Washington (CNN) House Republicans capped a partisan, two-year investigation of the Benghazi terror attacks Tuesday with a report that faults the Obama administration for security lapses that led to the deaths of four Americans but contains no revelations likely to further damage Hillary Clinton. 
 
 The more than 800-page report paints a picture of a perfect storm of bureaucratic inertia, rapidly worsening security in Libya and inadequate resources in the months that led up to the killings of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three colleagues on September 11, 2012. 
 
 The administration initially claimed the attack was carried out by an angry mob responding to a video made in the U.S. mocking Islam and the Prophet Mohammed. But the assault was later determined to be a terrorist attack -- a finding Republicans accused the White House of covering up to protect President Barack Obama's re-election prospects. 
 
 The House Benghazi Committee report doesn't directly blame Clinton, who was secretary of state at the time and is now the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, for the attacks. But it does suggest she and other administration officials did not adequately address the risks involved. It also suggests Stevens himself bore responsibility for securing his post. 
 
 When it comes to Clinton, the report stresses that intelligence was available suggesting an attack was possible and she and a top aide, Patrick Kennedy, should have realized the risks posed to the Benghazi mission by extremist groups. 
 
 "It is not clear what additional intelligence would have satisfied either Kennedy or the Secretary in understanding the Benghazi mission compound was at risk -- short of an attack," the report says. 
 
 Clinton told the House Benghazi Committee last year that she was aware of the dangers in Libya but "there was no actionable intelligence" indicating a planned attack. 
 
 On Tuesday, she reacted to the report by saying that after two years, the committee had found "nothing, nothing" to contradict an independent Accountability Review Board she commissioned herself while Secretary of State. 
 
 "I'll leave it to others to characterize the report but I think it's pretty clear it's time to move on," Clinton said at a campaign event in Denver. 
 
 Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump tweeted his reaction later Tuesday, saying: "Benghazi is just another Hillary Clinton failure. It just never seems to work the way it's supposed to with Clinton. Hillary Clinton's Presidency would be catastrophic for the future of our country. She is ill-fit with bad judgment." 
 
 Benghazi is just another Hillary Clinton failure. It just 
 
 never seems to work the way it's supposed to with Clinton. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 28, 2016 
 
 Hillary Clinton's Presidency would be catastrophic for 
 
 the future of our country. She is ill-fit with bad judgment. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 28, 2016 
 
 The report reveals that Stevens and senior department officials were apparently keen to set up a permanent consulate in Benghazi ahead of a planned visit to the city by Clinton in October 2012. But the difficulty finding a suitable secure facility prompted officials to exclude the Benghazi compound from official department rules and standards that would have otherwise been more stringent. 
 
 "If you are in a non-diplomatic facility, there are no security standards. They don't exist," one unnamed diplomatic security agent told the committee. 
 
 Conservative members of the panel released a more political analysis of the attack Tuesday that's far more critical of Clinton and the Obama administration. That study, authored by GOP Reps. Mike Pompeo of Kansas and Jim Jordan of Ohio, blames the attack on a "tragic failure of leadership." 
 
 Their decision to release an addendum to the main report appears to suggest that Pompeo and Jordan believe the committee report does not go far enough in criticizing Clinton and the administration. 
 
 "The overall report, it's about the facts, what happened," Jordan told Chris Cuomo Tuesday on CNN's "New Day." "But Mr. Pompeo and I thought it was important to ask the questions. Why were we still in Benghazi when almost every other country had left? Why did we stay in Benghazi when the security situation was so terrible, so dangerous? And why did the administration mislead us?" 
 
 JUST WATCHED How the Benghazi committee got so political Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH How the Benghazi committee got so political 02:49 
 
 Democratic reaction 
 
 Democrats pre-emptively rebutted the findings Monday by releasing their own dissenting report. They accused Gowdy and the committee of flagrant political bias while arguing the investigation wasted taxpayer money to try to damage Clinton ahead of the November election. 
 
 State Department spokesman Mark Toner said "the official facts surrounding the 2012 attacks in Benghazi have been known for some time." 
 
 He cited "great progress towards making our posts safer since 2012" and said "our priority continues to be carrying out our national security mission while mitigating the risks to our employees." 
 
