Hillary Clinton testifies at Benghazi hearings

The reviews of Hillary Clinton’s Thursday testimony before the House Benghazi committee are in: It was not the success that Republicans had hoped for. Slate’s Will Saletan called the 11-hour spectacle “a self-destructive, partisan embarrassment for the GOP.” Vox’s Jon Allen dubbed it Clinton’s “best campaign ad yet.” A number of conservative pundits acknowledged that the hearing, officially about investigating Benghazi but clearly in fact an effort to politically wound Clinton, was a disaster that ended up helping Clinton and blowing up in Republicans’ faces.

It’s not just this one hearing: Republicans’ entire Benghazi endeavor has become politically costly and counterproductive for them — and, worst of all, they’re trapped in it. Even if the GOP does see that this is hurting them more than it’s helping, they’ve organized the politics of it so effectively that they have little choice but to maintain the Benghazi circus, even as it continues blowing up in their faces.

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.

Republicans will kick themselves for dragging Hillary Clinton before the House Benghazi committee Thursday.

It was a defining moment for Clinton’s presidential aspirations. She handled the GOP’s questions with aplomb and without the patina of partisanship that has characterized the committee since its conception. That would have been bad enough for the Republicans’ hopes of seizing the White House in 2017. But she did much more than that. She answered questions that Republicans have been hanging out there in hopes of sowing doubts among voters.

Hillary Clinton is a top-tier politician who’s been the subject of nearly constant national media scrutiny for more than 20 years. She also happens to have worked at the House Judiciary Committee during the most famous and most influential congressional investigation into executive branch misconduct of all time. The Benghazi committee, by contrast, is led by a guy who can’t get a proper haircut and composed largely of random backbench Republicans, most of whom run in districts that aren’t remotely competitive.

Consequently, it’s not so surprising that she ended up mopping the floor with her antagonists — a group that went in with no clear plan of what they were hoping to accomplish and little substantive understanding of any of the relevant policy issues.

There was a moment, a little over three hours into Thursday’s House Benghazi hearing at which Hillary Clinton is testifying, when something unexpected happened: Two of the Congress members on the committee started shouting at each other. Clinton, supposedly the focus of the day’s hearing, just sat and watched.

The exchange was prompted by the Benghazi Select Committee’s investigation into Clinton’s now-infamous private email server. The committee found a lot of correspondence about Libya between Clinton and someone named Sidney Blumenthal. Blumenthal is a longtime friend and confidante of Clinton’s — you can read all about it in Dylan Matthews’s fabulous Blumenthal explainer. Republican Committee Chair Trey Gowdy, one of the speakers in the above video, subpoenaed Blumenthal, who ended up testifying before a closed-door session of the Benghazi committee.

The unique feature of the House Select Committee on Benghazi is that its sole mission is to inflict political damage on a person who already has been exonerated by the collective force of seven congressional committees.

Update: Watch Hillary Clinton Benghazi hearing live stream.

Hillary Clinton began testifying in front of the House Select Committee on Benghazi at around 10 am on Thursday, and as of this writing, it’s still going. If you haven’t been following the hearing, you might wonder what’s happened. Well, as far as a summary goes, this picture is worth a thousand words:

At the time, Jordan was asking about the Obama administration’s initial claim that the attack grew out of an organic protest. The administration had initially claimed as much but, after the fog of war lifted, acknowledged that this was wrong and in fact local militants had deliberately launched the attack. Jordan was asking if in fact the administration had known this claim was wrong all along, and had deliberately lied in those first few days.

The most intense exchange during the first portion of Hillary Clinton’s testimony before the House Select Committee on Benghazi Thursday revolved around the prior private testimony of Sidney Blumenthal, a Clinton confidant who emailed her many times about Libya but never visited the country.

After Chairman Trey Gowdy, a Republican, began questioning Clinton about her relationship with Blumenthal, his employment by the Clinton Foundation and his ability to email her directly, Democrats on the committee insisted that Gowdy release a full transcript of Blumenthal’s testimony earlier this year. Voices rose, lawmakers spoke over each other, Clinton grinned widely.

