Hillary Clinton testiefied before the House Select Committee on Benghazi at 10 am Eastern on Thursday. The hearing has concluded is live-streaming it on YouTube; you can watch the whole thing, which lasted for 11 hours, in the above video (starts at the 26 minute mark) and at the Benghazi Committee's YouTube page.
The hearing is interesting given the Benghazi committee's role in the 2016 presidential campaign. Set up last year to investigate the 2012 terrorist attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, in which four Americans died, the committee has yet to uncover any new information evidence of high-level Obama administration wrongdoing before or after the Benghazi attack.
It did, however, uncover evidence that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had improperly used a private email server for public business when it asked the State Department to turn over emails relevant to the attack earlier this year. The scandal has dogged Clinton's campaign for months now, and it'll be interesting to see how it's handled in the hearing.
The investigation has also damaged Republicans. In a September 29 appearance on Fox News, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy seemed to admit something that Republicans aren't supposed to say — that the real purpose of the Benghazi committee is to hurt Clinton's campaign:
Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee. A select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she's untrustable. But no one would have known that any of that had happened had we not fought to make that happen.
This allowed Clinton to dismiss the email scandal, and the Benghazi issue in general, as a trumped-up partisan sideshow. It's still too early to tell if that will work — but it's set the stage for fireworks during today's hearing, as Clinton has plenty of ammunition to attack the committee as it questions her about her conduct during the Benghazi attack.
