Benghazi: Episode 6 - Radicals

The Tea Party takes over the search for the truth about Benghazi, while the FBI pursues a Libyan militia leader suspected of planning the attack.

For a list of books, documentaries and resources we used to research this episode visit: bit.ly/fiascopolitics

 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:16):
Pushkin previously on Fiasco.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
There were some mysteries embedded in Benghazi that needed to
be answered, so that gave it legs.

Speaker 1 (00:36):
A number of conservative media outlets were particularly gender.

Speaker 3 (00:40):
Because you never knew what would get traction.

Speaker 4 (00:42):
Who told the military to stand down?

Speaker 5 (00:45):
Where in the world is Hillary Clinton?

Speaker 2 (00:47):
What's her legacy going to be? Benghazi?

Speaker 1 (00:56):
This is the final episode of our season on Benghazi.
But before we get into how the story ended, I
want to stop for a second and dwell on a
question that so far we've only come at sideways.

Speaker 6 (01:10):
Actually a two part question.

Speaker 1 (01:12):
First, what did the people who were outraged about Benghazi
actually think Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama did wrong? And second,
what did they think their motivations were.

Speaker 7 (01:23):
There's no question Hillary lied and people died.

Speaker 1 (01:25):
I don't mean to sound defensive on behalf of Clinton
or Obama. I just think it's surprisingly hard to pin
this down given how many specific accusations were leveled against
the administration.

Speaker 8 (01:37):
So the administration knew in real time there wasn't a mob.

Speaker 9 (01:40):
They knew in real time that this was a well
coordinated attack.

Speaker 10 (01:43):
They absolutely lied to the American people from day one.

Speaker 5 (01:45):
The White House can sign those people to death.

Speaker 1 (01:48):
What I've been trying to figure out is how did
all these accusations fit together, what did they add up to?
And the closest I've come to an answer to a
unified theory of the Benghazi scandal is that, at a
basic level, many Republicans saw the attack as a repudiation
of a worldview they had long despised.

Speaker 5 (02:10):
Son's problems with Benghazi make a bigger point about his
approach to governor.

Speaker 7 (02:14):
Benghazi is the result of the failures of the Obama
Clinton foreign policy.

Speaker 1 (02:19):
The argument was that Obama and Clinton were idealistic liberals
who didn't understand the threat of Islamic extremism. They thought
America could solve its problems in the Arab world with
diplomacy and deference and leading from behind.

Speaker 5 (02:33):
Maybe they wanted to believe the lie governed by the
ideology of hurt feelings. It's hipster diplomacy at its worst.

Speaker 11 (02:38):
If you're reluctant to call terrorism by its name, can
you ever defeat the terrorists?

Speaker 1 (02:44):
Benghazi was proof that Obama, Clinton and their fellow liberals
were fundamentally wrong about America's place in the world.

Speaker 5 (02:52):
The reason we have Libya is the obama mesress of
terrorism has expanded all across the region.

Speaker 12 (02:57):
Now, mister President, it's your effeckless weak foreign policy that
is creating a danger zone for all Americans.

Speaker 1 (03:04):
At best, the Democrats had gotten people killed with their
naivete and at worst, they had deliberately prioritized their liberal
values over protecting American lives.

Speaker 5 (03:15):
Bad things happen when you avoid reality, and unfortunately we've.

Speaker 6 (03:18):
Just seen that.

Speaker 1 (03:22):
It was a powerful story. But what strikes me is
just how far the debate around Benghazi ended up drifting,
how baroque and esoteric it got, Because it seems clear
the scandal wasn't really about a foreign policy disagreement between
left and right. It was about something deeper and also
more shallow, which is why in this season finale, I

(03:49):
want to tell you about two very different investigations into
Benghazi that were carried out in parallel. One resulted in
a trial in which a Libyan militia leader was accused
of orchestrating the murder of Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty,
and Tyrone Woods. The other ended with emails I'm Leon

(04:13):
Nafok from Prologue Projects and Pushkin Industries this is fiasco,
ben Gazi.

Speaker 13 (04:20):
The word Benghazi the ultimate roar shock test.

Speaker 14 (04:23):
Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, but we put together
a Benghazi Special Committee.

Speaker 3 (04:28):
Congressional investigations are partisan in nature. Their sole purpose is
to damage your opponent.

Speaker 8 (04:33):
They actually printed out tickets. It was like tickets to
the circus.

Speaker 15 (04:36):
What is the psychic told that takes Hillary crooked?

Speaker 16 (04:39):
Hillary crooked?

Speaker 6 (04:40):
So crooked?

Speaker 1 (04:43):
Episode six, our season finale, Radicals, in which everyone has
their own reasons for wanting the truth about Benghazi. We'll
be right back.

Speaker 4 (05:00):
It's funny when you see it for the first time
and then you see it for the thousandth time, you
cannot believe how much you missed.

Speaker 1 (05:09):
The first Julianne Himmelstein watched the surveillance footage from the
Benghazi compound over and over and over.

Speaker 4 (05:17):
It was grainy, it was black and white. But that
was the nugget that we started from.

Speaker 1 (05:24):
At the time of the attack, Himmelstein was an assistant
US attorney, and she was assigned by the Department of
Justice to serve as one of the lead federal prosecutors
in charge of the criminal inquiry into BEng Ghazi.

Speaker 4 (05:36):
We really were investigating it as a pure and simple
murder case and terrorist attack.

Speaker 1 (05:43):
Himmelstein's partner and the investigation was an FBI counter terrorism
specialist named Mike Clark.

Speaker 6 (05:48):
You know, we got the.

Speaker 17 (05:49):
Call on September eleventh to the normal channels, and immediately
I was notified that I was going to be the
lead case agent. We got our team together, and we deployed.

Speaker 1 (05:59):
On the night of September twelfth. The diplomatic security agents
and CIA contractors who had been in Benghazi during the
attack were in Germany, having just evacuated from Libya. Clark
and his team needed to debrief them about what they'd seen.

Speaker 17 (06:13):
My first responsibility was to take my team to our
forward operating base in Germany and interview the Americans that
had survived the attack, mostly the DSS agents that were
there on scene.

Speaker 1 (06:26):
Afterwards, Clark flew to Libya to personally pick up the
surveillance footage that had been pulled off a dozen or
so cameras set up around the Benghazi compound. Back in
the United States, Clark and Himmelstein watched the videos together,
sitting in a small room at an FBI office crowded
with boxes and furniture. They would stop every few seconds,

(06:46):
then rewind, then stop again, then rewind again. They would
do this for hours and eventually years.

Speaker 17 (06:55):
When you first look at those videos and you don't
know who the people are, it does look like a
chaotic mess. But once you start being able to identify
who the people are, what groups they belonged to, then
it becomes clearer and clear.

Speaker 1 (07:11):
For Clark and Himmelstein, identifying the people in the video
was the top priority. They received some promising leads from
intelligence reports, but in order to build a case, they
needed to connect that intelligence to the nameless individuals in
the footage, and to do that, Himmelstein and Clark needed witnesses.

Speaker 4 (07:29):
The only way that we were able to identify anyone
is to talk to people in Benghazi who knew them.
It was hard to convince people who were there to
talk to the FBI. There was an incredible witness who
was in Benghazi and present on the night of the attack,

(07:52):
very very young man. He was the first one to
identify Abu Katala.

Speaker 1 (08:02):
Ahmed Abu Katala was a construction worker by trade. During
the Libyan Revolution, he had taken up arms against muamargadaf
and raised a small battalion in Benghazi called Obeda Benjarra.
They were adherents to the ultra conservative solaphist interpretation of Islam,
and their vision for Libya involved ridding the country of

(08:23):
every imperialist foreign power, particularly the Americans.

Speaker 17 (08:27):
When you talk about Ubeeda Benjarrah and Abu Katala, you're
talking about an extremist militia that doesn't believe that any
government entity should be involved in anything involving Libya. He
wanted Libya to be governed under strict Sharia law.

Speaker 1 (08:43):
Investigators learned that Abu Katala had met many of his
compatriots in Obeeda Benjarra during the Gaddafi regime when they
were imprisoned together at Abu Salim, the prison where more
than a thousand inmates were killed in a massacre in
nineteen ninety six.

