HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton

by Jonathan Allen

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.

  In her opening remarks, Hillary choked up as she talked about making phone calls to the families of Sean Smith and Chris Stevens, but she revealed no new information about the attack or the State Department’s response to it. Idaho senator Jim Risch pressed Hillary on the administration’s characterization of the attack.

  “I called it an attack by armed militants,” Hillary offered.

  “Well done!” Risch interjected, his tone sopped in sarcasm.

  Surprisingly, as the press and Hillary’s team were prepared for a fistfight, Rubio took a pass on going toe-to-toe with Hillary. It was important to Rubio to stay focused on the facts, not political grandstanding—a posture that in and of itself spoke to his careful cultivation of a narrative in which he was a serious player on national security issues. Perhaps he also saw too much risk of hurting his own political chances if he ended up on the losing side of a caustic one-on-one exchange.

  But Johnson, the political newcomer who had swept to victory in Wisconsin on Tea Party power in 2010, displayed none of Rubio’s reticence. He was locked onto the question of whether the administration had lied to the public about the nature of the attack, and he was pretty sure he knew the answer.

  “I appreciate the fact that you called it an assault, but I’m going back to Ambassador Rice, five days later going on the Sunday shows, and, what I would say, purposefully misleading the American public,” Johnson began.

  “Well, since …” Hillary started, but Johnson cut her off.

  “Why wasn’t that known?” he asked, pushing Hillary to explain why State hadn’t simply interviewed the survivors of the Benghazi attack to find out what had happened.

  Mills reached forward from the row of seats behind Hillary to hand her boss a slip of paper. Hillary read from the note, which reminded her of the essential element of the administration’s timeline—the FBI’s intelligence on what had happened on the ground wasn’t available to other federal agencies at the time the talking points were devised.

  “I would say that once the assault happened and once we got our people rescued and out, our most immediate concern was number one taking care of their injuries. As I said, I still have a DS [diplomatic security] agent at Walter Reed seriously injured. Getting them into Frankfurt Ramstein to get taken care of, the FBI going over immediately to start talking to them—we did not think it was appropriate for us to talk to them before the FBI conducted their interviews.

  “And we did not—I think this is accurate, sir—I certainly did not know of any reports that contradicted the [intelligence community] talking points at the time that Ambassador Rice went on the TV shows,” Hillary said, adding a politically helpful—if a bit too late—defense of Rice. “And you know, I just want to say that people have accused Ambassador Rice and the administration of misleading Americans. I can say, trying to be in the middle of this and understanding what was going on, nothing could be further from the truth.” But, intentionally or not, there could be no doubt that Rice had mischaracterized the chain of events in Benghazi.

  Hillary was getting the better of the exchange, but Johnson wasn’t ready to give up. He was going to score some points.

  “We were misled that there were supposedly protests, and then something sprang out of that—an assault sprang out of that. And that was easily ascertained that that was not the fact …” Johnson started.

  Reines had told Hillary that other senior administration officials, in closed-door briefings, when confronted with this line of GOP criticism on the talking points, had boiled over.

  Hillary jumped in and she and Johnson jousted to be heard, with the senator finally getting out his point.

  “The American people could have known that within days, and they didn’t know that,” he said.

  If the Republicans wanted a made-for-TV moment, Hillary gave it to them—on her terms. “With all due respect,” she said, slowing down to emphasize each word in the rest of the sentence, “we had four dead Americans.” Her pitch rose with the volume of her voice. As he heard the change in her tone, Reines, seated behind Hillary and to her left, craned his neck to see who she was addressing and was surprised to see Johnson, whom he knew little about.

  “Was it because of a protest?” she went on. “Or was it because of guys out for a walk one night and decided they would go 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, now honestly, I will do my best to answer your questions about this, but the fact is that people were trying in real time to get the best information. The [intelligence community] has a process, I understand, going with the other committees to explain how these talking points came out. But, you know, to be clear, it is, from my perspective, less important today looking backwards as to why these militants decided they did it than to find them and bring them to justice, and then maybe we’ll figure out what was going on in the meantime.”

  For the many administration officials who thought Republicans wanted to make political hay out of a tragedy rather than learn lessons that might prevent another successful attack, Hillary’s response was a bravura performance. For Republicans, there was now a video clip of Hillary losing her cool under questioning on Benghazi.

  “Okay,” Johnson replied. “Thank you, madam secretary.”

  But the fusillade was only half over. Paul, sitting several seats down from Johnson, took note of Hillary’s charged response and decided that when his turn came to ask questions, he would pick up on his Wisconsin colleague’s aggressive line. Speaking without notes, Paul intimated that Hillary’s imminent departure from the department was related to Benghazi and then dropped the bomb that if he were president—a job he planned to seek in 2016—he would have fired her.

  “Ultimately, with your leaving, you accept the culpability for the worst tragedy since 9/11,” he said. “
Had I been president at the time, and I found that you did not read the cables from Benghazi—you did not read the cables from Ambassador Stevens—I would have relieved you of your post. I think it’s inexcusable.”

