By Brendan Bordelon
Thursday, October 22, 2015
Democratic lawmakers on the Benghazi Committee went into
last Friday’s Huma Abedin testimony smelling blood. After Majority Leader Kevin
McCarthy’s regrettable boast that the committee had driven down Hillary
Clinton’s polling numbers, GOP congressman Richard Hanna’s deliberate echoing
of McCarthy’s remark, and former committee staffer Bradley Podliska’s claim
that he’d been fired for not focusing on Clinton, Democrats felt comfortable
dismissing Republicans as rank partisans. Partisanship, they insisted, had
motivated the Republicans to seek the testimony of the former secretary of
state’s longtime aide.
Indeed, Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the
committee, said politics was the sole reason Republicans called Abedin before
the committee at all. “When we look at the actions — calling Ms. Abedin in,
letting the press know about the time, the location of her interview — when
she, based on other testimony that we’ve gotten, had no policy responsibilities, no
operational responsibilities, was not with Secretary Clinton on the night of
this phenomenal tragedy, it only leads one to ask the question: Did Congressman
McCarthy, Congressman Hanna, and Mr. Podliska tell the truth?” he asked
reporters just outside the hearing room, as Abedin was testifying inside.
But on the eve of Clinton’s own committee testimony,
Republican members are vehemently denying Cummings’s claim about Abedin. They
say that Abedin’s unparalleled access to then–secretary Clinton and other
high-ranking State Department officials, her knowledge of the State department’s
complicated record-keeping system, and her involvement in the Department’s
post-attack response made it absolutely necessary for the committee to hear her
testimony. And some aspects of her involvement with the Benghazi debacle
trigger national-security concerns, prompting additional scrutiny.
“It’s just so odd when you hear Mr. Cummings say that,
because he knows better,” Mike Pompeo (Calif.), one of two House Republicans
who attended last Friday’s hearing, tells National Review. “Unfortunately, Mr.
Cummings only stayed at the Huma Abedin hearing about 20 minutes. So when he
went to the microphones and made those statements, he was engaged in the worst
kind of partisanship — the uninformed kind.”
E-mails released to the committee by the State Department
show Abedin’s involvement in the run-up to the attack and the response.
Messages sent before the attacks — one on March 27, 2011; another on April 24,
2011; and a third on June 3, 2011 — show that Abedin acted as a conduit for
information on the security situation in Benghazi and on Ambassador Chris
Stevens’s previous missions to the city. In another e-mail from October 29,
2012, weeks after the attack, Abedin counseled Clinton on how to speak with a
State Department officer injured during the assault. “A check-in call and
asking him if he needs anything would be good,” Abedin advised.
The committee questioned Abedin about these e-mails,
including one that contained “confidential” information classified by the State
Department. An official with knowledge of the committee’s workings tells NR
that several of the e-mails triggered national-security concerns. That means
the committee will probably bring them up during Clinton’s testimony before the
committee today — though it may do that that behind closed doors.
Cummings described Abedin’s six-hour testimony as a
“spectacle” designed to “derail the campaign of Hillary Clinton.” But the
official with knowledge of the committee’s workings said that the meeting
scrupulously avoided the partisan questions that have dogged Abedin in her role
as vice chair of Clinton’s presidential campaign. Committee members asked no
questions, for instance, about Abedin’s employment at a private consulting firm
while she worked simultaneously at the State Department, although this has
raised conflict-of-interest concerns and sparked an investigation led by Chuck
Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Instead, committee questioning reportedly focused on the
State Department’s actions prior to the Benghazi attacks and on the attack’s
aftermath. As Clinton’s deputy chief of staff and longtime “body woman,” Abedin
had unmatched access to the then-secretary’s briefings and day-to-day
operations. This gave her unique knowledge about what information Clinton
received on the Benghazi security situation before the attack, as well as what
Clinton knew about the Obama administration’s claim that the attack was a
spontaneous demonstration.
“[Abedin] wasn’t setting foreign policy, I concede that,”
the official tells NR, adding: “But if you’re asking, did she have knowledge
of what was going on, who the decision-makers were, and how those decisions
were being made? Was she present in some of those places, and would she have
knowledge of where Secretary Clinton was on the night of the event? All of
those are absolutely true. It’s not the case that she was performing a
functionary role, just making the buses run on time, which is what Mr. Cummings
implies.V
Abedin also operated at the center of the State
Department’s communications nexus during the time period being scrutinized by
the committee, making her a valuable source of information on how the State
Department functioned and whether the committee is looking in the right place
for records and messages related to the Benghazi security set-up, the attack
itself, and its aftermath. “She was the deputy chief of staff for operations,
involved in all the activities of the secretary, and was a gateway and access
point for information flows inside the seventh floor of the State Department —
the most senior leaders, including the secretary herself,” the official says.
Though public interest in Abedin’s Friday testimony was
high, it’s not yet clear whether the interview of one of Clinton’s closest
confidantes yielded any breakthroughs in the Benghazi investigation. Democrats
seized on the lack of a “smoking gun” to suggest that Abedin should never have
testified. But others are more circumspect. “It’s truly a mosaic you’re trying
to piece together,” the official says, explaining how tidbits of seemingly
trivial information can later help identify key witnesses or important new documents.
“It’s hard to pick out one thing and say, ‘Yeah, that was the golden nugget,’”
the official says. “That not ever been my experience in these kinds of
investigations.”
Golden nugget or no, the e-mail evidence indicates Abedin
had knowledge of the State Department’s Benghazi activities, and it places her
at the center of the Department and at Clinton’s right hand. Given this, the
committee had little choice but to call her to testify. Members and staff won’t
reveal what they learned last week, but they are making it clear that
information gathered from Friday’s hearing will factor into Clinton’s own
interview today.
That makes Cummings’s accusation of Republican
partisanship in the Benghazi investigation particularly cynical — at least to
Pompeo, who turns right around to accuse the ranking member of “politicizing”
Abedin’s testimony. “Mr. Cummings’s comments about a particular witness were in
that same vein, an effort to undermine the credibility of the committee that he
serves on,” the congressman says. “Sadly, they’ve taken that path.”
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