Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine (26 page)

“When you do these jobs,” Clinton said by way of explanation, “you have to understand at the very beginning that you can’t control everything.”
There was only so much she could have done.

Clinton’s allies and aides agreed. “I think the way she has dealt with this has been admirable,” the reliably loyal Paul Begala later said. “And Republicans are treading awfully close to the tin foil hat.” The State Department’s undersecretary for management, Patrick Kennedy, blamed a lack of funding, claiming that “the best defense is the ability to construct new facilities.” P. J. Crowley, a former assistant secretary of state for public affairs under Hillary Clinton, said, “You’ve gotta look at this in the full picture. It’s a tragedy that happened on her watch, but I don’t think it will diminish what is a very significant record.” Clinton aide Philippe Reines was more concise, telling a reporter asking questions about Benghazi to “Fuck Off.”

Sensing a rare opportunity to damage Clinton for 2016, Republicans pounced on her role in the attack. “There was a clear disconnect between what security officials on the ground felt they needed and what officials in Washington would approve,” said California congressman Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight Committee. He added, “Reports that senior State Department officials told security personnel in Libya to not even make certain security requests are especially troubling.”
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Later, former vice president Dick Cheney summed up what will likely be a common attack on Clinton in any run for the White House: “She clearly wasn’t hands on . . . she’s doing everything she can to avoid responsibility for what clearly fell into her bailiwick.”

For a time, Clinton avoided many requests to testify on Benghazi, citing the mysterious collapse at home that left her incapacitated and out of the public eye for a month. It was the same attack that had led some observers to assume she had had some form of a stroke, or mini-stroke, that she was covering up from the public.

When she finally did appear for questioning, on January 23, 2013, Hillary Clinton looked her entire six and a half decades. It was a week before her final day as secretary of state, and her years at Foggy Bottom had not been easy on her. Clinton’s face had wrinkled, and her skin sagged even lower than usual. But worse than health and her bodily appearances was the black mark on her record as secretary of state—the tragedy that left four Americans dead.

“For me, this is not just a matter of policy, it’s personal,” she read from her prepared remarks, choking back prepared tears. “I stood next to President Obama as the Marines carried those flag-draped caskets off the plane at Andrews. I put my arms around the mothers and fathers, the sisters and brothers, the sons and daughters.”

During her questioning, Clinton repeatedly relied on the classified review of the State Department’s procedures of the evening of September 11, 2012. When she was in a bind, or hit a tough question, she insisted that all the answers were in the classified report (but, since the report was classified, she would have to pass on answering their questions in public, or be at risk of breaking the law). It was a beautiful strategy, which she cunningly employed throughout the day, often making her interlocutors look like fools who hadn’t done their homework.

In fact, members of Congress, as well as their aides with security clearances, say there’s little in the classified report that is not in the public report. It does not explain the failures of the State Department and other intelligence officials to properly diagnose what had gone wrong in Benghazi. And it does not explain why the Obama administration, including Hillary Clinton, sought to cover up what had really happened that terrible night in Benghazi.

Not that any of that mattered to the Democrats on the House and Senate committees. Nearly every Democrat to question the embattled secretary of state spent the first half of their allotted time lavishing her with praise and practically begging her to run for president. “I think I speak for all the freshmen,” said Ami Bera of California, “that we’re not gonna get much time to serve with you, but we hope in a few years we’ll get that chance to serve again.” Congressman Joseph Kennedy of Massachusetts called her career and dedication to public service “truly exemplary” and said he looked “forward to what the future holds for you as well.” One congressman from New York even asked Clinton, a “fellow New Yorker,” to show her around town.

The sycophants were so over-the-top that they prompted one Republican congressman to mock Clinton’s suitors. “I bring greetings from many of our mutual friends in Arkansas,” Congressman Tom Cotton said. “Some of our peers on the other side have expressed their ambitions for your future. I’d like to say that I just wish you’d won the Democratic primary in 2008.”