Speaker 4 (08:58):
Not swear many of them formed their friendships and relationships
and it was just, you know, just a horrible environment,
just the worst that you could ever think of. And
there was torture, and actually Abu Katala was tortured.

Speaker 1 (09:13):
At some point. Abu Katala affiliated himself with a hard
line Islamist militia called Ansar al Sharia. A few months
before the attack on the US compound, he and about
two hundred other members of Asar Al Sharia took part
in a rally through Benghazi intended to show their force.

Speaker 17 (09:31):
The rebel fighters from Libya's revolution had brought their weapons
along while demanding that their country imposed Sharia Islamic law.

Speaker 1 (09:39):
They drove trucks brandishing artillery and loudly condemned the coming elections,
Libya's first since the fall of Gaddafi.

Speaker 4 (09:46):
We need.

Speaker 18 (09:50):
To kill them, ko Kofan, Yeah, to kill the infidels.

Speaker 19 (09:55):
Yes.

Speaker 20 (09:56):
Yes.

Speaker 1 (09:57):
It didn't take long for investigators to start circling Abu Katala.
Libyan witnesses told the FBI that they had seen him
directing fighters during the attack, and sources from various local
militias said Abu Katala had approached them several weeks earlier
trying to acquire weapons and vehicles.

Speaker 17 (10:15):
He was also discreetly and diplomatically in some cases, going
to other more mainstream militia leaders and basically telling them,
you know, it would be a bad idea to interfere
with our plans should something happen.

Speaker 1 (10:33):
The witness interviews that generated these details were hard won.
People in Libya were scared of Abu Katala.

Speaker 17 (10:41):
Those are the people that made the case. Some of
them paid the ultimate sacrifice. We had witnesses that were killed.
We had witnesses that their houses were burned to the
ground by the extremists. Once they found out that they
were speaking out against Abu Katala and other militia groups,
extremist groups, they risked everything to cooperate with the FBI
because they realized how dangerous the extremists were.

Speaker 13 (11:08):
A Libyan militia leader who has the suspected ringleader behind
the deadly attack on the US consul in Benghazi is
basically thumbing his nose at American and Libyan investigators.

Speaker 1 (11:16):
Abu Katala was not exactly keeping a low profile. In October,
just a few weeks after the attack, he even made
himself available to the American media.

Speaker 13 (11:25):
His name is Ahmed Abu Katawa. He socialized with journalists
last night at a hotel in Benghazi.

Speaker 1 (11:31):
In meetings with reporters from The New York Times, CNN,
and Fox News, Abu Katala spoke in a tone that
was described as taunting. During his time's interview, he sipped
on a strawberry frape could have been a ringleader.

Speaker 21 (11:44):
Maybe a suspect may be just bragging about his contentions,
but his walking around free as a bird in Benghazi
a couple of days ago and talking.

Speaker 1 (11:54):
To the New York Times, Abu Katala denied playing a
role in the attack, but he made no secret of
his contempt for the American government and made clear that
he wanted the US out of Libya. According to Mike Clark,
the FBI agent leading the instigation, Abu Katala was also
convinced that the US mission compound in Benghazi was not

(12:16):
what the United States had claimed.

Speaker 17 (12:18):
Abu Katala never believed that the Special Mission was an embassy,
was a diplomatic facility. He always believed, even to the
time when I interviewed him, that it was a spy
base and it was a front for illegal American activities.

Speaker 1 (12:34):
In this respect, Abu Katala had something in common with
a certain subset of Americans, whether he knew it or not.
There was a theory popular in conservative media that Chris
Stevens's real reason for being in Benghazi was to broker
a secret weapons deal with Turkey. The theory didn't exactly
say the Benghazi mission was a CIA front, but it

(12:56):
suggested Stevens was not acting as an average ambassador. In
any event, Abu Katala thought every American in Benghazi was suspect.
While the FBA eyes slowly developed their case, Republicans in
Congress were focused on a different investigation, a bunch of

(13:16):
them actually, all taking place on Capitol Hill, where multiple
House committees were looking into various aspects of the attack.

Speaker 5 (13:24):
I mean five separate House committees are looking into this thing.
Four or five different committees that are looking into ben Ghazi.

Speaker 1 (13:31):
Each committee had its own jurisdiction, So, for example, the
House Armed Services Committee was focused on the Pentagon's response
to the attack, and the Foreign Affairs Committee was focused
on the State Department. The broadest scope belonged to the
House Oversight Committee. You heard about their work in our
previous episode. They were the ones who interviewed the whistleblowers

(13:52):
and asked repeatedly about a stand down order.

Speaker 22 (13:55):
How did the personnel react at being told to stand down?

Speaker 6 (13:59):
They were furious, he said, this is the first time.

Speaker 1 (14:02):
Suzanne Saxmon Grooms was the Chief council for the Oversight
Committee's Democratic staff. In that capacity, she worked under Congressman
Elijah Cummings, so.

Speaker 8 (14:12):
The Oversight Committee was called back in immediately after the
attacks and had its first hearing in October of twenty twelve,
and then continued to heavily and actively aggressively investigate the
Bengazi attacks for that full year and a half.

Speaker 1 (14:28):
Between the Oversight Committee investigation and all the others, the
Bengazi attack was being scrutinized from every angle.

Speaker 8 (14:35):
The Committee's interviewed dozens of witnesses, They reviewed tens of
thousands of pages of documents, There was a lot of
classified interviews and briefings, and there were a number of
public hearings.

Speaker 1 (14:48):
By mid twenty thirteen, polls were showing that Benghazi was
being processed completely differently by Democrats and Republicans.

Speaker 13 (14:55):
The ultimate roar shock test in American politics today maybe
the word Benghazi.

Speaker 1 (15:01):
For one thing, Republicans were just much more interested in
the story. According to a Pew survey, they were twice
as likely as Democrats to be followed Benghazi in the news.
The same survey showed that among Democrats, sixty percent thought
Republicans had gone too far with the investigations. Among Republicans,
sixty five percent said the investigations had been handled properly.

(15:24):
You could see a corresponding schism on Capitol Hill, where
Democratic lawmakers were arguing that Benghazi was a manufactured scandal
that Republicans were dragging out for political gain.

Speaker 3 (15:35):
There's an obsession with Benghazi Hillary Clinton that some of
my Republican colleagues have in the House.

Speaker 1 (15:41):
While Republicans insisted that the real truth had still not
come out.

Speaker 4 (15:45):
You know, I think the Benghazi issue is quite significant
because we still don't have truth in regards to what
happened there.

Speaker 23 (15:53):
And that was part of the message of the Tea Party.

Speaker 1 (15:55):
Hey, everybody leading the charge on the Republican side was
a cohort of arch conservatives who felt the existing committees
weren't being aggressive enough about Benghazi. That included members of
the Tea Party, a flamboyant, anger fueled wing of the
GOP that rose to power during Obama's first term. What
they wanted was a new investigation into Benghazi, a special

(16:17):
select committee that would find the smoking gun that had
so far eluded Congress. More than anything, the desire for
a select committee was about the promise of a less
restrained approach than Republicans had been taking thus far. Part
of the appeal was symbolic. Select committees have been created

(16:37):
to investigate name brand scandals like Watergate and Iran Contra,
so it was only right that Benghazi should get one too.
But there was a practical appeal as well. The select
committee wouldn't be limited by jurisdiction and could therefore investigate
any aspect of the scandal they wanted.

Speaker 24 (16:56):
There were Republicans who believed that the people leading these
other investigations were not sufficiently bloodthirsty.

Speaker 1 (17:05):
This is Tim alberta author of a book called American
Carnage about the recent history of the GOP.

Speaker 24 (17:12):
They believed desperate times call for desperate measures. And we've
got this incident that left four Americans dead, and we
have the likely nominee of the Democratic Party right at
the center of it, and nobody has even laid a
glove on her yet. And so all of these fact
finding missions that are playing by the rules of Congress

(17:32):
are all fine and well, but isn't it about time
that we tested some of those boundaries and that maybe
we broke a couple of those rules.

