At odds with Republicans, Hillary Clinton to testify on Benghazi
Whether it's a fact-finding mission as Republicans insist or the political witch hunt that Democrats anticipate, the congressional committee investigating the deadly 2012 attack on the US diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, on October 22 will hear from Hillary Clinton, then the secretary of state and now the top candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Clinton and many of her fellow Democrats have seized on the comments in recent weeks by Republican lawmakers as evidence that the goal of the Benghazi committee in the US House of Representatives was to hurt her front-runner status in the campaign for the November 2016 election.
Clinton's appearance follows months of unflattering reports about her use of a private home email server for her State Department work. The reports emerged in part because of the Benghazi committee's demand last year to see Clinton's official records.
Trey Gowdy, the committee's Republican chairman and a former federal prosecutor, has been put on the defensive as the most high-profile event in his committee's 17-month existence drew near.
Gowdy says he is focused on a serious inquiry into the killing of J. Christopher Stevens, the US ambassador to Libya, and three other Americans by suspected Islamist militants who invaded the US mission compound in the war-torn city of Benghazi with guns, grenades and mortars.
The committee's five Democrats, who may discuss abandoning the inquiry after Clinton's appearance, say they think there is little left to unearth on Benghazi that more than half a dozen previous inquiries did not find.
Gowdy and some of the committee's six other Republicans say October 22's hearing will dispel this notion.
The Democrats will likely ask Clinton, who also testified about Benghazi before the US Senate in 2013, about how diplomatic security can be improved, Adam Schiff, a Democratic member from California, said in a telephone interview.
The panel's Republicans, he said, are expected to have Clinton testify for at least six to eight hours. "I am not sure what we are going to do in all that time," he said.