HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (48 page)

Deputy secretary of state Bill Burns later testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that cables from Tripoli advocating greater security “would have been reviewed up
through the assistant secretary level, and it may be that some of my colleagues on the seventh floor saw them as well.” The top executives at the State Department, including career officials and Hillary’s personal staff, work on the seventh floor.

In August 2013, Hillary’s successor, John Kerry, would reinstate all four of the employees who were put on administrative leave; in explaining the decision, a State Department spokeswoman cited “the totality” of their careers and the ARB’s finding that their actions did not amount to a “breach of duty.”

The question of responsibility presented a Scylla-and-Charybdis dilemma for Hillary. If she accepted blame for failing to respond to
security requests, the admission would damage both her legacy as a manager and the narrative of strong leadership she would present if she ran for president. But if she shirked responsibility for what had happened in her own department, that would also be politically damaging.

Hillary tried to navigate a narrow channel to avoid both beasts. On the one hand, she had been saying publicly for more than two months that she took responsibility for the tragedy. But on the other, she had an official government report in hand that laid the blame at the feet of career State Department employees far removed from her—a report created by people she had appointed. It placed fault for denying an extension of high-level security teams at least three steps below Hillary. She was responsible, but not to blame, according to an ARB narrative that neatly matched up with her own story.

The details of the ARB’s findings on particular personnel were not contained in the unclassified report released to the public but appeared in a classified version. The report had spared Kennedy, the career foreign service officer whom Hillary had kept on to manage the sprawling agency’s resources, but House investigators, displeased with his level of cooperation, targeted him.

Kennedy had gotten pressure from the Pentagon to give back security officers on loan in Libya, but declined to throw Defense officials under the bus to help himself, the senior State official asserted.

Burns and Nides testified in Hillary’s place in December, and it was revealed on New Year’s Day that her condition was much worse than previously thought. Doctors had treated her for
a blood clot in her head. Still, Republicans clamored to put Hillary under the scrutiny of white-hot congressional hearing lights and television cameras. Issa’s admonition that Benghazi was a “developing scandal” proved prophetic. The old reality of a GOP focused on pinning Benghazi to Obama had been replaced by a new focus on Hillary. Sure, they were interested in hearing what the secretary had to say. But they were just as interested—if not more so—in creating a made-for-television moment that would haunt Hillary if she ran in 2016. Hillary thought Issa was succumbing to pressure from
his own party and couldn’t help himself as the investigation turned from Obama to her.

Over the course of more than a year, in testimony that was both public and in closed session, congressional investigators broke the Benghazi tragedy into three phases.

The first dealt with the deteriorating security situation in Benghazi, where armed militants—some of whom had links to major terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda and Ansar al-Sharia—were filling the power vacuum left when Qaddafi was toppled. The main questions centered on the decision by State Department officials to reduce the number of military security officers in Libya and to start transferring responsibility for security to diplomatic officers and local militias at a time when violence was rising. In particular, investigators wanted to know why State Department officials in Washington had denied requests from Americans on the ground in Libya, including Chris Stevens, to maintain a Pentagon presence, and they wanted to know how high up the chain of command that decision went. Specifically, had it come from the career foreign service officers who were blamed for it, or did it reach up into the political ranks of the department, perhaps as high as Hillary?

The second phase was the attack itself. The investigators never seriously tried to argue that Hillary had not responded quickly and correctly to the assault. There was ample evidence that, of all the major national security principals in Washington, she had been most on top of the situation. She had been on the phone or videoconference with Libyan officials, ministers in other countries where Americans might be at risk, the White House, the Pentagon, the CIA, and others.

Instead, the investigators looked at whether Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Joint Chiefs chairman Martin Dempsey, and Obama had done enough to save the Americans in harm’s way. Republicans were particularly incensed that jets and special forces teams weren’t deployed to protect the CIA annex, since there had been no telling, at the time, how long the attacks would last.

The third matter that consumed investigators’ time was whether
the administration had covered up the nature of the attack in its aftermath in order to protect Obama and other officials, including Hillary. Republicans believed that the administration had misled the public about whether the assault was a “terrorist” attack on the watch of a president who was seeking reelection at the time.

“It was five days after the Democratic National Convention, where President Obama stood up and said ‘Al Qaeda’s on the run, we killed Osama bin Laden. We’re pushing back on the terrorists.’ Nobody wants to get caught and be embarrassed like that,” Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), the chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s subcommittee investigating Benghazi, said. “It was all political. It was political trumping reality. And the casualty was the truth.”

That part of the investigation explained the obsession with Susan Rice’s talking points—the exclusion of the names of terrorist groups in their final version, the omission of references to generic warnings issued by the CIA to the State Department, the insertion of a protest that had never happened, and the extent to which top officials in the White House and the State Department were involved in revising the intelligence community’s assessment. Hillary, of course, had an interest in several elements of that part of the probe, not the least of which was the question of whether the State Department should have been more ready for the attack, based on CIA warnings about protests at the Cairo embassy and the possibility of violence on the anniversary of September 11, 2001.

All those questions were swirling shortly after eight a.m. on January 23, 2013, when reporters, spectators, and Senate staff began filling the cavernous main hearing room on the second floor of the Senate’s Hart Office Building—where a special committee had investigated Hillary’s role in the Whitewater scandal more than fifteen years earlier. Used for high-profile moments, including the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court justices David Souter and Sonia Sotomayor, Hart 216 is a favorite space because of its combination of size and modernity. On a mezzanine a few feet above the main floor are openings on either side for television cameras and their operators.
Senators sit in a U-shape, with the senior members of a committee in front of a gigantic white-marble wall bearing the Senate seal and junior members flanked on their sides below the camera bays. The witness sits alone at a small table about ten feet away, facing the senators, with reporters and other visitors behind her.