Speaker 1 (17:42):
Calls for the formation of a select committee began just
a few months after the attack, but the drumbeat got louder.
Over the course of twenty thirteen. That summer, a freshman
congressman from Texas announced that he had collected one thousand
signatures from Special Ops veterans in support of a select committee.
The congressman planned to unveil the signatures in the form

(18:03):
of a sixty foot long scroll that he wanted to
spread over the Capitol steps.

Speaker 24 (18:08):
The sixty foot scroll at noon time.

Speaker 7 (18:10):
I do believe it's been signed by a thousand Special
Offs veterans.

Speaker 24 (18:14):
Well, this happened today.

Speaker 12 (18:15):
You're getting resistance on that from Capitol police.

Speaker 25 (18:17):
Well, the police say that we're not allowed to do it,
but we're working with him. Right now, we're going to
unfurrel the scroll and just demanding that we have a
special investigation. We owe it to the survivors. We also
owe it to the victims that were killed there.

Speaker 1 (18:32):
That more, The power to appoint a select committee on
Benghazi lay with one man, House Speaker John Bayner. The
surly had strong congressman from Ohio.

Speaker 6 (18:43):
What you see is what you get. I know who
I am.

Speaker 18 (18:45):
I'm comfortable in my own skin, and everybody who knows
me knows that I get emotional about certain things. Trying
to catch my breath, so I don't refer to this
as a chicken crap, all right? What this is bensense?

Speaker 23 (18:59):
All right.

Speaker 1 (19:00):
Bayner had a history as something of a renegade in
the GOP, but after twenty years in the House he
had evolved into a quintessential establishment figure, someone who would
go on to support Jeb Bush and John Kasick in
the Republican primary over their more erratic challengers.

Speaker 24 (19:17):
The term institutionalist gets thrown around a lot in Congress,
but there's really no one in Congress at this time
who is more of an institutionalist than John Bayner. This
is somebody who is really, really, sort of obsessed with
the long term health and stability and credibility of the
US Congress.

Speaker 7 (19:38):
Whatever anyone thinks about the Speaker of the House, John
Bahner may have the toughest job in Washington.

Speaker 1 (19:44):
Though Baynor had initially celebrated the Tea Party wave, he
quickly found himself at odds with the Republican Party's ascendant
right flank, many of whom he regarded as politically immature
and unserious about governing.

Speaker 7 (19:56):
His problem has been the rise of the Tea Party faction,
the newly arrived and highly motivated members who do not
go along or get along with the wishes of the leadership.

Speaker 24 (20:07):
And so John Baynor tied after time after time. Since
he becomes speaker in January of twenty eleven, he's butting
heads with the far right of his conference.

Speaker 1 (20:18):
While Bayner owes his speakership to the Tea Party, victories
that put Republicans in charge, the Tea Parties headstrong confrontations
put his leadership on the rocks repeatedly.

Speaker 24 (20:28):
They are just ready to light fires and lob bombs
and sort of engage in these guerrilla tactics against not
only the Obama administration, but more and more against members
of their own party.

Speaker 1 (20:42):
The Tea Parties guerrilla tactics included pushing conspiracy based legislation
that Bayner opposed, like a bill requiring presidential candidates to
show their long form birth certificates. What do Obama and
God have in common?

Speaker 6 (20:56):
Neither has a birth certificate.

Speaker 12 (20:58):
But this strikes of racism in the very least, he's foreign,
he's alien, he's the other.

Speaker 1 (21:03):
Tea Party members also forced government shut down and tanked
several of Bayer's carefully crafted compromises with the Obama way
Ight House. On one occasion, Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann demanded a
spot on a powerful House committee and threatened to go
on Sean Hannity's show to disparage Bayner if he didn't
see her. This was par for the course for Tea
Party members, who regularly used Fox News as a way

(21:25):
to bypass Bayner's agenda and gain influence by talking directly
to their base in private meetings. Bayner attempted to strong
arm the renegades with little effect. He had a stern
message for Tea Party or Bayner told them, get your
ass in line.

Speaker 6 (21:40):
Don Bayner's a pissed off Speaker of the House.

Speaker 1 (21:44):
Bayner declined to be interviewed for this podcast, but Tim
Alberta says the Speaker was uncomfortable with how the Republican
Party was changing. At the same time, Alberta emphasizes that
Bayner's discomfort wasn't about policy or ideology so much as
tactics and temperament. Bayner saw himself as the adult in
the room, and when he started getting pressure to form

(22:04):
a special select committee to reinvestigate Benghazi, he bristled.

Speaker 24 (22:09):
What's really giving Bayner a great degree of heartburn is
he's beginning at this point to appreciate what it is
that these folks are really after. They're looking for the
House of Representatives to do what traditionally a partisan opposition
research firm would do, which is spend a whole lot

(22:30):
of money and a whole lot of time and a
whole lot of energy trying to dig up dirt on
a particular subject. And for Bayner, that makes him extremely
uncomfortable because he knows in his bones that that is inappropriate.

Speaker 1 (22:45):
On some level. Bayner's heartburn was about appearances. He had
no problem with cutthroat political maneuvering. He just didn't want
the Republican Party to look shameless.

Speaker 24 (23:09):
There are new developments on Benghazi.

Speaker 5 (23:12):
Some of the families of the four Americans killed, pressing
House Speaker John Bayner to create what's called a select
committee and investigate.

Speaker 1 (23:19):
By the spring of twenty fourteen, the pressure on Bayner
to appoint a select committee was building. It was no
longer just the zany, angry New Right calling out for it.
It was all kinds of Republicans who were hearing from
voters back home that not enough was being done about Benghazi.
Author Tim Elberta again.

Speaker 24 (23:38):
Lots of the constituents. Even in these sort of moderate
suburban Republican districts. The folks that we thought at the
time were just your sort of traditional Republicans, you know,
Chamber of Commerce, country Club, give me some tax cuts
and Supreme Court justices. Republicans, they're you know, tuning into
Fox News every night, and they're bringing these concerns now

(24:00):
to their members of Congress, saying, hey, why aren't you
looking at the ben Ghazi Why are you letting Hillary
Clinton off the hooks.

Speaker 2 (24:06):
About one hundred and sixty seven members of the Republican
Commerce have written to Bayner asking to create this committee.

Speaker 26 (24:12):
One month of billboards advocating Watergates style committee going up
in Bayner's district.

Speaker 24 (24:18):
And it wasn't just the Tea partiers who were sort
of battering at the gates of the House leadership asking
for this investigation. More and more the drum beat was
coming from across the conference.

Speaker 1 (24:31):
In April, John Bahner sat for an interview on Fox
News with Megan Kelly, in which she pressed him on
why he was resisting calls for a new investigation.

Speaker 11 (24:40):
You've got one hundred and ninety members in the House
who are in favor of a select committee, and yet
you are overruling or ignoring the will of your own majority.

Speaker 18 (24:49):
There are four committees that are investigating in BEng Ghazi.
These committees all have subpoena power. At this point in time,
I see no reason to break up all the work
that's been done and to take months and months and
months to create some select committee.

Speaker 6 (25:02):
But want it.

Speaker 11 (25:03):
You've got one hundred and ninety House Republicans who say
they need it.

Speaker 6 (25:06):
I understand it.

Speaker 1 (25:07):
It's Later that month, the conservative legal group Didditional Watch
published an email they had obtained through a four yer request.
In it, a White House communications advisor laid out a
series of talking points for Susan Rice's appearance on the
Sunday News shows. The memo directed Rice to underscore that
the recent unrest in the Arab world, including the Benghazi incident,

(25:28):
was quote rooted in an Internet video and not a
broader failure of policy.

Speaker 15 (25:34):
The president of Judicial Watch said the documents read like
a pr strategy, not an effort to provide the best
available intelligence to the American people.

Speaker 1 (25:42):
The State Department had not previously disclosed the email when
responding to document requests from Congress. In a statement, John
Bahner said he was appalled.

Speaker 27 (25:51):
Speaker Bayner said, quote, the administration's withholding of documents is
a flagrant violation of trust, and it forces us to
ask the question, what else about Benghazi is the Obama
administration still hiding?