Jokes aside, the Republicans who had been demanding for months that she appear before Congress to explain why four Americans had been murdered and why the U.S. response had been an utter failure came completely ill-prepared, and were soon overwhelmed by a battle-ready Clinton, who alternated between smiling, laughing, lashing out, and choking up—all with a timing so perfect she might have been mistaken for the most talented performer in her family.

At one point, in response to questioning about the administration’s misleading statements that the attacks were a protest over a YouTube video, Clinton exploded with a seemingly well-prepared retort. “With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans.” She was shouting. “Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk last night who decided to kill some Americans?
What difference, at this point, does it make?
It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again, senator.”
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The secretary of state then gave a warning, to the senator questioning her and to those who would follow: “Honestly, I will do my best to answer your questions about this, but the fact is people were trying their best in real time to get to the best information.” In other words: Don’t you dare try to blame these attacks on
me
.

As a point of fact, learned only after Clinton left office, she had been AWOL the night of the attack. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey later testified under oath that the military “never received a request for support from the State Department, which would have allowed us to put forces” in motion. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta was even more direct: “We did not have any conversations with Secretary Clinton” on the night of the attack, he testified, sitting next to Dempsey.

Nevertheless, at Hillary’s hearing, her strategy worked. After her “what difference . . . does it make” outburst, she was hardly challenged the rest of the day, and she won widespread praise in the media for her forceful testimony. The
Washington Post
began an article on her testimony by reporting, “In what probably was her final major public appearance as secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton spent Wednesday delivering a forceful defense of the Obama administration’s response to the killings of four Americans in Libya last year and praising the commitment of the United States’ diplomats.”

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews was far less reserved in his praise. In a “magnificent display of smarts” and “guts,” Hillary “showed acuity, eloquence, humanity and charm,” gushed the liberal talk-show host who once described “this thrill going up my leg” during an Obama speech and who was a frequent source of anti-Hillary invective during the 2008 primaries.
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“To the reasonable question, she offered candor and humility. . . . In response to hostile questions, she came back with strength and a challenge of her own.” Perhaps in an attempt to make up for his frequent attacks in earlier years, some of which media critics and Hillary staffers described as “misogynistic,” he added, “Hillary, Hillary, Hillary—she never looked better. . . . She looked every bit like a person who could run for president, run well, win big and serve confidently.”
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The “forceful defense” storyline was all many Americans heard about Benghazi in January 2013, but her performance was far weaker in substance than it was in style. Clinton’s role in Benghazi was damning, as revealed both by her testimony and the testimony of other administration officials. Because Clinton did not speak with Secretary Panetta or General Dempsey, and because neither Obama nor the White House spoke with Panetta and Dempsey, Clinton left her men under attack to fend for themselves.

Under oath, Panetta and Dempsey revealed one other bombshell that would in retrospect make Clinton look like a fool: They knew immediately, the night of September 11, 2012, that the attack in Benghazi was a
terrorist
attack. It was not the outgrowth of a protest over a video; it was a planned terror attack carried out by enemies of America. That means either Clinton had not talked with Panetta and Dempsey about the attack for days after it, or she knew the deadly attack had nothing to do with the video and intentionally misled the American people.

As Jason Chaffetz, a sharp young representative from Utah, says, there are three main “buckets” regarding the attack—and about how Secretary of State Hillary Clinton handled it—worth considering.

“One is the lead-up to the actual attack itself. Why were these people in essentially a death trap?” Chaffetz tells me as we discuss the attack in his House office. There were multiple signs that al-Qaeda was active in Benghazi and that they had their eyes set on attacking U.S. forces. The consulate, as well as the CIA annex that came under attack the same night, would appear to have been the obvious targets of these attacks, and that would explain why Stevens, the murdered ambassador, had written a cable to Hillary Clinton back in Washington to request tighter security. Alas, the security was not sufficient—and steps were not taken by the State Department to ensure that diplomats abroad would be safe.

