Clinton, Benghazi Committee Prepare for Battle

Re­pub­lic­an Rep. Mike Pom­peo says noth­ing has changed.

“We are be­hav­ing ex­actly the same way with Sec­ret­ary Clin­ton as we have with every oth­er wit­ness,” says the Kan­sas Re­pub­lic­an, a mem­ber of the House Se­lect Com­mit­tee on Benghazi.

How is the pan­el pre­par­ing for Hil­lary Clin­ton, who will testi­fy on Oct. 22?

“The same way we have pre­pared for everything we have done all along the way,” Pom­peo says. “No dif­fer­ent, no dif­fer­ent.”

In fact it’s very dif­fer­ent, des­pite the GOP’s in­sist­ence, hotly dis­puted every day by Demo­crats, that the Clin­ton hear­ing and the over­all probe are just-the-facts-ma’am af­fairs.

Pom­peo was speak­ing to re­port­ers in the Cap­it­ol Fri­day near a closed-door com­mit­tee in­ter­view with long­time Clin­ton aide and con­fid­ante Huma Abedin.  

But in con­trast to al­most all the com­mit­tee’s work to date, the hear­ing with Clin­ton will be pub­lic. And in con­trast to the dozens of oth­er wit­nesses the pan­el has in­ter­viewed, Clin­ton is the front-run­ner for the Demo­crat­ic pres­id­en­tial nom­in­a­tion.

It’s an event with high stakes for the former sec­ret­ary of State.

She’s com­ing off good re­views in last week’s Demo­crat­ic de­bate, but while those af­fairs are long, they’re noth­ing com­pared to what’s ex­pec­ted to be an all-day grilling be­fore the pan­el prob­ing the 2012 at­tacks in Libya that killed four Amer­ic­ans, in­clud­ing Amb. Chris Stevens. The ques­tions will likely veer in­to her un­usu­al private email ar­range­ment as well.

Clin­ton’s cam­paign is cast­ing the hear­ing as a turn­ing point.

“We think once she is through Thursday, we are go­ing to be done with this, and she will have answered ques­tions from all the me­dia, she will have answered ques­tions from the Hill; this will be the eighth time a con­gres­sion­al com­mit­tee has in­vest­ig­ated [Benghazi], and it will be time to move on,” Jen­nifer Palmieri, Clin­ton’s dir­ect­or of com­mu­nic­a­tions, said on MS­N­BC Monday.

But des­pite the massive amount of at­ten­tion that will be fo­cused on Clin­ton, the Benghazi pan­el’s Re­pub­lic­ans are very much in the polit­ic­al hot seat them­selves.

The pan­el has been thrown onto the de­fens­ive in re­cent weeks, in large meas­ure be­cause com­ments by a pair of Re­pub­lic­ans—Reps. Kev­in Mc­Carthy and Richard Hanna—fueled long-stand­ing Demo­crat­ic al­leg­a­tions that the Benghazi pan­el is a par­tis­an weapon against Clin­ton.

Com­mit­tee Chair­man Trey Gowdy used an ap­pear­ance on CBS’s Face the Na­tionSunday to push back against those claims, and more broadly said that people out­side of the com­mit­tee don’t know what they’re talk­ing about.

“I have told my own Re­pub­lic­an col­leagues and friends, ‘Shut up talk­ing about things that you don’t know any­thing about.’ And un­less you’re on the com­mit­tee, you have no idea what we have done, why we have done it, and what new facts we have found,” he said.

“We have found new facts … that have ab­so­lutely noth­ing to do with [Clin­ton]. I get that people don’t want to talk about that, but the sev­en mem­bers of my com­mit­tee are much more fo­cused on the four dead Amer­ic­ans than we are any­one’s pres­id­en­tial as­pir­a­tions,” Gowdy said.

The South Car­o­lina Re­pub­lic­an said the probe has un­earthed new in­form­a­tion, in­clud­ing emails Stevens wrote in June of 2012 ask­ing for more se­cur­ity, and also sought to re­but charges that the pan­el is all about Clin­ton, not­ing that she is just one wit­ness, al­beit an im­port­ant one.

But Demo­crats are seek­ing to keep Re­pub­lic­ans on the de­fens­ive.

The com­ments by Mc­Carthy and Hanna—and dis­puted al­leg­a­tions of a politi­cized probe by a former GOP com­mit­tee aide who was fired—have em­boldened Demo­crats.

The fight is es­cal­at­ing rap­idly ahead of Clin­ton’s ap­pear­ance.

The New York Times re­por­ted Monday af­ter­noon that the pro-Clin­ton su­per PAC Pri­or­it­ies USA is buy­ing ads in the states with the first four nom­in­at­ing con­tests—New Hamp­shire, Iowa, Nevada, and South Car­o­lina—to run ahead of the hear­ing.

And a sep­ar­ate pro-Clin­ton su­per PAC, Cor­rect The Re­cord, has ramped up its at­tacks on the Benghazi pan­el’s cred­ib­il­ity with a bar­rage of press re­leases and oth­er ef­forts.

Founder Dav­id Brock was set to ap­pear Monday night at Geor­getown Uni­versity’s In­sti­tute of Polit­ics and Pub­lic Ser­vice to dis­cuss the “overtly polit­ic­al Benghazi Com­mit­tee,” ac­cord­ing to Cor­rect the Re­cord. He’ll also go after the com­mit­tee in re­marks be­fore the World Af­fairs Coun­cil of Phil­adelphia on Wed­nes­day night.

And as if the glare wasn’t bright enough already, the hear­ing ar­rives as two GOP mem­bers of the Benghazi com­mit­tee—Pom­peo and Rep. Lynn West­mo­re­land—say they might jump in­to the race for House speak­er if Rep. Paul Ry­an de­cides against run­ning.

The cross­cur­rents around the com­mit­tee were ap­par­ent dur­ing Abedin’s closed-door testi­mony last week.

Re­port­ers’ ques­tions to Pom­peo and West­mo­re­land—the two GOP mem­bers who at­ten­ded—toggled between the Abedin in­ter­view, Clin­ton’s up­com­ing ap­pear­ance, and the two law­makers’ po­ten­tial runs for speak­er.

West­mo­re­land signaled that Re­pub­lic­ans don’t plan to make Clin­ton’s private email serv­er, which the com­mit­tee’s probe un­covered, a ma­jor fo­cus.

“We don’t care about her private email setup,” he said. “All we want is the cor­res­pond­ence that re­lated to Libya and Benghazi. I could care less that she had a private serv­er, a private email ac­count. Just turn over all the emails that re­late to Benghazi and Libya.”

As the pan­el pre­pares to host one of the biggest mo­ments of the 2016 elec­tion cycle thus far, West­mo­re­land said he has “prac­ticed with a lot of dif­fer­ent people,” in­clud­ing us­ing a stand-in for Clin­ton. But at the same time, he em­phas­ized that the probe is not about Clin­ton, not­ing the dozens of oth­er in­ter­views the com­mit­tee has con­duc­ted.

“She is,” he said, “just an­oth­er wit­ness.”