Speaker 1 (26:07):
Appointing the Select Committee would earn Bayner credit with the
Republican Party's loudest, most ideological voices. In his book, Tim
Alberta tells a story about Bayner going up to New
York and meeting with Fox News chairman Roger Ales.

Speaker 24 (26:21):
John Bahner and Roger Ayles have been friends for a
very long time. They talked frequently. When Ales took over
Fox News, he and Bayner had long dinner conversations about
Ales's vision for the network. These two were really, in
some ways peas in a pod. These guys were buddies.

Speaker 1 (26:39):
Bayner planned to tell Ales that he had decided to
go ahead and form the Select Committee. So many on
Fox News had been demanding. What Bayner wanted in exchange
was for Ales to get Fox News off his back,
not just about Bengazi, but about everything. Bayner wanted the
crazies his word, to tone down their criticism of the

(27:00):
Republican Party, and he wanted Fox News to stop giving
them a platform.

Speaker 24 (27:05):
Bayner says to Ales, he says, listen, Roger, I want
you to know that I'm the one given this thing
the green light, and i want you to know that
we'll be communicating with you and with your anchors and
with your hosts about this, and we're going to make
sure that Fox News has a front row seat for
everything that's happening with this committee. But Roger, I'm telling

(27:27):
you this because I need you to call off the hounds.
I need you to give me a break here. I
need you to treat this as something of a peace offering.

Speaker 1 (27:37):
Essentially, Bayner was offering to trade Ales more Benghazi content
for a friendlier Fox News. Bayner had long understood Ales
to be obsessed with ratings, but he viewed him ultimately
as a reasonable man. Ales gave Bayner no indication that
he was willing to tone anything down.

Speaker 24 (27:56):
Ales here's the word ben Ghazi and basically spirals out
into a little dark world of his own, in which
he begins to talk about, as Bayner said, black helicopters
flying all around his head. He talks about how the
Obama administration is spying on him and how he has

(28:17):
to create a safe room in his house to make
sure he's not being monitored, and how his property has
armed guards to protect against potential assassins coming to take
him out. Bayner walks out of that meeting thinking, if
the head of Fox News is this conspiratorial, and this lost,
and this deep down some of these crazy wormholes believing

(28:42):
this stuff, then how does that bode for this country
and for the conservative movement and for the Republican viewers,
millions of them around the country who are essentially addicted
to watching his network every single night.

Speaker 15 (29:07):
At this time, I would yield to the jail woman,
the Speaker of the House, the gentleman, mister Bayner from Ohio.

Speaker 18 (29:15):
I believe the whole House and the American people deserve
to know how I came to the decision that brings
us here today.

Speaker 1 (29:22):
Baynor announced the formation of the Select Committee on May two,
twenty fourteen, not long after his meeting with Ales. He
billed it as the definitive Bengazi investigation, the one that
would settle the case once and for all.

Speaker 23 (29:35):
This doesn't need to be, shouldn't be, and will not
be a partisan process, and we will not allow any
side shows that distract us from those goals.

Speaker 1 (29:48):
Bayner's pick to chair the new committee was Trey Goudy,
a Tea Party favorite from South Carolina.

Speaker 10 (29:54):
Congressman Trey Goudi now leading the charge with it.

Speaker 1 (29:57):
It was as clear a sign as any that Bayner
was thinking of the Select Committee as a way to
appease the Republican Party's most extreme members.

Speaker 28 (30:05):
Goudy, with that wonderful Southern accent, leading that committee hearing.

Speaker 2 (30:09):
So, I think I am not surprised at the President
of the United States call this a phony scan. I'm
not surprised, as Secretary Clinton ask, what difference does it make?

Speaker 1 (30:18):
I'm Goudy had the track record of a hardline conservative.
During Obama's first term, the congressman had advocated for getting
rid of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. He had also
been a particularly vocal critic of the administration's handling of
the Bengazi attack.

Speaker 2 (30:34):
No one has been arrested, no one has been prosecuted,
no one has been brought to justice. We don't even
have access to the witnesses.

Speaker 1 (30:46):
At the same time, Goudy was seen as a sort
of thinking man's Tea partier, someone who could throw punches,
but wasn't reckless about it. True to that image, Goudy
vowed to the Select Committee and Benghazi would be fair
and apolitical, a fact finding mission that had nothing to
do with attacking Hillary Clinton and everything to do with
answering the unanswered questions.

Speaker 2 (31:07):
Can you tell me why Chris Stevens was in the Gazi?
Do you know why we were the last flag flying
in Benghazi after the British had left and the Red
Cross had been blonged? Do you know why requests for
additional security were denied?

Speaker 1 (31:21):
Do you know why this messaging was consistent with Speaker
Bayner's desire to keep up appearances.

Speaker 2 (31:26):
I have no friends to reward and no foes to punish.
We're going to go wherever the facts take us. Facts
are neither.

Speaker 24 (31:32):
Rule, and so Trey Goudi was sort of that rare
specimen in the eyes of Bayner, who was going to
make the Tea Party guys happy, but who also could
be expected to run a professional investigation that was not
going to bring any sort of embarrassment to the institution.

Speaker 1 (31:51):
Democrats were unconvinced by Goudy and Bayner's promises. Remember this
was the spring of twenty fourteen, and Hillary Clinton was
widely expected to run for president in twenty sixteen. No
matter how a political Goudy and Bayner wanted it to look,
the Select Committee would inevitably be an early battleground in
the upcoming election, and initially the Democrats considered boycotting it

(32:14):
so as to avoid giving it the appearance of legitimacy
at House.

Speaker 5 (32:17):
Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi calls it a political stunt and
are still considering whether her party will participate.

Speaker 1 (32:25):
Ultimately, the Democrats decided they couldn't trust Goudy and Bayner
to run a fair hearing on their own, and so
they sat five members of their party, including Elijah Cummings,
alongside the seven Republicans. Bayner had selected.

Speaker 29 (32:38):
Elijah Cummings a seasoned vet when it comes to all
things Benghazi, having suffered through Daryl IS's House Oversight Committee
on the very same subject he will be.

Speaker 1 (32:47):
Doing at that point. Suzanne Grooms, the Democratic staffer you
heard from earlier, transitioned along with her team from the
Oversight Committee to the new Select Committee. Here's Grooms again.

Speaker 17 (32:57):
We saw our.

Speaker 8 (32:58):
Role as to fact check and ensure that the most
accurate information about what happened in the Benghazi attacks was
going to be made public, and that any conspiracy theories
be done away with.

Speaker 1 (33:12):
To that end, the first thing Grooms and her team
did was make a website, a.

Speaker 29 (33:16):
Website intended to preemptively push back on the expected avalanche
of Republican rumors and conspiracy mongering joining me.

Speaker 1 (33:24):
He was titled Benghazi on the Record, Asked and Answered,
and its purpose was to address more than a dozen
frequently asked questions about Benghazi, including why was security in
Benghazi inadequate despite repeated requests? And did Secretary of State
Quinton order the military to stand down? The website was

(33:45):
based on a very earnest premise that if the Democrats
could just get all the relevant information in one place,
anyone who was intrigued by the conspiracy theories they were
hearing about on Fox News could just consult the record
and set themselves straight. According to Suzanne Grooms, the Democrats
even thought there was a chance that, upon seeing the website,

(34:05):
Trey Goudi himself would be compelled to narrow the scope
of the committee's investigation.

Speaker 8 (34:10):
Our hope was at the beginning that if there was
some chance for bipartisanship, Trey Goudi would sort of look
at some of these conspiracy theories that had been debunked
already and make a powerful statement pointing to these factual
pieces of evidence that were already in existence, and we
could take those off the table, and maybe we could

(34:32):
stop the right wing media from kind of constantly repeating
them by having an authoritative source say that they were
not true. Maybe that was overly hopeful.

Speaker 1 (34:46):
Now, normally, this is where I'd tell you that the
Republicans were taking a much more relentless tack than the Democrats,
that they were focusing less on humbly educating the public
and more unscoring direct hits against their opponents. But that's
not really what happened after the Select Committee was formed. Instead,
Trey Goudi's investigation got off to a conspicuously slow start.