 Rep. Elijah Cummings, the panel's top Democrat, blasted partisanship on the committee. 
 
 "Democrats offered to work with Chairman Gowdy on a joint report, and we even offered to give him a draft of our report ahead of time," Cummings said. "Instead, he mocked our idea and decided to go it alone right before the presidential conventions. We can't comment on his partisan report because we haven't read it, and we haven't read it because Republicans didn't want us to check it against the evidence we obtained."‎ 
 
 White House press secretary Josh Earnest said the report was evidence of the GOP's intent on damaging Clinton. 
 
 "There seems to be only one remaining question," Earnest said. "It's simply this. Is the RNC going to disclose the in-kind contribution they received from House Republicans today?" 
 
 South Carolina Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy, the committee chairman, defended his committee's work, insisting the panel uncovered valuable new evidence that should change how the events in Benghazi are viewed. 
 
 "The seven of us believed that there were more questions to ask, that there were more answers to acquire, more witnesses to interview, more documents to access," Gowdy said. "And this report validates that belief." 
 
 Adding texture to the public record 
 
 Tuesday's report includes testimony from senior State Department and intelligence officials along with lower-ranking diplomats and diplomatic security agents. It adds color and texture to the public record of the attacks already unveiled by multiple congressional and independent investigations. 
 
 It shows that the State Department assessment of the situation in Benghazi in 2011 and 2012 noted rising crime levels, rampant firearm ownership, and a high risk of militia violence in the security vacuum left by the toppling of Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi. The precarious security situation, according to the report, was exacerbated by inadequate security at the Benghazi outpost, which was plagued by equipment failures, a lack of manpower and relied on an often-disorganized local militia for protection. 
 
 Photos: Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State Photos: Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is ceremonially sworn in as secretary of state by Vice President Joe Biden, as her husband, former President Bill Clinton, and daughter Chelsea look on at the State Department in Washington on February 2, 2009. Hide Caption 1 of 9 Photos: Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State Israeli President Shimon Peres meets with Clinton at the president's residence in Jerusalem on March 3, 2009. Hide Caption 2 of 9 Photos: Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and members of the national security team receive an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden in the Situation Room of the White House on May 1, 2011. Hide Caption 3 of 9 Photos: Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State Clinton reviews an honor guard carrying torches at Bellevue Castle on November 9, 2009, in Berlin. Hide Caption 4 of 9 Photos: Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State Clinton joins some of Kenya's Masaai traditional dancers before a dinner hosted in her honor on August 5, 2009. Hide Caption 5 of 9 Photos: Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State Clinton testifies before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the September 11 attacks against the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, on January 23, 2013. Hide Caption 6 of 9 Photos: Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State Clinton tours the Shwedagon Pagoda, a Buddhist temple founded between the 6th and 10th centuries, in Myanmar on December 1, 2011. Hide Caption 7 of 9 Photos: Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State Egyptian President Mohamed Morsy meets with Clinton in New York on September 24, 2012. Hide Caption 8 of 9 Photos: Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State Sen. John Kerry talks with committee staffer Bertie Bowman as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton attends Kerry's Senate confirmation hearing after Kerry was nominated to succeed her as secretary of state. Hide Caption 9 of 9 
 
 The report says requests for more security in Benghazi repeatedly met no response or were refused by senior officials in Washington, though the parts of the report seen by CNN do not directly lay the fault at Clinton's door. 
 
 The full details surrounding the attack may never be fully understood, the report says. The panel blames Clinton and the State Department for failing to turn over all emails from her private server -- an omission it describes as "shameful." 
 
 But Mark Toner, the State Department spokesman, said officials went out of their way to cooperate. 
 
 'When combined with the seven previous Congressional inquiries, the Department has participated at least in 15 hearings, 64 briefings, 72 interviews, and has provided 100,000 pages of documents," Toner said, adding that the panel requested huge volumes of information over a long period of years that was not relevant to the Benghazi tragedy. 
 
 Other findings include : 
 
 The tenacity of Chris Stevens. 
 
 The report reveals the determination of Stevens to keep the post open in Benghazi — "Chris had, I think a different tolerance of risk than I did," said Joan Polaschik, former U.S. deputy chief of mission in Libya. 
 
