Marathon Benghazi

5 takeaways from Clinton's marathon Benghazi testimony

The Democratic front-runner left with her eardrums battered and her candidacy well intact.

By Glenn Thrush and Gabriel Debenedetti

If getting yelled at for hours without losing your cool is a requirement for the presidency, Hillary Clinton checked the box on Thursday.

Clinton studiously avoided another exasperated outburst like her 2013 comeback to Senate Republicans — "What difference, at this point, does it make?" — and walked away from her long-awaited trial before the GOP-steered Benghazi committee with her eardrums battered and her candidacy mostly unscathed.

Yet — 24 hours after Joe Biden handed her an election year gift — Republicans made it clear they intend to keep hammering her, over and over, on Benghazi and her dubious decision to build her “homebrew” email server.

Here are five takeaways from Clinton’s daylong testimony:

1. Clinton won the news cycle — not the war

Seldom in the annals of congressional grilling has the power dynamic between accused and accuser been so inverted: Congressional Republicans (in a protective crouch over House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s apparent admission the committee existed to drive Clinton’s poll numbers down) did little to change widespread perceptions they were more interested in damaging the Democratic front-runner than discerning new facts on Benghazi. Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy, who has described the lead-up to the hearing as a spiritual trial, felt the need to kick off the hearing by declaring he wasn’t on a political hunting expedition. “This investigation is about four people who were killed representing our country on foreign soil,” he said — but soon after firebrands like Jim Jordan and Mike Pompeo began barking accusatory questions.

By the late afternoon, Clinton looked annoyed and exhausted — the good kind of annoyed and exhausted. She parried almost every attack with the same kind of dispassionate confidence exhibited on the debate stage a week ago. Republicans threw a lot of wild, roundhouse punches (Jordan, in particular, harangued her over her insistence that the attack was motivated, in part, by an anti-Islamic video). In the hearing’s signature outburst, Gowdy bellowed, “If you think we’ve heard about Sidney Blumenthal, wait for the next round,” at a committee Democrat who complained how many questions were being aimed at the secretive, sometime Clinton adviser.

Clinton — who famously fumed last time she testified on Benghazi — didn’t lose her cool this time. But she didn’t look happy either, passing much of the marathon session with an impatient hand on puckered chin, as Republicans droned on like a traffic court judge with a pending dinner reservation. Anti-Clinton conservatives outside the room fumed at how upstanding Clinton looked in comparison to her inquisitors. “Why doesn't Pompeo just go over and swear her in for president now—if he goes on like this, he'll practically get her elected,” tweeted John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine.

But Clinton and her backers run a serious risk if they mistake surviving an ambush for winning: The FBI is still probing Clinton’s use of a private email server while at the State Department, and some revelations could contradict Clinton’s statements today — and that would turn what appeared to be a victory into a delayed-fuse defeat.

2. Eleven hours of selfies with a Democrat Republicans love to hate

None of the GOP committee members are personally opposing Clinton for the presidency next year, but picking a fight with the Democratic front-runner was an electoral no-brainer.

Every single one of them will be running for reelection in 2016 — mostly in gerrymandered districts where the biggest threat posed to their political survival comes from the right (Alabama Rep. Martha Roby, especially). So battering the party’s prime target on video —  in the loudest, most confrontational way possible — makes perfect political sense. Sure it was grating, annoying and confusing to almost everyone else, but a 45-second YouTube clip of your candidate bellowing in the face of the most hated figure in the Democratic Party is pure partisan gold, perfect for TV ads or campaign websites.

Take Pompeo, who peppered Clinton repeatedly — but almost always with a reference to the folks back in his Kansas district, where he’s famously friendly with a few high-profile locals — like the anti-Clinton Koch brothers.

“Why didn’t you fire someone?” he asked Clinton. “In Kansas, I get asked constantly why has no one been held accountable."

3. No email bombshells

Facing pressure to prove the committee was about Benghazi not Clinton 2016, Republican questioners waited until 7:40 p.m. (well after FOX broke away from the hearings) to savage her server arrangement. Jim Jordan, the most aggressive of the lot, took the lead, followed by Georgia Rep. Lynn Westmoreland and, eventually, Gowdy.

Gowdy may have scored the most perplexing answer from Clinton when she asserted, late into the evening, that her aides were told by the State Department that nearly all her work-related emails were captured in agency's databases. “I believed the vast majority of the emails were in their system … 90 [percent]to 95 percent were already there,” she said. However, as Gowdy noted, the State Department has acknowledged that its recordkeeping practices were lax and that emails were not automatically archived during Clinton’s tenure.

But for the most part, Gowdy and Co. were almost entirely intent on keeping their sights on Benghazi and Clinton’s tenure at the State Department, spending most of the day avoiding procedural examinations of Clinton’s email except to establish that Stevens, the ambassador, did not have her personal email address. (He had plenty of better ways to get in touch with her team, Clinton insisted. And when asked why she hadn’t sent more emails about Libya in 2012, Clinton was quick to point out that she didn’t do most of her communications online in the first place.)

That outcome is just fine with Republicans, who were careful not to make Democrats’ day by effectively tying the emails and Benghazi issues together in public. Clinton allies had hoped she’d be able to step past both questions — which they largely see as partisan skirmishes — at once, but the lack of email fireworks meant that battle will have to come another day.

4. All Sid, all the time

No one’s name ID rose more on Thursday than that of Sidney Blumenthal — Clinton’s on-again-off-again friend/source/staff/chronicler — and the committee’s Republicans made clear that his name would come up again and again (and again) over the next 15 months.

Blumenthal’s own closed-door June testimony before the panel was the source of the day’s biggest blow-up — a Gowdy vs. Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings shouting match — and at times, it felt like his name was mentioned more than Clinton’s. Gowdy in particular pressed the Democratic front-runner on her relationship with the now-frequent GOP target, and the South Carolinian kept suggesting that he had more and more information about Blumenthal still to come. “Republicans asked more than 160 questions about Blumenthal’s relationship and communications with the Clintons, but less than 20 questions about the Benghazi attacks,” complained Rep. Adam Schiff, one of the committee Democrats, early in the evening.

“Republicans asked more than 270 questions about Mr. Blumenthal’s alleged business activities in Libya, but no questions about the U.S. presence in Benghazi."

5. No fun allowed

On Thursday evening, Roby pressed Clinton on a question that has nagged at the GOP for months: Where Clinton was, and who she was with, on Sept. 11, 2012, the night of the Benghazi attack.

“Were you alone?,” Roby asked.

“I was alone, yes,” Clinton replied.

“The whole night?"

“Well, yes, the whole night,” a bleary-eyed Clinton laughed heartily, as many of the Democrats in the room joined in, more out of fatigue than anything else.

Roby, a 39-year-old former Montgomery council member, grimly reprimanded the world’s most famous woman. “I don’t know why that’s funny,” the congresswoman said as Clinton’s team chuckled. "Did you have any in-person briefings? I don’t find it funny at all."

“I’m sorry,” said Clinton, over nine hours after the hearing began. “A little note of levity at 7:15.”

Post-hearing bonus: 11 hours of Clinton testimony, and all Gowdy got was ... ??

Speaking to reporters directly after the marathon testimony session ended, Gowdy stumbled when asked what new things he learned, playing directly into Democrats’ oft-repeated talking point that Clinton’s appearance wouldn’t add much to the record.

"Uh, I think some of Jimmy Jordan’s questioning. Well, when you say new today, we knew some of that already, about the emails. In terms of her testimony?” he asked, shaking his head. “I don’t know that she testified that much differently today than she has the previous times she’s testified."