Speaker 30 (35:10):
Democrats explicitly said that they didn't know where this committee
was going.

Speaker 6 (35:14):
They said that it was rudderless. Essentially, they had.

Speaker 31 (35:16):
No organizational meetings, that they had no long term timeline.

Speaker 6 (35:20):
They did not know.

Speaker 1 (35:21):
During the first year of the committee's existence, Goudy presided
over just three days of public hearings, and none of
them offered much in the way of fireworks.

Speaker 5 (35:31):
Where is the outrage from Republicans.

Speaker 11 (35:33):
I heard Brettber's reporting today earlier.

Speaker 22 (35:35):
And he was laying it out, It's going to be
kind of like a slow role.

Speaker 5 (35:38):
When is the role part of the slow coming.

Speaker 1 (35:40):
To Brad Pudliska, who joined the Republican staff of the
SECT Committee as an investigator in September of twenty fourteen,
it looked like his new colleagues weren't doing much of
anything at all.

Speaker 3 (35:51):
It was well known that staffers were surfing the web,
staffers were drinking in the office. It was just very,
very slow.

Speaker 1 (35:59):
Pudliska says he was disappointed. He was a military intelligence analyst,
and he says he really wanted to conduct a meaningful investigation,
and so he buried his nose and State depart documents,
including a bunch of Hillary Quinton's emails that had previously
been obtained by the oversight committee.

Speaker 3 (36:16):
Basically, there was like no day to day oversight. He
would show up at nine o'clock in the morning, go
down to the document room and look through documents, although
he long with no director from above, nothing to look
for in particular. It was just start to look through
the documents to see if you find anything interesting, and
then at the end of the day you would simply
clock out and go home.

Speaker 6 (36:36):
You just pull out a random one from a boxer.

Speaker 3 (36:38):
Like basically, and it was just start shuffling through documents.
If you found anything good, you would simply highlight it,
set it aside with marking, and then move on to
the next one.

Speaker 1 (36:49):
I should mention here that Brad Pugliska went on to
sue Trey Goudi and the Select Committee for wrongful termination,
so he's not exactly an unbiased source, but he says
the lack of urgency around the investigation was an open
joke at the office, especially after Elijah Cummings, the lead
Democrat on the committee, criticized Goudy for the glacial pace
of the committe.

Speaker 30 (37:10):
He says quoted every turn, the Select Committee comes up
with new excuses to further delay its work and then
blames the glacial pace on someone else.

Speaker 1 (37:20):
Cummings was suggesting that the Republicans were slow walking the
investigation on purpose so that they could extend it further
into the twenty sixteen race, when each little morsel of
information could do more damage to Hillary Clinton.

Speaker 3 (37:33):
He suspected that we were trying to draw this investigation
into the election year, and you know, we took that
in jest. Soon a staff member had designed and produced
a lapel pen that said glacial pace on it. Another
staff member designed and produced wineglasses that said glacial pace
on it, and this became a running joke within the office.

Speaker 1 (37:53):
Trey Goudi said, the problem was that the Obama administration
wasn't responding quickly enough to document requests and subpoenas.

Speaker 2 (37:59):
It would be shame on us if we intentionally drag
this out for political expediency. On the other hand, if
an administration is slow walking document production, I can't end
a trial because the defense won't cooperate.

Speaker 1 (38:12):
Regardless, not much was happening, and that was the state
of play on the committee until early twenty fifteen. Meanwhile,
over at the Department of Justice, Prosecutor Juliannehimmelstein and FBI
agent Mike Clark were making progress.

Speaker 19 (38:28):
Sunday night, on.

Speaker 32 (38:30):
Orders from the Commander in Chief, the United States Military
conducted in Operation to Capture Ahmed Abu.

Speaker 1 (38:36):
Kaitala on June fifteenth, twenty fourteen, almost two years after
the attack, the FBI in a team of special forces
arrested Ahmed Abu Katala in Benghazi. They then transported him
by ship to the US to stand trial.

Speaker 32 (38:52):
Katala has been charged for his role in the attacks
on US facilities in Benghazi, Libya, on September eleventh, twenty twelve.

Speaker 1 (39:01):
It was the climax of a process that, unlike the
political drama on Capitol Hill, had unfolded almost entirely out
of sight, with FBI eight working with confidential informants in
Libya to build the case against Abu Katala before taking
him into custody.

Speaker 25 (39:16):
Katala was lured to a location south of Benghazi.

Speaker 21 (39:19):
Intelligence gleaned from local Libyans helped draw Katala to the location.

Speaker 1 (39:25):
Among the informants was a man whom the FBI paid
seven million dollars as a reward for infiltrating Abu Katawa's
inner circle, once again, Mike Clark.

Speaker 17 (39:35):
He basically went in and befriended Abu Katala and developed
enough information to allow us to develop a pattern of
life and then get him legally captured and then transported
back to the United States, fore he faced justice in Washington,
d C.

Speaker 11 (39:54):
There's also the question of how they plan to prosecute him.

Speaker 5 (39:57):
The Obama administration says Abu Katala will be tried in
civilian court.

Speaker 1 (40:01):
The fact that the Obama administration wanted Abu Katala to
stand trial as a civilian rather than sending him to
Guantanamo Bay and prosecuting him as an enemy combatant was
instantly controversial among conservatives.

Speaker 29 (40:14):
Send him to GITMA. That is the course of action
recommended by one Republican senator after another, Rubio Cruz.

Speaker 1 (40:20):
Even John McCain on Fox News. The administration also took
criticism for not capturing Abu Katala sooner.

Speaker 12 (40:28):
It certainly doesn't look like it was a top priority.
Let's face it, six hundred and forty two days. It
took us that long. But again, I don't know the details.
I can't make that accusation. What I can tell you
what is not a priority. This administration is holding members
of his administration accountable for.

Speaker 1 (40:42):
Their day election to do both. Himmelstein and Clark told
me they were able to mostly tune this stuff out
along with the rest of the public dialogue around Benghazi.

Speaker 4 (40:51):
We were protected, the investigation team was protected from so
much of the noise that was happening all around us,
and we never thought about any of the silliness. I
don't know if I should use that word, but it's
the only word that came to mind.

Speaker 6 (41:08):
People have used ruder words NaNs.

Speaker 1 (41:10):
Yeah, we'll be right back. Despite the capture of Abu Katala,
it's fair to say that the Benghazi story was stuck
in neutral. Then, on March second, twenty fifteen, The New

(41:34):
York Times published an article about Hillary Clinton's personal email account.
According to the article, the account had come to light
after the Select Committee on Benghazi sought correspondence between Missus
Clinton and her aides about the attack.

Speaker 6 (41:48):
Hillary Clinton has some explaining to do.

Speaker 5 (41:50):
A New York Times story this morning about when she
was Secretary of State, she never had a government account,
she exclusively communicated using a personal email account.

Speaker 1 (41:58):
And the story, written by reporter Michael Schmidt, said that
while serving as Secretary of State, Clinton had declined to
use a government email address and instead had relied exclusively
on a personal one HDR twenty two at clinton email
dot com. Schmidt noted that federal law required government officials
to preserve all their correspondents on government servers, and that

(42:22):
Clinton's staff had handpicked which emails to hand over to
the State Department. Schmid's reporting was immediately picked up by
the news networks and amplified far and wide.

Speaker 23 (42:31):
Our lead story, email.

Speaker 17 (42:33):
Gate, Hillary Clinton email mess This story is something for everyone.

Speaker 7 (42:37):
How Hillary Clinton's use of a personal email address while
Secretary of State shielded her and the department from a
probe of her public records.

Speaker 1 (42:47):
Brad Pudliska told me he was caught off guard when
the Time story broke. As an investigator on the Republican
staff of the SEUECT Committee, he had seen some of
Clinton's emails, and it hadn't even occurred to him that
her use of a personal account might be seen as problematic.

Speaker 3 (43:02):
We always knew that Secretary Clinton used private emails in
her capacity a Secretary of State, and it was just like, okay, well,
everybody to use this private email if necessary, not a
big deal. We simply want access to those to those emails.