There’s a school of political thought that holds you should stay out of the fray when an opponent is wounding himself. That’s not Hillary Clinton’s way.

The Democratic presidential frontrunner has come out with a devastating new ad that plays on House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s now-famous Benghazi gaffe. In an interview on Fox News last week, McCarthy tied Clinton’s sagging poll numbers to the special committee House Republicans created to investigate 2012 terrorist attacks in Libya.

For more than a year, Republicans insisted the committee was about finding out why four Americans died in a terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012, and how to protect US personnel overseas in the future. It would honor the memory of those who died.

But then House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy explained on national television that Republicans have been using the committee to tear down Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. It was a boast — McCarthy wanted to earn credit with conservatives in advance of his presumed election as speaker of the House. In one moment, Republicans were hoisted by their own petard.

Republicans’ use of the House Benghazi Committee as a political weapon to affect the 2016 presidential election is “deeply distressing” and dishonors “everybody who has served our country,” Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton said in an interview taped Wednesday.

Her forceful counter to House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s ill-advised remarks Tuesday night about the Benghazi Committee suggests that she thinks the GOP has ceded any remaining semblance of a moral high ground in its investigation — a major shift after the weeks of criticisms she’s received for the email-handling scandal the Committee helped prompt.

A gaffe, in Michael Kinsley’s famous formulation, is “when a politician tells the truth — some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.”

On Tuesday night, Rep. Kevin McCarthy — the overwhelming favorite to succeed John Boehner as speaker of the House — made Kinsley proud.

Michael Bay, the man behind the Transformers movies and other poorly reviewed action flicks such as Bad Boys and Armageddon, once said of his own less-than-stellar reputation, “I make movies for teenage boys. Oh, dear, what a crime.”

Bay has just released the trailer for his latest movie for teenage boys. This one is not about giant robots or fast-talking, street-wise cops, but rather about a real-life incident: the 2012 attacks on US diplomatic and intelligence facilities in Benghazi, Libya.

House Republicans say they’ve caught Hillary Clinton in a baldfaced Benghazi lie.

House Speaker John Boehner and Select Committee on Benghazi Committee Chair Trey Gowdy couldn’t wait to get the news out to reporters that Clinton said she hadn’t been subpoenaed for the email on her personal server when they’ve got evidence — a subpoena signed by the House clerk — that says otherwise.

The House Select Committee on Benghazi is moving quickly away from Benghazi and toward a more potent 2016 campaign issue: Hillary Clinton’s judgment in pushing for war in Libya in 2011.

Republicans would like to undermine Clinton’s foreign policy record, which is perceived as a strength because Clinton served as secretary of state. Their release Monday of a new batch of her emails with longtime confidant Sidney Blumenthal suggests that the wisdom of the Libya mission is increasingly an area of focus.

The State Department turned over 900 pages of Hillary Clinton’s private emails Friday to a House special committee investigating the Benghazi attacks of 2011. The documents join 40,000 pages the White House has handed over to Congress already. The volume is enormous.

The volume of information produced by this case ends up giving comfort to both sides of the fight: Republicans believe a smoking gun must be hidden in reams of documents, while Democrats point to the continued demand for documents, given how much has been made available and how little wrongdoing has been found, as proof this is a partisan witch hunt.

An alleged ringleader of the Benghazi attack is in US custody. A just-revealed clandestine US raid captured Libyan Islamist Ahmed Abu Khattala on an as-yet undisclosed date.

On Kirkpatrick’s telling, Khattala was also a loner, shunned even by other Islamists. “He thinks he owns God and everyone else is an infidel,” Fawzi Bukatef, another rebel leader, told Kirkpatrick. He became nationally infamous when General Abdul Fatah Younes, the leading rebel commander, was killed while in Khattala’s custody.

Hillary Clinton’s new memoir Hard Choices is ostensibly a history of her time as Secretary of State, but it’s really a political tract. That’s totally fine, of course, but it means that the best way to read the book is to look for parts that tell us something interesting about American politics.

So here’s three nuggets from Clinton’s book on some of the most politically controversial foreign policy issues of past several years: Benghazi, Bowe Bergdahl, and Syria.