“Bucket two is the hours during the attack,” Chaffetz says. “I think there are a lot of questions there.” He points to what Hillary was doing—and, more important, what it appears she was not doing—while the attack was taking place. “It’s Libya after a revolution on 9/11. Our facility had been bombed twice. The British ambassador had an assassination attempt. How does that not get to her desk?” Chaffetz asked. “I mean, she said she takes full responsibility. I can’t imagine that of all the facilities in the world, there’s none that I’m aware of that have been bombed before, let alone twice, let alone the ambassador, let alone the Red Cross, al-Qaeda flying flags over government buildings and she’s unaware of anything? What does that say about her? I think it says a lot. If she wasn’t paying attention, then what in the world was she doing other than logging a lot of frequent flyer miles. I don’t know. I think it’s a very legitimate question.”

The third and last “bucket,” according to Chaffetz, is the aftermath. The State Department knew immediately that al-Qaeda, the terror organization responsible for attacking America on September 11, 2001, was responsible. And yet there appears to be evidence of a suppression campaign in which administration officials did not tell the truth about what had happened in Benghazi.

John McCain, who himself knows a thing or two about running for president, says, “You know, I mean it just cries out for outrage because it was in a political campaign.” He adds, “Hillary, I don’t know how much she had to do with the decision making as to what the president of the United States should say, but I sure didn’t hear her say, hey, wait a minute! It wasn’t [a protest over a video]. In fact, she gave a speech saying it was a hateful video, as you might recall.”

Former aides to Hillary Clinton worry about the impact of Benghazi on a 2016 presidential race. “If Benghazi hadn’t happened, she would have had a cakewalk,” one aide tells me inside a busy New York City eatery.

“What is their concern about Benghazi?” I ask.

“I just think it looks bad. Someone died on her watch. It just looks bad. But I mean, look: 9/11 happened on fucking George Bush’s watch and he got reelected. It just looks bad, and politics is perception. People will try to use that against her. But people die all the time. Because she doesn’t have the Susan Rice problem of having gone on TV and saying something that was a lie, she’s kind of inoculated against it. No one has video of her lying,” the aide replies, apparently unaware of the video evidence of Hillary blaming the attack on an Internet video.

In short, when the testimonies of Clinton, Panetta, and Dempsey are considered with Clinton’s public statements in the days after the terrorist attack, it’s easy to conclude that Clinton did not do all that was in her power to save her men in Benghazi. She did not even lift a finger to call the Defense Department to see if there was any military action that could possibly be taken to save an American ambassador’s life. Ambassador Stevens and his men were not offered all the resources at America’s disposal. And they were not saved. The only thing saved—so far—was the reputation of a secretary of state who did not make a single phone call, or even a plea, for help.

“She made, I believe, personal judgment calls that turned out to be the wrong call and it cost people their lives,” says Congressman Chaffetz. “She’s the one that was running ads [against Obama’s lack of national security experience in 2008] about, ‘Okay, the call comes at 3:00 in the morning . . .’ Remember that ad? Her call came in the middle of the afternoon and she blew it and they know it.”

The impression of Mrs. Clinton’s being a successful secretary of state—only Benghazi really scarred her record, and most Democrats have given her a pass on it—is even more remarkable since her record of accomplishment at the State Department proved so lacking. It says something about her tenure that one of her main achievements was how many miles she traveled—956,733, to be exact. There was still no peace in the Middle East, and she had negotiated no grand treaties or landmark solutions to a single diplomatic crisis.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that the world in the last five years has become a far, far more dangerous place than it was in 2009,” says John McCain. “I mean, we are seeing an upheaval in the Middle East, worsening relations with Russia, emerging China, having Iran . . . I mean [on] any spectrum of national security policy the country is far worse off. Now how much of that is her fault? Not much, but certainly it is a legacy that I think Obama will carry for a long time.”