 -- After the fall of the Gadhaffi regime in 2011, one of Clinton's top State Department aides, Jake Sullivan, asked a colleague what it would take to get a team back to the Libyan capital of Tripoli to re-open the U.S. embassy. 
 
 -- "An ambassador to Libya who actually wants to go. Locking Pat Kennedy (then Under Secretary for Management) in a closet for long enough to actually take some real risks," the colleage emailed back. 
 
 -- In testimony to the committee, Charlene Lamb, formerly a senior State Department official, said that Stevens was ultimately responsible for security at his post. "It is very unfortunate and sad at this point that Ambassador Stevens was a victim, but that is where ultimate responsibility lies." 
 
 Inadequate security in Benghazi 
 
 Throughout late 2011 and through 2012, security became perilous in Benghazi and there were at least two attacks on the compound and on diplomats and other international facilities. 
 
 -- A diplomatic security agent in the city in November 2011 told the committee that security was "woefully inadequate" with no perimeter security, low walls and no lighting. 
 
 -- The report said the Benghazi mission made repeated requests for new agents in late 2011 and early 2012. After a series of attacks on international targets in the city, more requests were made. But "no additional resources were provided by Washington D.C. to fortify the compound after the first two attacks. No additional personnel were sent to secure the facility, despite repeated requests for security experts on the ground." 
 
 -- At one point, then-State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland emailed Stevens to ask how to publicly describe the security incidents in 2012 : "Washington D.C. dismissed Stevens' multiple requests for additional security personnel while also asking for help in messaging the very violence he was seeking security from," the report said. 
 
 -- The report, citing a cable from the U.S. embassy in Tripoli, suggests there simply were not sufficient resources in the unstable nation to send to properly protect Benghazi. In early August 2012, there were only 34 security staff at the embassy. By the end of the month there were only six. 
 
 -- Such shortages might explain the overreliance on the February 17 local militia in Benghazi to help secure the outpost -- but a diplomatic security agent quoted in the report said the group was "undisciplined and unskilled." 
 
 -- In 2011 and early 2012, security sometimes became so difficult in Benghazi that staff were unable to do their jobs reaching out Libyans to report back to Washington on the restive political situation in the city. But the report says that in February 2012, the lead diplomatic security agent at the Tripoli Embassy told the post that "substantive reporting" was not its job anyway. 
 
 "[U]nfortunately, nobody has advised the (principal diplomatic officer) that Benghazi is there to support [redacted] operations, not conduct substantive reporting," the agent wrote, in a possible sign that the primary purpose of the mission was in fact to support the CIA. 
 
 -- The report also finds that the military did not carry out then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's order to deploy U.S. forces to help rescue Americans under fire in Benghazi. 
 
 "What was disturbing from the evidence the Committee found was that at the time of the final lethal attack at the Annex, no asset ordered deployed by the Secretary had even left the ground," the report says. 
 
 -- The panel also argues that initial administration talking points framing the attack as the result of an angry protest over an anti-Muslim video released in the U.S. were drawn up by administration officials and did not include accounts from eyewitnesses or the Americans under attack. 
 
 The report quotes an agent at the Benghazi compound as hearing chanting before a full-on attack begins, including explosions and gunfire and "70 people rushing into the compound with an assortment of "AK-47s, grenades, RPG's ... a couple of different assault rifles." 
 
 Another security officer described the assault as "a full on attack against our compound." 
 
 Asked if he had seen a protest before the attacks, the officer said: "zip, nothing, nada." ||||| FILE - In this Sept. 12, 2012 file photo, glass, debris and overturned furniture are strewn inside a room in the gutted U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, after an attack that killed four Americans, including... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - In this Sept. 12, 2012 file photo, glass, debris and overturned furniture are strewn inside a room in the gutted U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, after an attack that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens. Democrats on the House Benghazi panel said in a report Monday, June... (Associated Press) 
 
 WASHINGTON (AP) — Republicans on the House Benghazi Committee faulted the Obama administration Tuesday in a report on the deadly 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya. 
 
