The GOP Grilled Hillary Clinton for 11 Hours and All We Got Was Some BS About Emails

If there was one moment that laid bare the absurd black hole that wasthe House Benghazi Committee's 11-hour interrogation of Hillary Clinton on Thursday, it came when Indiana Republican Susan Brooks reached under her chair and pulled out a map of North Africa. "Most of us," Brooks intoned, "don't know much about Libya."

Benghazi is a city in Libya, so you might think it reasonable that everyone involved with something called the Benghazi Committee should know a lot about Libya. But that's because you don't understand what the Benghazi Committee is about. I, on the other hand, spent 660 minutes watching GOP members of Congress interrogate the former Secretary of State, so I can say definitely what this whole affair is all about, and that thing is—

Well, actually, that's a tricky question. One thing these hearings are certainly not about is Benghazi, the Libyan city where four Americans, including US Ambassador Chris Stevens, died tragically in a terrorist attack on September 11, 2012. Since then, conservatives have generated a number of conspiracies about the events of that day. The main one is that the Obama administration, and Clinton specifically, ignored warnings about Libya, failed to call in support from the military once the attack started, and then covered up what they knew on Meet the Press with dishonest talking points.

But eight—eight—investigations have already answered the big questions about what happened in Benghazi. Those reports disproved the more feverish conservative conspiracies while also finding that what happened in Benghazi was a massive fuckup, a mess of bad intelligence, bad estimates, and bureaucratic bullshit that created a situation where a ragtag band of local militias could storm the US diplomatic outpost.

As Secretary of State during that period, Clinton certainly bears at least some responsibility for that fuckup. But the right wing of the Republican Party wants #BENGHAZI to be more than just a series of mistakes that ended in tragedy—they're looking for a smoking gun, a damning email that says "lol I don't care that Americans died," evidence that confirms all those rarely-made-explicit conservative suspicions that Barack Obama and the rest of the Democrats are actively working to destroy the country they are in charge of running. That motivation turned what could have been a discussion of a disastrous Libyan intervention into a partisan puppet show acted out for the benefit of Facebook trolls and regional talk-radio hosts. And if you watched any of the Hillary Clinton show trial on Thursday, you probably dismissed it as such.

But it didn't have to be that way. Lost among the chaff about who Clinton emailed back and how quickly were legitimate questions about what the Democratic frontrunner will do if she's elected as the next president.

Early on in the hearing, there was a moment when it looked like Republicans might actually take this road, and steer the argument toward policy as it relates to the world outside of #TCOT Twitter feeds. It came when Congressman Pete Roskam, a Republican from Illinois, asked Clinton about her role in the administration's decision to intervene militarily in Libya in early 2011. Pointing out that there were several members of the administration who were against getting involved in the country's civil war, Roskam cast Clinton as the key advisor who persuaded Obama that it was a good idea to lead an international coalition that ultimately overthrew Muammar Qaddafi.

Clinton looked visibly agitated. "I think it's fair to say there were concerns and there were varying opinions about what to do, how to do it, and the like," she said. "At the end of the day, this was the president's decision."

But the response rang hollow. Clinton did play a key role in the administration's campaign in Libya—she was one of Maureen Dowd's "Amazon warriors," and her advisors have been touting the accomplishment ever since. Just last week, at the Democratic primary debate, Clinton herself was talking up the Libya campaign as a legacy-making accomplishment of her tenure as Secretary of State.

And Roskam wasn't having it. "Our Libya policy be couldn't have happened without you because you were its chief architect," he insisted. "After your plan, things in Libya today are a disaster."

"That's not a view that I will ascribe to," Clinton replied.

The moment went largely unnoticed in the endless hours of questioning that followed, but Roskam's point was salient. While the US intervention may have averted the mass killings that Qaddafi had promised to wreak on his opponents, his death left a vacuum that the Obama administration had no plan—or political will—to fill. The country is now a failed state, a breeding ground for terrorists and human traffickers, ruled by dueling parliaments and devastated by a civil war that has killed thousands of people.

The situation bears a remarkable resemblance to the aftermath of the Iraq war, a war that Clinton voted for and now says that she regrets. What was the difference? Did the administration foresee any of the chaos that ensued after Qaddafi was gone? Did they have a plan? Or did they, as Roskam later theorized, simply declare success and then lose interest in Libya, even as the security situation there deteriorated?

There is evidence that Trey Gowdy, the Draco Malfoy impersonator who has taken over as the chief inquisitor of the GOP's clown court, tried to pursue this line of questioning. Gowdy, who spent most of Thursday defending his committee's existence, told Politico recently that he wanted to expand the investigation's scope to look beyond whether the attack in Benghazi could have been prevented, and consider whether the US should have been there in the first place. According to Gowdy, the Obama administration has so far resisted this line of inquiry, demanding that the committee's jurisdiction be limited only to the days immediately before and after the attack.

Maybe it's the executive branch stopping the GOP from fully examining the Libyan intervention. Or maybe the problem is that this isn't a good time for dovish talk about the problems with an aggressive foreign policy. Clinton supports a no-fly zone in Syria, but so do the majority of Republican presidential candidates, making further military action in the Middle East all but inevitable. I can't wait for the Syria Committee hearings of 2020.

Follow Grace Wyler on Twitter.