Speaker 1 (43:16):
You had come across emails from her that had the
email address.

Speaker 3 (43:19):
Yeah, certainly we knew her private email address, and like
I said, we didn't think anything of it.

Speaker 1 (43:26):
Pudliska was perplexed. Not only was everyone suddenly talking about
Clinton's private email server as if it were a huge deal,
but the original Time story by Michael Schmidt credited the
Select Committee with discovering it. It was hard to tell
from the story how Schmidt was defining discovered, because it's
not like the committee had officially made an issue out

(43:47):
of Clinton's email use. The Times did that after an
anonymous source told Michael Schmidt about it. Much like Podliska,
Schmidt didn't think much of it at first, figuring Clinton
probably used her official address for some things but not others.
It was only months later, when he asked some other
sources about it, that Schmidt realized he had stumbled onto

(44:07):
a major story. Here, Schmidt an interview on Fresh Air.

Speaker 30 (44:11):
I knew that the committee had these personal email messages,
but it wasn't until the end of the reporting, right
before I was about to publish that I learned that
she did not have a State Department email account, and
she was using this personal account to do government work.
So that was a pretty significant fact because it showed

(44:31):
that her email system had operated very differently than any
other government official.

Speaker 1 (44:38):
Practically, overnight, the Clinton email story injected new vigor into
John Bayner and Trey Goudi's Select Committee on Benghazi.

Speaker 30 (44:47):
I thought that maybe the story had a month long
shelf life at the time, meaning that it would have
been over by April of twenty fifteen.

Speaker 1 (44:58):
From that point forward, Clinton's use of the private email
server became the focus of the investigation, while the events
surrounding the Benghazi attack took an unmistakable backseat. Spugliska put
it to me, the Republicans on the committee could smell
blood in the water.

Speaker 3 (45:15):
It was no longer a sleepy investigation. This was now
front and center in terms of the political world. And
this became, you know, very much hyper focused on Hillary Clinton.

Speaker 6 (45:24):
Why why do you think the email story took off?

Speaker 3 (45:25):
Oh, it feeds into that Clinton narrative of their their
hiding things. So you know, going back to Bill Clinton
with the Lewinsky scandal and Whitewater and all that, it's
the Clintons are hiding things. And so this becomes a
self looking ice cream cone. If you're the Clintons and
you you know, no matter what you say or do you,
someone you know sees that the wrong way. And you're
an investigation, So what do you do? Okay, you isolate

(45:47):
yourself more and you make really really dumb decisions that
as setting up a email server in your basement of
your house, and then this is discovered. Okay, now this
is you know, leading to more investigations, and so you know,
it became a self looking ice cream cone. In terms
of political scandals.

Speaker 1 (46:01):
The self liaking ice cream cone is a great image,
but as a metaphor, it kind of falls apart when
you imagine the ice cream gradually melting away or being eaten.
Because the Clinton email scandal, like Benghazi before, it never
did melt away. It just got bigger, especially after Hillary
Clinton formally declared that she was going to be running

(46:22):
for president.

Speaker 11 (46:23):
Hillary Clinton making it official with a two minute, nineteen
second video launching her second White House campaign.

Speaker 21 (46:29):
Everyday Americans need a champion, and I want to be
that champion.

Speaker 1 (46:33):
So you can do more than just get by.

Speaker 21 (46:35):
You can get ahead and stay ahead.

Speaker 1 (46:38):
For the next six months, John Bayner and Trey Goudi
made the most of the new Clinton scandal that had
fallen into their laps. The subpoenas and the press releases flew.

Speaker 5 (46:48):
Hillary Clinton using not only private email, but her own
private server, and that's causing all kinds of questions and
new actions.

Speaker 28 (46:56):
Today, a House committee investigating the Bengazi terror attack subpoenaed
private emails from Clinton's time as Secretary of State.

Speaker 1 (47:04):
The committee sat down with witnesses, including Clinton's longtime confidant
and email correspondent, Sydney Blumenthal.

Speaker 10 (47:10):
He is a close friend to Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Apparently mister Bloomenthal had private business interests in Libya at
the same time he was emailing missus Clinton about policy there.

Speaker 33 (47:21):
We want to talk to all the folks who were
providing information to decision makers, and mister Bloomenthal's part of that.

Speaker 1 (47:28):
Every little push and pull between the Select Committee and
its target became news, and the decisions Hillary Clinton and
her staff had made about her emails started to look
more and more suspicious.

Speaker 15 (47:39):
Will this not be a psychic overhang for her? That
people were reminded of? Man, all of that stuff from
the nineteen nineties, all the Clinton wars, right that was
just that was a There was impeachment and all of that.
If this stretches out in Republicans with Benghazi and there's
more subpoenas and there's more of this, and there's more
of that, what is the psychic toll? That that takes

(48:00):
on the electorate in terms of her prospects. I can't
tell you, but it's not good if.

Speaker 1 (48:04):
The Select Committee was on some level a pr battle
the Republicans were now winning. In September of twenty fifteen,
a Gallup poll found that Clinton's favorability ratings were just
forty one percent, the lowest they'd been in more than
twenty years. Later that month, one elected official went on
television and couldn't stop himself from gloating about it.

Speaker 14 (48:26):
Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right, but we put
together a Benghazi Special Committee. What are her numbers today?
Her numbers are dropping?

Speaker 23 (48:36):
Why?

Speaker 14 (48:37):
Because she's untrustable.

Speaker 1 (48:38):
Congressman Kevin McCarthy's comments were a perfect example of what
people in Washington like to call a Kinsley gaff, when
a politician tells the truth by accident. McCarthy had essentially
admitted that the point of the Select Committee had been
to hurt Hillary Clinton in the polls. Many of McCarthy's
fellow Republicans were enraged.

Speaker 12 (48:57):
As you see all the hammering he's getting today for
that statement he made on Fox last night.

Speaker 22 (49:02):
Well, I think rightfully, so that's an absolutely inappropriate statement,
it is not how this started. We wanted to get
to the truth of it.

Speaker 1 (49:10):
For months, Kevin McCarthy had been considered a likely replacement
for John Bayner as House Speaker. After his comment, his
chances were completely shot. It appeared that at least some
Republicans still shared Bayner's allergy to appearing shameless.

Speaker 6 (49:23):
I think I shocked some you.

Speaker 23 (49:25):
Huff Sligiam mccartman.

Speaker 12 (49:27):
How much did your comments about Bank Dazzi last week's
we playing into decision.

Speaker 14 (49:32):
A step aside to day, Well, that wasn't helpful.

Speaker 6 (49:37):
Yeah, I mean.

Speaker 1 (49:38):
Brad Pudliska by this point was no longer on the
Select Committee staff. He had been fired back in June
for reasons he thought were related to his lack of
enthusiasm for going after Clinton over her emails. Now Pudliska
was going public with his long simmering discontent about how
the Select Committee was being run.

Speaker 31 (49:57):
But Liska says in March the investigation took a turn
after The New York Times broke the story of Hillary
Clinton using a personal email server for State Department business.
After that happened, the investigation's broader focus narrow, he says.

Speaker 3 (50:10):
And I was told that things were now changed. There
was this great hubris with the committee after that March
second New York Times article of we're kind of on
the side of good to go after Clinton because of
this email server. And honestly, like to me, you know,
congressional investigations are partisan in nature. Their sole purpose, arguably

(50:34):
is to damage your opponent, and so I didn't see
McCarthy's comment as controversial as it turned out to be,
but it certainly was damaging to the committee.

Speaker 1 (50:44):
The timing for the Republicans couldn't have been worse. On
the heels of the Kevin McCarthy incident and Pudliska's emergence
as a quasi whistleblower, the country's attention was about to
turn to Hillary Clinton, who, finally, after more than a year,
would be sitting down before the Select Committee for questioning.
It would be her second time appearing before Congress and
addressing Benghazi, but it would be her first as a

(51:07):
presidential candidate.

Speaker 6 (51:09):
Well.

