Live Streaming Hillary’s Benghazi Select Committee Hearing (Scheduled Start 10:00 AM ET)

Excerpts from Stephen Hayes’ piece at Weekly Standard:

Hillary Clinton will hide behind the State Department’s Accountability Review Board report.

The ARB never interviewed Secretary Clinton. It never sought to obtain her emails and never learned that she had set up a private server. The ARB chose not to interview State Department officials who were likely to offer testimony that contradicted the Obama administration’s preferred narrative, including Mark Thompson, the senior counterterrorism official at the State Department on duty the night of the attacks, who repeatedly offered to testify but was never contacted by the ARB investigators.  

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Among the issues that have dominated the attention of investigators is the matter of security before the attack. In previous congressional testimony, Clinton has volunteered that she was ultimately responsible for what happens at the State Department under her watch. 

But Libya was different. US facilities there were increasingly under threat and those responsible for securing them—and those who worked in them—were sounding alarms about inadequate security. A long trail of documents make clear that Clinton was intimately involved virtually every aspect of Libya policymaking and was receiving detailed reports from both formal State Department channels and from outside advisers (Sidney Blumenthal and others). 

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And, second, she will be asked why she had time to read, share and respond to a regular stream of emails from Blumenthal, who was barred by the Obama administration from working at the State Department, but did not have time to read urgent reports from State Department officials responsible for addressing the deteriorating security situation in Libya.

In that email, which Blumenthal sent Clinton in preparation for a meeting she was to have about the Libyan opposition; Blumenthal described at length the qualifications of an American security firm seeking contracts in Libya. 

According to Blumenthal, the firm, Osprey Global Solutions, had unique experience in chaotic wartime security environments. The training and assistance they could provide the Libyan opposition could break the stalemate between the rebels and the Qaddafi government. The opposition, Blumenthal wrote, had finally recognized that Qaddafi would not fall on his own and that they needed American assistance to force him out. Blumenthal argued that Osprey was the firm to provide that assistance and noted that he and two associates had secured an agreement between Osprey and the Libyan opposition.