FRIENDS AND ALLIES TALKING POINTS

HOUSE BENGHAZI COMMITTEE HEARING WITH HILLARY CLINTON

October 17, 2015
Before this weeks hearing even begins, the House Select Committee on Benghazi has already been
exposed as a partisan charade whose main goal is attacking Hillary Clinton.
In recent weeks, an array of key Republicansfrom Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy to New
York Congressman Richard Hannahave admitted the truth about why this committee was
established in the first place: to go after Hillary Clinton.
Also, a whistleblower and Air Force reservist who formerly worked as an investigator on the
Committee has alleged he was fired because he objected to the partisan focus of the inquiry.
Even before these individuals came forward, the Committees partisan approach was evident in
the way its Chairman, Trey Gowdy, has conducted his work. Learning what actually happened at
Benghazi or how to best improve diplomatic security have been the last things on the
Committees mind.
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This weeks hearing with Hillary Clinton marks only the fourth in the Committees 17
months of existence.

Gowdy has abandoned plans to hold hearings with top defense and intelligence
officials who served at the time of the attack, such as Leon Panetta and David
Petraeus. And the Committee has interviewed or deposed more current or former
Clinton campaign staffers than Defense Department officials.

After insisting that interviews of Clinton aides and associates be conducted behind
closed doors and even objecting to transcripts being released, Republican sources
from the Committee have leaked inaccurate and misleading details from the
interviews to try to damage Hillary Clinton.

Rep. Adam Schiff has revealed the Committee Republicans have conducted some
witness interviews without informing the panels Democratic members at all.

In the last 9 months, the committee has issued 31 press releases. All but seven
pertain to Secretary Clinton.

Rep. Gowdy has predicted his investigationwhich has already taken longer than
the investigations into Pearl Harbor, Iran-Contra and the Kennedy assassination
will stretch into 2016, a clear effort to influence the presidential election.

Given its partisan focus on Hillary Clinton, its no surprise that this investigation has failed to produce
anything new about the attack on our diplomatic facility in Benghazi.

From the start, it was hard to tell why the Benghazi Committee was truly necessary. Prior to
its formation, the attack had already been the subject of seven different Congressional
investigations, five of which were led by Republicans.
In addition, Hillary Clinton herself set up a nonpartisan panel known as the Accountability
Review Board (ARB) to investigate the attack. It was chaired by former Ambassador Thomas
Pickering and Admiral Mike Mullen, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The
panel issued a comprehensive report, with dozens of recommendations.
These seven previous investigations debunked every one of the allegations and conspiracy
theories that the Benghazi Committee says it was set up to examine. For instance:
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On why military assets were not mobilized to respond to the attack: The consistent
finding in every investigation conducted to date is that while the U.S. military did
mobilize certain assets, its response was limited by the availability of resources and
status of forces on the night of the attack. As the Republican chairman of the House
Armed Services Committee stated after his panel issued its report: given where the
troops were, how quickly the thing all happened and how quickly it dissipated, we
probably couldn't have done more than we did.

On whether a stand down order was given by Secretary Clinton: None of the
investigations found any evidence of this, and it was directly refuted by the top
military official in Africa, General Carter Ham.

On whether talking points used by Ambassador Susan Rice on the Sunday talk shows
deliberately misrepresented the attacks as a spontaneous protest: The Office of
the Director of National Intelligence confirmed that in the immediate aftermath of
the attack, the initial intelligence assessment was that the attack began
spontaneously following protests earlier that day at our embassy in Cairo. As the
Republican-led House Intelligence Committee found, the CIA did not change its
initial assessment until September 24, 2012, several days after Rice spoke.

Despite these conclusive findings, the Republican House majority approved an unlimited
budget in 2014 for the House Benghazi Committee. To date, it has spent $4.5 million
without improving anyones understanding about Benghazi.
In trying to justify his committees work, Gowdy has claimed that his committee has spoken
to 50 new witnesses who were not interviewed in any of the previous investigations. That
claim, however, was debunked by the Washington Post, which found that the Committee
was counting at least 16 witnesses who had in fact been interviewed by the ARB. Of the
remainder, several were IT officials or other witnesses who were of interest to the
Committee only because of their possible knowledge of Hillary Clintons emails.

Despite the partisan focus of this committee, Hillary Clinton still agreed to testify because she wants
to honor the memory of the four brave Americans who died at Benghazi by making sure we do
everything possible to learn from this tragedy.
For Hillary Clinton, the tragedy at Benghazi is quite personal. She knew the late Chris
Stevens and had asked him to serve as Ambassador. And she was there with President
Obama at Andrews to receive the flag-draped caskets of Stevens and the other slain
Americans.
No one wants to ensure we do our utmost to protect diplomats serving abroad more than
Hillary Clinton. That is why she established the ARB, and that is why she has twice testified
on Capitol Hill already on Benghazi.
She has been willing to testify a third time - before this Committee - since last year. She first
asked to appear at a public hearing in November 2014; it has taken nearly a full year for the
Committee to call her as a witness.
As she has done in past hearings, Clinton will explain that while the U.S. must not retreat
from conducting diplomacy in the most dangerous places, it is incumbent on everyone the
Administration, as well as Congressto ensure the resources are in place to properly
protect our diplomatic personnel serving abroad.
There is no doubt this Committee will also use her appearance to bring up her personal
email account. She has said she will answer questions on this topic as well.
But it is important to remember: the State Department has all of Hillary Clintons work
emails and has been providing relevant ones to the Committee for more than a year. There
is nothing in those emails that substantiates any of the Republicans conspiracy theories
about Benghazi, or that sheds any new light on the attacks at all.
And so if Republicans dwell on this subject rather than deal with the issues that are
supposed to be the focus of the committee, it will only reveal how far they are willing to go
to exploit the deaths of four brave Americans for their own partisan ends.