Speaker 28 (51:09):
This morning, Hillary Clinton testifies before the House Committee investigating
the attacks on the US diplomatic mission in Bengazi, Libya.

Speaker 1 (51:17):
The plan was for each member of the committee to
ask questions for ten minutes before handing it off to
the next person in line. After all twelve members got
a chance to ask their questions, they would then go
around again for a second time, and then again for
a third Democratic staffer Suzanne Grooms again.

Speaker 8 (51:36):
Chairman Goudi had told us that he was going to
have three rounds, and three rounds in a Congressional hearing
is not ever done because it takes forever.

Speaker 1 (51:46):
The Democrats suspected that taking forever was exactly the.

Speaker 8 (51:49):
Point, because we knew that it was going to be
such an incredibly long day. One of the larger sort
of thought processes around the hearing was whether Clinton would
just have the stamina to get through it.

Speaker 1 (52:03):
Everyone remembered that last time Clinton appeared before Congress as
part of a Bengazi investigation, she had lost her cool
and uttered a SoundBite that had been used against her
ever since.

Speaker 7 (52:13):
The former Secretary of State will try to avoid an
outverst like this one before a Senate panel in twenty thirteen.

Speaker 21 (52:20):
What difference at this point does it make?

Speaker 8 (52:23):
Certainly, the concern was that if the goal was just
make it last all day long and see if she
has a bad moment in that time period, there wasn't
really anything in that space that the Democrats could do
about that other than spend some of our time kind
of calling out Republicans on their abuses, and so we
obviously did that.

Speaker 1 (52:45):
It felt like the whole Benghazi scandal had been leading
up to this final high stakes confrontation between the former
Secretary of State and the Republicans who had been pressing
the case against her for more than two years.

Speaker 2 (53:08):
Morning, Committee will come to order the share notes the
presidence of a quorum. Good morning, Welcome, Madam Secretary. Welcome
to each of you. This is a public hearing of
the Bengazi Select Committee.

Speaker 8 (53:20):
It was crowded. There were a lot of members who
came to sit behind Clinton. They actually printed out tickets
to the hearing, little paper tickets, which I thought looked
just like a terrible thing. It was like tickets to
the circus. Everybody was there who could get a ticket
to get in.

Speaker 1 (53:36):
Clinton answered questions for a total of eleven hours, with
both Democratic and Republican members trying to create big, memorable
moments for the next day's news cycle. For Democrats, the
goal was to show just how thoroughly the Bengazi attack
had already been litigated, and how little evidence there was
that Clinton had done anything wrong, either in the run

(53:57):
up or the aftermath.

Speaker 34 (53:59):
I know the ambassador was a friend of yours, and
I wonder if you would like to comment on what
it's like to be the subject of conallegation that you deliver
interfered with security that cost.

Speaker 17 (54:11):
The life of a friend.

Speaker 21 (54:13):
Well, Congressman, it's a very personally painful accusation.

Speaker 8 (54:19):
You know.

Speaker 21 (54:19):
I've would imagine I've thought more about what happened than
all of you put together. I've lost more sleep than
all of you put together. I have been racking my
brain about what more could have been done or should
have been done, And.

Speaker 1 (54:35):
So Republicans used their time to cast Clinton as an
absentee leader at best and a liar at worst. At
one point, she was asked to recount in detail what
she was doing on the night of the attack.

Speaker 8 (54:47):
Okay, and who else was at your home?

Speaker 24 (54:49):
Were you alone?

Speaker 21 (54:50):
I was alone?

Speaker 4 (54:51):
Yes, the whole night.

Speaker 21 (54:53):
Well, yes, the whole night.

Speaker 23 (54:57):
Well. I don't know why that's funny.

Speaker 6 (54:58):
I mean, did you have any in person briefing? Since
I don't find it funny at all.

Speaker 24 (55:04):
I'm sorry.

Speaker 21 (55:04):
A little note of levity at seven fifteen.

Speaker 9 (55:07):
Well, I mean the reason I say it's not funny
is because through.

Speaker 1 (55:10):
It all, Clinton kept her cool, answering every question patiently,
while also making it clear that she viewed at least
some of the people attacking her as political opportunists. Why
didn't you just speak plain to the American people?

Speaker 21 (55:22):
I did, and I said it again in more detail
the next morning, as did the President. I'm sorry that
it doesn't fit your narrative, Congressman, I can only tell
you what the facts were, and the facts as the
dem juz am grooms again, our goal was.

Speaker 8 (55:38):
To have the top takeaways be that there was essentially
nothing new found out about Clinton's role in the Bengazi attacks,
and that there were Republican abuses in the Select Committee,
and that the committee was not legitimate. And I think
if you look back at the press from that day,

(55:59):
I think those were the takeaways.

Speaker 3 (56:00):
There was nothing big, There was no major bombshell, and
for Hillary Clinton, that's a great thing.

Speaker 1 (56:05):
Clinton did receive very positive reviews for her performance from
some conservatives, who felt the Republicans had blown an opportunity
to take Clinton down.

Speaker 33 (56:15):
I just got up the phone a few moments ago
with the Republican operative, and this person said there was
a total wipeout for the Republicans on the committee. Now,
maybe he's exaggerating, but she did look presidential. She did
look in command today.

Speaker 1 (56:27):
Just like she did it in the weeks that followed.
Clinton's poll numbers in the Democratic primary started going up,
and even as Republicans continued beating the Benghazi drum as
much as they could, the narrative around her testimony was
that she had defeated the final boss. Eight months later,
when the Republicans on the Select Committee published their majority report,

(56:49):
what stood out was how stale most of it felt,
and how little there was to personally tie Clinton to
any of the decisions that made the Bengazi attack so deadly.

Speaker 26 (56:58):
Along with waited House Republican report on ben Ghazi found
no new evidence of wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton or anyone else,
but the report blasted the Obama administration for failures and
intelligence coordination and security.

Speaker 9 (57:11):
And with the report paints is a narrative of the
Bengazi outpost as a bureaucratic and diplomatic no man's land,
which made it unnecessarily hard to get funding and security.

Speaker 4 (57:22):
I don't see evidence of anything further than what we
already knew, and so there's no smoking gun at all
about Hillary Clinton.

Speaker 6 (57:32):
And in fact, what we knew.

Speaker 8 (57:34):
It was clear that the report just did not have
the kind of smoking gun evidence that Hillary Clinton had
blood on her hands that a number of Republican folks
had wanted. That's just simply because those facts didn't exist,
and Trey Goudy couldn't come up with them because they
weren't there.

Speaker 1 (57:55):
All of a sudden, Trey Goudy was coming in for
criticism from his party's most conservative members, the same ones
who had push John Bayner to launch the new investigation
back in twenty fourteen.

Speaker 16 (58:06):
Trey Goudi should be impeached for wasting my time.

Speaker 23 (58:10):
He promised us a lot.

Speaker 30 (58:11):
Remember Trey Goudi, Trey Goudi, the Great Tea Party, Trey Goudy,
Everyone loved him.

Speaker 1 (58:16):
At an event at the National Press Club, a member
of the far right Citizens Commission on Benghazi asked if
maybe the GOP leadership had tampered with the evidence in
order to benefit Clinton.

Speaker 4 (58:27):
Has someone in the GOP leadership gotten their fingers involved
in watering down some of this against Secretary.

Speaker 1 (58:36):
Clinton and Republican voters around the country had wanted Goudy
to produce new evidence of Clinton's wrongdoing, something anything about
her giving a stand down order or leaving Chris Stevens
for dead out of political expediency. Among the disappointed was
Donald Trump, who by this point was well on his
way to securing the Republican nomination, and who had referred

(58:58):
to Trey Goudy on Twitter as a Bengazi loser.

Speaker 33 (59:01):
So Trump now says Goudy is a loser for failing
to nail Hillary Clinton on Ben Gazzi.

Speaker 1 (59:07):
The following month, at the Republican National Convention, the Trump
campaign invited the mother of Sean Smith to deliver a
primetime speech for.

Speaker 19 (59:16):
All of this loss, for all of this grief the
tragedy in vain Ghazi has brought upon America. I blame
Hillary Clinton personally for the death of my son personally.