 The panel's chairman, Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, and other Republicans accuse the Obama administration of stonewalling important documents and witnesses. Democrats say the panel's primary goal is to undermine Hillary Clinton's presidential bid. 
 
 Clinton was secretary of state during the attacks, which killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens. 
 
 Democrats released a report Monday saying that while the State Department's security measures in Benghazi the night of Sept. 11, 2012 were "woefully inadequate," Clinton never personally turned down a request for additional security at the U.S. outpost in Benghazi. Democrats said the military could not have done anything differently that night to save the lives of four Americans. 
 
 The dueling reports highlighted the partisanship of the inquiry, which has been marked by finger-pointing on both sides. 
 
 On Tuesday, the panel's Democrats denounced the Republicans' report as "a conspiracy theory on steroids — bringing back long-debunked allegations with no credible evidence whatsoever." The statement added: "Republicans promised a process and report that was fair and bipartisan, but this is exactly the opposite." 
 
 The State Department also issued a statement before the report's unveiling, saying that the "essential facts surrounding the 2012 attacks in Benghazi have been known for some time," and have been the subject of numerous reviews including that by an independent review board. 
 
 "We have made great progress towards making our posts safer since 2012," the statement said. ||||| Rep. Trey Gowdy and fellow Republicans on the House Select Committee on Benghazi said that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the State Department acted in a “shameful” manner in failing to turn over emails from her private email server, making it “impossible” to know whether everything about the Sept. 11, 2012, attack in Libya that left four Americans dead will ever be known. 
 
 In the committee’s final report, being released Tuesday, Republicans assert that stonewalling by the Obama administration — especially the State Department, Pentagon and CIA — delayed the completion of the investigation for months. The committee even threatened to begin contempt of Congress proceedings against Secretary of State John Kerry and CIA Director John Brennan for failing to comply with its subpoenas, according to a section of the final report obtained by Politico ahead of its release. 
 
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 The report blasts the administration for what Republicans say was repeated and willful noncompliance with a congressional investigation, forcing the Benghazi panel to use a series of under-the-radar subpoenas, subpoena threats and a warning that the committee would initiate contempt-of-Congress proceedings against Kerry and other officials if the department did not accede to its demands for information. Republicans say the State Department still has failed to turn over several thousand pages of documents related to an Accountability Review Board investigation into Benghazi. 
 
 Overall, the select committee issued more than a dozen subpoenas to federal agencies, and threatened to issue dozens more, including to top White House aides, say committee sources and the report. 
 
 “This ‘who’s on first’ routine orchestrated by [Clinton’s] private counsel and the State Department, which is ostensibly an apolitical government entity, is shameful,” the report states. “It was not merely Congress and the people it represents who were misled and manipulated, the State Department and the Secretary’s email arrangement undoubtedly delayed access to what happened to four brave Americans in Benghazi and the government’s response before, during and after the attacks.” 
 
 And Democrats have accused the committee of conducting a two-year witch hunt, seeking information that was already known or impossible to produce and dragging out the investigation for maximum political damage. The State Department has been more measured in its response, but also pointedly denies accusations of foot-dragging in a statement Tuesday. 
 
 "The Department cooperated extensively with the Benghazi Committee," department spokesman Mark Toner said. "The Committee received documents, briefings, and/or witness interviews from us every single month between August 2014 and June 2016. The Department provided every single witness the Committee asked for—over 50 current and former employees appeared for interviews, often requiring them to travel from abroad. We made over 50 document productions, totaling over 100,000 pages of documents. We provided eight briefings to members (of Congress) and staff, and Department witnesses appeared at all four of the Committee’s hearings." 
 
 In her testimony to the Benghazi committee last year and in numerous public statements, Clinton has denied wrongdoing in regard to the email server. 
 
 Still, she has conceded that using private email at State, which she said she did for convenience, was a mistake. “Looking back, it would’ve been better if I’d simply used a second email account and carried a second phone,” she said in March 2015. 
 
 The long tussle between the committee and the Obama administration led to some dramatic moments, according to the report and committee sources. During one meeting with State Department officials to talk about their slow response to the committee’s demands, Phil Kiko, the Republican staff director, walked in and slapped a stack of 20 subpoenas on the desk. The committee was preparing to issue a wave of subpoenas to diplomatic security personnel who were on the ground in Libya before and during the attack. But after the threat, State Department officials complied with the committee’s requests and brought in two of the personnel each week for interviews. 
 