  Paul was fashioning a highlight-reel moment of his own, but he was working a shaky point. More than one million cables are sent to the State Department each year from diplomats across the globe; if any secretary reads one, it is typically because an underling has brought it to his or her attention. Still, Paul’s aides blasted the video out to reporters.

  “You know they practiced that when they were shaving in the morning,” one of Hillary’s closest friends said. “I could see that Rand Paul going over it three times as the shaving cream disappeared.”

  All the major players had what they wanted from the hearing. Rubio cast himself as above the partisan fray; Johnson put himself on the map by pushing Hillary into a testy exchange; Paul conjured the image of himself as president; and Hillary defended Obama, Rice, and herself in a way that questioned the motivations of junior senators from the Tea Party wing of the GOP. Her exchange with Johnson was the move of a veteran witness, one who understands how to wait for the right moment and then use the weight of her adversary’s thrust against him.

  “She has a full range of emotions,” said one former senior government official. “They were always a full range of emotions, but very carefully controlled.… I think she’s very savvy, and I don’t think anybody laid a glove on her frankly. There may be a video clip or two that perhaps may be unhelpful later on, but so be it.”

  In her most comprehensive remarks on the topic of Benghazi, over several hours of hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations and House Foreign Affairs Committees that day, Hillary laid out her view that it would be far more dangerous for the United States to pull back from violent parts of the world than it was to maintain and build a presence. The United States, she said in essence, is a beacon of good and cannot cede ground to terrorists and other perpetrators of violence and oppression. The QDDR had articulated her philosophy of making expeditionary diplomacy in conflict areas the “new normal” and “managing risk” rather than averting it by avoiding it.

  When American outposts came under attack in countries where radical brands of Islam flourished—as at the Peshawar consulate in 2010, an attack that she had watched images of in a meeting with her top deputies—Hillary’s response was to make sure her team at the State Department knew the risks that diplomats were taking, to work to reduce them, and to redouble public diplomacy efforts in those regions.

  “We’ve come a long way in the past four years, and we cannot afford to retreat now. When America is absent, especially from unstable environments, there are consequences. Extremism takes root; our interests suffer; our security at home is threatened,” she said. “That’s why I sent Chris Stevens to Benghazi in the first place.”

  A source who had worked closely with Hillary on implementing the recommendations of the ARB report said she wanted to make sure that “we don’t overcorrect” in the wake of the attack.

  “I think she believes, accurately, that we will never get to zero risk,” the source said. “Her notion of expeditionary diplomacy, which is very much a part of the QDDR, is important to her.… Diplomacy is not just about government-to-government relations anymore. Especially ambassadors and their diplomatic staff need to be out with the NGOs, with the nonstate actors, with the businesses, and she very much believes that. I think she wants to address any shortfalls that were there, any systematic issues in how diplomatic security does its job. But she also doesn’t want to overlearn this lesson, and I think she wants to remind members of Congress and other people that we’re going to have a lot of risk out there, and we’re going to have to figure out how to manage it.… That’s the picture of modern diplomacy.”

  Jason Chaffetz, a boyish-looking forty-six-year-old Utah Republican and a critic of Hillary’s view of expeditionary diplomacy, had quickly become the engine behind the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s investigation into Benghazi in the fall of 2012. A onetime pal of former New York representative Anthony Weiner, Chaffetz had actually been to Hillary’s Washington home for the engagement party the Clintons threw for Weiner and Huma Abedin in 2010. Bill Clinton, Chaffetz thought, had been a little overzealous in greeting visitors with a “two-minute man-shake,” consisting of a handshake and a firm arm grasp. He had also met Hillary during his first term, at a reception the State Department threw for freshman members of Congress.

  Chaffetz’s aw-shucks manner and natural charm make it easy to underestimate him. Reines once sought to play down his importance by referring to him as “Jeremy Chaffetz.” But the media-friendly former placekicker for Brigham Young University’s football team is a sharp political operative who beat Representative Chris Cannon in a 2008 primary despite not living in the district at the time. Before that, he ran Jon Huntsman’s victorious campaign for governor of Utah in 2004 and served as Huntsman’s chief of staff.

  When Chaffetz traveled to Libya in October 2012, a State Department lawyer was assigned to shadow him in meetings with General Carter Ham, the head of the military’s Africa Command, during a stop in Germany and with U.S. officials in Tripoli. Because Chaffetz served on two committees that were already investigating the Benghazi attack—Issa’s panel and the House Intelligence Committee—his trip was regarded as part of an investigation rather than a typical congressional delegation visit to a foreign capital. Though Chaffetz didn’t like having the State Department lawyer at his meetings—he complained to the lawyer but not to the State Department in Washington—the lawyer was allowed to stay in the briefings until one with Gregory Hicks, the deputy chief of mission in Tripoli, turned toward classified information. The lawyer didn’t have high enough security clearance for the topic and was forced to leave.