Speaker 1 (59:32):
By then, the issue of Clinton's email server had become
a reliable set piece at Trump's campaign rallies. Exhibit a
of Quinton's corrupt and untrustworthy nature.

Speaker 16 (59:42):
In other words, Hillary's secret email server existed for the
reason we all know, to keep her emails from ever
being read by the public rigged system, folks, remember I
used to saying I'm the one that brought.

Speaker 23 (59:55):
That word up.

Speaker 1 (01:00:05):
In November of twenty seventeen, five years after the attack
in Benghazi, Ahmed Abu Katala was found guilty on terrorism charges.
He was eventually sentenced twenty two years in prison by
a US District Court judge.

Speaker 3 (01:00:19):
The jury convicted him of material support for terrorism, conspiracy,
malicious destruction of property, and also got him on a
weapons offense.

Speaker 1 (01:00:28):
According to prosecutor Julianne Himmelstein, only one of the Republican
Congressmen from the Select Committee made a point of attending
Abu Katala's trial.

Speaker 6 (01:00:37):
What did it tell you that everybody else didn't show up.

Speaker 4 (01:00:41):
I really can't say why they didn't. You know, we
just cared so much about the case. You know, we've
spent six years traveling all over the world trying to
find out desperately who did this, Who attacked our facilities,
who attacked our mission. That's all we thought about. Really,
I'm not making a judgment. I'm just saying that they

(01:01:04):
didn't show up.

Speaker 1 (01:01:15):
When I first started learning about Ambassador Chris Stevens and
what he represented in the world of American foreign policy.
What really stopped me cold was how unlikely a martyr
he was for the conservative movement. Throughout his career, Stevens
had revealed himself to be distinctly unconservative in terms of
how he thought about the Arab world, how he conceived

(01:01:37):
of his role as a diplomat, and what he believed
America's posture should be towards political Islam. This was a
guy who once expressed hope that the US government would
give Hamas a chance. He also opposed the Iraq War
so strenuously that he refused to be posted there afterwards
out of principle, even though at the time it was
widely seen as the best way to advance your career

(01:01:59):
in the State department. Stephens was also a risk taker.
Starting in the nineteen eighties, a string of deadly terrorist
attacks in Lebanon had caused American embassies all over the
world to become more like militarized fortresses, where diplomats were
expected to hole up in safety instead of going out
and really getting to know their host countries. Stevens didn't

(01:02:20):
want to be that kind of diplomat, and when he
was first posted in Benghazi during the Libyan revolution. He
went out running every morning, stopped to talk to people
in the street, and reveled in his freedom to meet
with locals in their homes.

Speaker 20 (01:02:34):
What Chris felt about security was making friends increases security,
and he wanted to be out there with the people
and communicating and being on the ground.

Speaker 1 (01:02:44):
This is Ann Stevens, Chris's sister, speaking to a Washington
Post reporter a few months after the attack.

Speaker 20 (01:02:51):
I think what really came out in his work is
how inclusive he was. And you know, at a personal level,
when we were deciding who to invite to your wedding,
you invite everybody. When you go out into the world,
who do you talk to? We talked to everybody. I
think that's a wonderful.

Speaker 17 (01:03:06):
Way to live.

Speaker 1 (01:03:09):
After her brother's death, Ann Stevens emerged as a spokesperson
for her family, and in a series of media appearances,
she made it clear that they didn't blame the State
Department or Hillary Clinton for what happened. He decided to
take the risk to go there, Stevens told The New Yorker,
it is not something they did to him. Pretty Much

(01:03:29):
every State Department person I've talked to for this podcast
told me Stevens knew that Benghazi was dangerous and decided
to go anyway. In other words, he wasn't naive about
the risks. From what I understand, he made the trip
to Benghazi because he thought it was that important for
the future of Libya that the United States have a
strong diplomatic presence there. The Benghazi attack helped put an

(01:03:53):
end to all of that. Afterwards, the internal divisions left
over from Gaddafi's overthrow grew sharper and more violent. As
one former diplomat told me in an email, despite all
the US's imperfections, we can be a force for good
and are often uniquely capable of preventing or ending conflict
around the globe. When Chris Stevens died, this person said,

(01:04:17):
we not only lost our ability to understand Benghazi and
therefore Libya, but Libya lost its best advocate in the
United States. The country became political kryptonite, so that no
US politician could see the point in risking anything to
help slow or stop its downward slide. In twenty fourteen,
the American mission, once led by Ambassador Stephens, was effectively

(01:04:41):
suspended due to security concerns.

Speaker 28 (01:04:43):
The United States has closed and evacuated its embassy in
Libya as the security situation deteriorates.

Speaker 1 (01:04:49):
In the capital of Tripoli, Benghazi became a war zone
as local militias faced off against an army led by
Khalifa Haftar, an ex member of the Gadathi regime who
had defected to the US and returned to Libya after
the revolution. Amid the fighting between Haftar and the militias,
large parts of Benghazi were reduced to.

Speaker 21 (01:05:09):
R To this day, people are dying because they just
want to.

Speaker 22 (01:05:14):
Return to their homes.

Speaker 1 (01:05:16):
For years now, the State Department has urged all Americans
to stay out of Libya, while other foreign powers like Russia,
the UAE, Turkey, and Egypt have flooded the country with
mercenaries and weapons.

Speaker 28 (01:05:29):
Classes between rival militias are growing more fierce and violent.
American travelers are also being advised to steer clear of Libya.

Speaker 1 (01:05:36):
It's always hard to definitively establish cause and effect, and
it would be too simple to say that America's diplomatic
withdrawal is the reason why Libya descended into a bloody
civil war, but it is clear that the fallout from
the Bengazi attack did not just transform American politics. It
also transformed Libya.

Speaker 14 (01:05:57):
They call it the Second Libyan Civil War, as warlord
Khalifa Haftar advances on the capital of Tripoli.

Speaker 1 (01:06:03):
Back in twenty twenty, when this season of Fiasco was
first released, I said that the prospect of building a
democracy in Libya was tenuous but real. At the time,
the Biden administration was exploring the possibility of reopening the
American embassy in Tripoli. A State Department spokesman was quoted
as saying that the US's intent was to begin to

(01:06:24):
resume operations in Libya as soon as the security situation permits.
Five years later, the embassy in Tripoli remains closed, while
in Washington, Benghazi remains a shorthand for scandal. The difference
is that scandal no longer feels like a distraction from politics.

(01:06:45):
It's now the raw material. That's it for this season
of Fiasco. You can check out our other seasons on
Bush v. Gore, the AIDS Epidemic, and Iran Contra. All
in this feed for a list of books are articles

(01:07:10):
and documentaries we used in our research. Follow the link
in our show notes. Fiasco is a production of prolog
projects and it's distributed by Pushkin Industries. The show is
produced by Andrew Parsons, Ulla Kulpa, Sam Lee and me
Leon Mayfock, with editorial support from Sam Graham Felsen and
Madeline Kaplan. Our researcher was Frances Carr. Our score was

(01:07:34):
composed by Dan English, Joe Valley and Noah Hecht. Additional
music by Nick Sylvester, Joel Saint, Julian Billy Libby and
Little Cheddar Studios. Our theme song is by Spatial Relations
Audio mixed by Rob Buyers, Michael Raphael and Johnny Vince Evans.
Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at Chips and Y

(01:07:55):
Copyright Council. Provided by Peter Yassi at Yass Butler PLLC.
Thanks to Archive dot Org, maraud Adrise, Nicole Hemmer, Ben Fishman,
Ethan Chorn, Frederick Warehey, David Kirkpatrick, Hannah Groach, beegwi Aya Burwela,
Stephen Fischer, Percia, Verlin, Ed Claris, Alexei Abadott, Matt Sachs,

(01:08:17):
Jamie Lyons, Mark Silverstein, Kyle Ranson, Walsh Langston, Dillard, Evan Bell,
Lisa de Leone and everyone at Luminary. I also want
to thank Alexandra Garriton, Sarah Bruguer, and everyone at Pushkin
who helped bring this season to life. Special Thanks to
Carrie Baker and Alice Gregory, and thank you for listening.