 Subpoena threats were also used to secure testimony from national security adviser Susan Rice and deputy national security adviser for strategic communications Ben Rhodes. The White House agreed to allow the aides to be interviewed but kept dragging out scheduling for those sessions despite multiple inquiries, committee sources said. 
 
 Kiko threatened a subpoena unless the White House agreed to the proposed deposition dates. White House counsel Neil Eggleston hopped on a plane a few days later with two other White House employees to see Gowdy in Charlotte, North Carolina. They then negotiated the terms of the Rice and Rhodes’ interviews, panel sources said. 
 
 The “Select Committee on the Events Surrounding the 2012 Terrorist Attack in Benghazi, Libya,” as the panel is formally known, received more than 75,000 pages of previously unreleased documents and interviewed dozens of new witnesses. However, the panel was still unable to obtain everything it wanted. 
 
 In probably the most closely followed section of the report — concerning Clinton’s use of a private email server that at one point was located in the basement of her home in Chappaqua, New York, and which is still under FBI investigation — Republicans condemned what they described as a “shell game” between Clinton’s lawyers and the State Department. 
 
 The committee knew by August 2014 that Clinton was using a private email address to conduct official State business. But Republicans were not aware of the “extent” that Clinton used that address or the fact that State Department officials did not have access to tens of thousands of Clinton emails and were trying to obtain them from her. State had been aware of the issue of Clinton emails for 14 months at that point, but it never told the committee. 
 
 When the Benghazi committee wrote David Kendall, Clinton’s lawyer, in early December 2014 seeking access to all of her emails, Clinton’s legal team privately sent them to the State Department instead. That made the department responsible for deciding what to turn over to the Benghazi panel, a process that took months to play out. Clinton and her lawyers had already gone through all the emails, deleting those she said were private and nonofficial, a move that infuriated Republicans. 
 
 “The manner in which the Secretary communicated during her tenure, the manner in which those records were housed and the manner in which the public record was self-scrutinized and self-selected makes it impossible to ever represent to those killed in Benghazi that the record is whole,” the report states. 
 
 The Clinton campaign and Democrats say that Republicans are just looking to score political points over the email issue, a claim supported by comments from House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and others last year. But the committee insists its “interest in the Secretary’s emails is limited to their relevance in the investigation of the Benghazi attacks.” 
 
 Gowdy and other Benghazi panel Republicans say Clinton is to blame for her own problems. 
 
 “Had she used state.gov or employed a method of preserving public records other than simply hiring a private legal counsel to store, vet and disclose those public records, this would have never become an issue for the Committee,” the report says. 
 
 In addition to their battles with Clinton and the State Department, Republicans say the CIA and Defense Department were also slow to turn over documents and schedule interview requests. That prompted the Benghazi panel in February to threaten to hold Brennan in contempt of Congress. The CIA eventually turned over a series of rarely shared interagent instant messages about what was happening during the attack — a type of document committee staffers say that has never been shared previously with Congress. 
 
 The panel also eventually scheduled interviews with lower-level CIA officials who told the committee that they had erred on intelligence reports they wrote on Benghazi, surprising investigators who had no idea the officials would admit to such a conclusion, committee staffers said. 
 
 Benghazi committee staffers were allowed to read CIA emails only at agency headquarters and were not allowed to take their notes from the review outside the building. These notes had to be kept locked at CIA headquarters. The CIA “eventually offered to allow Committee staff to take their notes back to Committee offices — but only if CIA staff first reviewed the notes and applied various redactions to them,” according to the report. The Benghazi panel complained that none of these restrictions were ever imposed on the House Intelligence Committee. 
 
 Benghazi panel Republicans complained about the Pentagon’s response as well. 
 
 “The Defense Department was initially cooperative but this cooperation diminished during the course of the Committee’s investigation culminating in a factually deficient letter from a political appointee deliberately mischaracterizing efforts to obtain access to witnesses,” the report states. This was in reference to an April letter from a Pentagon official, Stephen Hedger, that accused the panel of using “unproductive” and “unfair” tactics to obtain documents and witness interviews. 
 
