Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pushed back at Rep. Susan Brooks’ (R-IN) questions about the seeming dearth of emails in the months leading up to the 2012 Benghazi attack by saying she did not conduct most of her business by email.
At the House Benghazi Committee hearing Thursday, Brooks presented Clinton with stacks of email from 2011 and 2012, with the 2011 stack being noticeably larger. The implication from Brooks was that Libya had fallen off Clinton’s radar by the time of the Sept. 11, 2012 attack in Benghazi that killed four Americans.
“Well, congresswoman, I did not conduct most of the business that I did on behalf of our country on email,” Clinton said. “I conducted it in meetings. I read massive amounts of memos, a great deal of classified information. I made a lot of secure phone calls. I was in and out of the White House all the time. There were a lot of things that happened that I was aware of and that I was reacting to. If you were to be in my office in the State Department, I didn’t have a computer. I did not do the vast majority of my work on email.”
Among other things, Brooks grilled Clinton on the “kind of culture was created in the State Department” that she hadn’t received an email about a bomb at the U.S. Libyan compound in April 2012.
“I don’t want you to have a mistaken impression out what I did and how I did it,” she said, speaking generally. “Most of my work was not done on emails with my closest aides, with officials in the State Department, officials in the rest of the government, as well as the White House and people around the world.”