  Hicks later got a call from Cheryl Mills. “She was unhappy that the lawyer that came with Congressman Chaffetz was not included in that meeting,” Hicks testified. “The statement was clearly no direct criticism, but the tone of the conversation—and again, this is part of the Department of State culture—the fact that she called me and the tone of her voice—again, we’re trained to gauge tone and nuance in language—indicated to me very strongly that she was unhappy.”

  From State’s view, Mills was providing standard legal protection for the department and its employees. In Chaffetz’s eyes, the lawyer was there to intimidate those same officials. “That’s highly unusual, to have a babysitter/note-taker in there the whole time, watching my every move,” he said. “I think it was intimidating for the people who wanted to talk to me. It made me feel uncomfortable. I think it suppressed information that should’ve been shared.”

  While the sprawling set of congressional investigations into Benghazi generally suffered from an abundance of zeal and a lack of focus—the obsession with Susan Rice’s talking points and whether the president had called the assault an act of terrorism diluted the Republican message—Chaffetz was in the process of developing a more coherent narrative that placed blame on Hillary for her belief in expeditionary diplomacy.

  More than any other member of Congress, Chaffetz questioned whether Chris Stevens’s death was the result of a flawed philosophy. He was struck by a conversation he had with the major leading a Marine fleet antiterrorism security team (FAST) in Tripoli. The two men were looking over the south wall of the Tripoli embassy into the rural outskirts of the city, and the Marine pointed to a modest home sitting on about half an acre not too far away.

  “Before we got here, they had a ladder, and the ladder from the home was leaning up against our embassy wall,” the major told Chaffetz. “There’s no barbed wire. Every day they’d come out and they’d take their garbage, and they’d dump it on our embassy grounds. You go over there, and there’s fishheads and all kinds of garbage and crap, When we got here, we had to go tell ’em, ‘You take that ladder down. In fact, if you go up on that wall, I will kill you.’ They got the
message, and they don’t dump garbage on the embassy grounds anymore. But before we got here, that was just the attitude: ‘We don’t want to offend anybody. We don’t want to make anyone feel bad about us.’ ”

  To Chaffetz, the diplomatic dynamic reflected a problem with an approach that left Americans too vulnerable to attack. The Marines were willing to use—or at least threaten to use—lethal force against people who disrespected America’s post, while diplomats let it go in a way that could embolden potential attackers. “We had trees growing right next to the embassy wall. All you do is scurry up the tree and jump over the embassy wall. It would be easy,” Chaffetz said later. “Any high school kid could do that. The Marines were so frustrated, but that was just the cultural approach that the State Department had.”

  Chaffetz, who opposed Obama’s decision to go to war in Libya, blamed Stevens’s death on Hillary’s desire to see the intervention prove wise. “Prior to the attack,” he said, “I think toppling Qaddafi and building a strong presence in Libya could have been her swan song. It really could have been her major achievement, but the whole deck of cards fell out from underneath her. I’m not blaming her for the fact that we were attacked. I just think her push for normalization [of diplomatic relations] at the sacrifice of security cost people their lives and that was a cultural push from this administration, and I think from her, personally.”

  Obviously, the terrorists were to blame for the attacks. But Hillary was anxious to build Libya into an enduring success story, and, according to Hicks’s testimony, Stevens went to Benghazi in September at least in part because Hillary wanted to upgrade the facility there to a permanent post as soon as possible. At the same time that the State Department brass sought to demonstrate progress in Libya by normalizing security operations, the country was becoming more dangerous by the day. That was particularly true in Benghazi. But Washington didn’t heed the warning calls from its agents on the ground in Tripoli, from Gene Cretz to Chris Stevens. While there’s no evidence that their requests ever made it past the desk of Undersecretary Pat Kennedy and up to Hillary’s inner circle, it is perfectly legitimate to ask why. The Accountability Review Board found that security was inadequate both in Tripoli and Benghazi and that folks on the ground in Benghazi felt certain that their security needs were not a high priority in Washington. In the end, Chris Stevens died doing what he had signed up to do: venture into one of the most dangerous parts of the world with a small enough security footprint to avoid intimidating the very people he hoped to create partnerships with. But the ARB found that the State Department was too willing to let him operate without a fully functioning net. Hillary had sent the message throughout her department that she believed the risk of putting diplomats in dangerous areas was worth it, but in this case, the ARB strongly suggested that the calculation of risk and reward had been out of whack. “The Department should urgently review the proper balance between acceptable risk and expected outcomes in high risk, high threat areas,” the investigators wrote. “While the answer cannot be to refrain from operating in such environments, the Department must do so on the basis of having: (1) a defined, attainable, and prioritized mission; (2) a clear-eyed assessment of the risk and costs involved; (3) a commitment of sufficient resources to mitigate these costs and risks; (4) an explicit acceptance of those costs and risks that cannot be mitigated; and (5) constant attention to changes in the situation, including when to leave and perform the mission from a distance.”