Rand Paul, the fifty-year-old first-term Kentucky Republican, walked through the Capitol complex from his Russell Senate Office Building suite to the hearing with Rachel Bovard, his legislative aide for foreign relations matters, at his side. It would be the libertarian-leaning Tea Party favorite’s first hearing as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and he had met with his staff the day before to go over the Benghazi timeline. As Paul made his way to the Hart Building, Bovard briefed him on Hillary’s prepared testimony, which the State Department had sent over the night before.

For the rest of the ten-minute walk, and for a few minutes in an ante space behind the hearing room, Paul detailed his grasp of the timeline, the flow of memos and cables on security between Tripoli and Washington before the attack, why Hillary wouldn’t have been apprised of those interactions given the high threat level in Libya, and why State Department officials had been placed on leave or moved to other jobs rather than being fired in the wake of the ARB report. Instead of asking a long list of questions, Paul laid out his understanding of the essential elements of the Benghazi story, giving Bovard a chance to correct him if necessary. If he planned to go hard at Hillary during the hearing, he didn’t share his strategy—or the specifics of his questions—with his aides ahead of time.

Paul was one of two Republicans on the committee who were widely considered to be interested in running for president in 2016. The other, Marco Rubio, a telegenic forty-one-year-old Cuban American from Florida, had been following Benghazi intently for months as a member of both the Intelligence and Foreign Relations Committees. Unlike Paul, Rubio leaned heavily on his national security aides
to generate questions for the hearing. He had been present for both public and closed classified hearings on Benghazi and was determined to use his time with Hillary to press for the answers to questions he had been asking of the State Department privately. The posture he hoped to strike was that of a serious investigator, eager to plug gaps in the information he had gotten from the State Department and to get to the bottom of answers he didn’t think made sense.

Hillary’s own preparation for the hearing included reading transcripts and summaries from more than thirty separate Capitol Hill briefings and hearings over the four and a half months since the attack, both sessions in which she participated and those at which other administration officials appeared without her. She suspected that she would be asked questions about what other departments and agencies had done, and she wanted to be ready to answer them—even if they had nothing to do with her role as secretary of state. She had also met behind closed doors with top aides in the days before the hearing to go over questions she might get from various senators. Her staff expected that Paul and Rubio would take shots at her.

They went over the story line of the talking points that Susan Rice had used on the Sunday shows and a wrinkle that had become a focal point for Republican critics of the administration. Because the FBI had interviewed survivors of the attack at Ramstein in Germany before Rice went on the shows, Republicans were convinced that the White House and State should have known definitively that there had been no protest outside the gates of the consulate before the attack. The State Department’s response was that officials in Washington had waited to talk to survivors because they didn’t want to create any appearance of interfering with the FBI’s investigatory interviews, and the FBI hadn’t disseminated information about its probe to other agencies until after Rice’s Sunday-show appearances.

During her prep session, Hillary expressed frustration at Senate Republicans’ focus on the talking points Rice had used and the question of when the administration started calling the assault a terrorist attack. While she had cast the assault as terrorism in the twin
House and Senate briefings the week after Benghazi, determining the motivation of the attackers was secondary in her mind to finding them and bringing them to justice.

“I just don’t understand,” she told her aides. “Why don’t they get it?”

“Everyone who has briefed or testified has wanted to stand up and scream ‘What the hell difference does it make?’ ” Reines said, unwittingly planting a seed.

Indeed, late in 2012, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, had become so irate with questions along that line from the House Intelligence Committee that when one lawmaker asked him what he had learned from Benghazi, he finally lost his temper. “I learned that it will be a cold day in hell before we ever give talking points to you people again,” Clapper had said.

One Republican getting worked up over the talking points was Ron Johnson, a first-term Wisconsin senator who, like Paul, would be interrogating Hillary in his first hearing as a member of the Foreign Relations Committee. Johnson, who came from a business background rather than the world of politics and public policy, required staff briefings to get up to speed on most issues. But he usually developed his own questions while a hearing was going on, rather than coming with preprinted notes on what to ask. No one, save perhaps Ron Johnson, was prepared for him to create the most memorable highlight of the hearing.

Hillary arrived on time for the inquisition and emerged from a holding room behind the marble wall wearing a new pair of glasses with a thick black frame and lenses covered with a thin film designed to help her with the bouts of double vision she had been suffering since her fall. She quickly found her old Armed Services Committee chum John McCain and hugged him. Then she gave a hug to California Democrat Barbara Boxer, whose daughter was once married to Hillary’s brother. Ben Cardin, the Democratic senator from Maryland, got a handshake and a kiss on the cheek before
Hillary posed for pictures with Bob Corker, the top-ranking Republican on the panel, and Bob Menendez, who was chairing the hearing because Foreign Relations Committee chairman John Kerry was the president’s pick to succeed Hillary.

After the demonstrative pleasantries, Hillary rounded the side of the dais and whispered something to Reines, sat down, and laid a big, white three-ring binder on the table in front of her. Reines took a seat in a row of chairs directly behind Hillary and to her right. Mills, who held her own copy of the binder, sat next to him.

When Menendez opened the hearing, many of the senators had not yet arrived. Paul and Johnson were among the early birds, while Rubio was one of several senators who filtered in once the hearing was in full swing. Everyone in the room was waiting to see just how far the Republican senators would push Hillary, and how hard she would push back. Reporters listened intently for the kind of exchange that could be sent out in a breaking news e-mail alert or typed into the crawl across the bottom of a cable television feed.