The Select House Committee on Benghazi questioned Democratic presidential candidate and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for more than eight hours on Thursday.The much anticipated hearing did very little to shed any new light on the situation in Benghazi. Many Democrats including Clinton herself saw the Committee as a partisan effort by the Republicans not to get to the truth of what happened at Benghazi, but to damage Clinton's chances of winning the presidency in 2016.

Republicans maintained that this was in fact not the case. Members of the committee said numerous times that the only goal of this hearing was to discover the answers to questions that the American people had regarding the attack on the U.S embassy in Benghazi. Representative Trey Gowdy stated that the hearing "was not a prosecution". The hearing did however contain many instances of intense back and forth exchanges between Clinton and the members of the committee. Although much has been said in recent weeks about former Secretary of State Clinton's use of a private email server, that issue was rarely brought up during the hearing. Those on the Committee focused on accusing Clinton of neglecting to take proper actions to improve security at the United States Embassy in Benghazi after more than several hundred requests for increased security resulted in no action from the state department. Republican's asserted that due to the fact that four American lives were lost in the attacks, Clinton's lack of response to the requests for increased security meant she was in some way responsible for the death of those Americans. Clinton defended herself saying “He did not raise security with the members of my staff, he raised security with the security professionals.I know that’s not the answer you want to hear. But those are the facts. If he had raised it with me, I would be here telling you he had.”

Another area that members of the committee focussed on was the fact that immediately following the attack on Benghazi, Clinton publicly stated that the attack occurred as a spontaneous response to an internet video. Members of the committee cited transcripts of a phone call Clinton had with the Prime Minister of Egypt as well as a few personal emails in which she described the cause of the attack to be stemming from a terrorist group, and not from an internet video as she had previously stated. Clinton defended this discrepancy in accounts describing the situation at the time as "fast moving" thus leading to the change in accounts.