Hillary will testify 6-to-8 hours before Benghazi committee today

This sounds like a day from hell for Trey Gowdy, wrought with all kinds of peril, even if it's also a day when he could nail down some serious answers and/or expose some serious lies once and for all. But whatever happens, it won't be fun. Having to spend six-to-eight hours with Hillary would be horrendous no matter what the occasion. In this case, thanks to Kevin McCarthy, she's ostensibly there to testify but her real mission will be to seek out and pounce on the slightest pretext for painting herself as the victim of a political witchhunt. And since the media have at least accepted Hillary's premise to the extent that they too are looking for an excuse to advance the narrative, any question that seems to wreak of politics, even if it doesn't come from Gowdy himself, will be immediately siezed on by Hillary as an excuse to de-legitimize the whole thing.

---

The Wall Street Journal believes the Benghazi-committee-as-pure-politics narrative has already affected how the hearings will go:

The House Committee on Benghazi will focus its long-awaited questioning of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on details of the 2012 attack on a Libyan diplomatic outpost, rather than on Mrs. Clinton’s email arrangements, Republicans said this week. The panel’s hand has been forced by recent suggestions, including by some Republicans, that the committee’s motivations are chiefly political. That has shifted the dynamics of Thursday’s high-profile hearing, with Republicans facing pressure to show they are playing fair just as Mrs. Clinton faces pressure to show she didn’t botch a tragic incident.

What happened that night in Benghazi has always been the primary focus, of course, but now the media can run with a narrative in which every question not about e-mail is proof that the committee has been cowed by public pressure or something. Gowdy's job is to make sure the focus not only stays on the attack and the things that were said about it, but that it really gets at the answers that are needed. And let's not forget the seriousness of the issues involved. I'd say three of them are key:

---

---

• Hillary was among top Obama Administration officials who claims for at least a week, when evidence suggests they knew better from day one, that the attack was caused by a YouTube video and was not a planned, coordinated terrorist attack. Hillary herself was even reported to have gone up to the family of one of the victims and told them the filmmaker "would be brought to justice" long after she had to have known the film did not cause the attack. This narrative was pushed, remember, so as not to derail the claim of the Obama re-election campaign that Al Qaeda was "on the run."
• Available U.S. forces say they were told to stand down when they could have stepped in to take on the attackers. Who gave that order, and why? Hillary will claim to know nothing about it, because she, the great and competent administrator, never knows about anything. But if Gowdy has information to the contrary this would be a good time to confront her with it.
• The consulate was denied additional security some weeks before the attack. Hillary claims the request never made it up the chain to her, which even if true is irrelevant. She was Secretary of State and she was responsible for the workings of the chain. But is it really true that it never got to her? I'd like to see what evidence Gowdy has on this too.

By the way, the e-mail question should not be ignored. To the extent that it shows Hillary relied on advice from Sidney Blumenthal - probably not very good advice in many cases - that is absolutely relevant and it's worth exploring not only why she relied on this advice but also why she went to such lengths to hide that she was doing so. Hillary's hope is that, by establishing the hearings-as-politics narrative, she essentially innoculates herself because anything that makes her look bad must by definition be politics, which means the Republicans on the commitee will feel obliged to tread lightly and the Democrats on the committee will pounce if they don't. See? See? Politics! Gowdy's job is to keep the questions so fact-based and substantive that even though Hillary and her allies on the committee will try that, it will appear ridiculous that they did so - so ridiculous that even the media will feel circumspect about carrying her water on this. That is not an easy task, but it's a necessary one, because contrary to what Hillary would have you believe, it makes a lot of difference what really happened that night.

---