 Toner, the spokesman at State, accused the committee of drowning government officials with unreasonable demands for documents that added little or nothing to the understanding of the Benghazi attacks. 
 
 "The Committee repeatedly refused to narrow or focus their requests. As a result, we reviewed hundreds of thousands of pages of irrelevant documents. Furthermore, a large amount of what we did provide the Committee is absent from the report," he said. 
 
 The Benghazi committee recommends that salaries for federal officials held in contempt of Congress be cut off and a special counsel be appointed for any criminal-contempt recommendation against an executive branch official. Right now, all such criminal cases are at the discretion of the Justice Department, which is highly unlikely to seek an indictment of an official from the same party as the president. In addition, the Benghazi panel wants an expedited process to handle civil contempt cases. ||||| Photo 
 
 Q. What is the mission of the House Select Committee on Benghazi? 
 
 A. The Select Committee on the Events Surrounding the 2012 Terrorist Attack in Benghazi, Libya, as the panel is officially known, was created in May 2014 to look into what happened before, during and after the 2012 attack on two American outposts — one belonging to the State Department, the other to the C.I.A. — in Benghazi. Seven congressional panels had investigated the attacks, but Speaker John A. Boehner said the administration had covered up what occurred. Democrats said that Mr. Boehner created the committee to serve as a vehicle to undermine Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign. 
 
 Mr. Boehner appointed Representative Trey Gowdy, a former federal prosecutor popular with the conservative wing of the Republican Party, to lead the committee. The panel received little attention until March 2015, when it was revealed that it had been given emails about Libya from a personal email account that Mrs. Clinton had exclusively relied on when she was secretary of state. 
 
 Q. What questions will Mrs. Clinton face about the Benghazi attacks? 
 
 A. Lawmakers are likely to focus on Mrs. Clinton’s response to early warnings of increasingly dangerous security conditions in Benghazi — warnings that department officials failed to heed, an independent inquiry into the attack concluded in December 2012. That inquiry sharply criticized the State Department for a lack of seasoned security personnel and for relying on untested local militias to safeguard the compound. But the report did not place blame on anyone higher than the level of assistant secretary. 
 
 Mrs. Clinton has acknowledged that she was briefed on a series of events that indicated that security in Benghazi was deteriorating in the months before the attack. But she said she had gone along with a recommendation from subordinates that the Benghazi State Department post be kept open and assumed that they would take the necessary steps to protect it. 
 
 Q:. What do we still not know about the Benghazi attack? 
 
 A. Republicans contend that the administration has not provided an answer about why Susan E. Rice, the national security adviser who at the time was the United States ambassador to the United Nations, went on national television the Sunday after the attacks and provided an inaccurate account about what occurred. Ms. Rice said that the attacks were spontaneously spawned by an anti-American video and were not preplanned by terrorists. Mrs. Clinton will probably be asked about the administration’s initial narrative about the attacks. And, she will likely be asked why the administration had Ms. Rice appear on television instead of the secretary herself. 
 
 Q. If the committee is investigating the attacks, why is Mrs. Clinton going to be asked about her emails? 
 
 A. The emails about Libya that the committee received had never been provided to any of the congressional committees that investigated the attacks. Mr. Gowdy has said that he has the right to investigate Mrs. Clinton’s email arrangement because the committee’s charter calls for him to look into how the administration complied with other congressional inquiries into the incident. Mrs. Clinton and Democrats on the committee have said that Mr. Gowdy has no right to investigate her emails because they are not related to the attacks. 
 
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 Q. What do the Republicans need to do for the hearing to be considered a success for them? 
 
 A. The Republicans need to placate their base without appearing overly partisan. It is unclear if they can do both. The base would like to see the committee embarrass Mrs. Clinton and get her to make a significant gaffe or admit to some type of wrongdoing. But if the committee members appear overzealous, they will open themselves up to criticism from Democrats who will argue that the Republicans are just trying to undermine Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. 
 
 Q. If Mrs. Clinton is having a good day, what will that look like? 
 
 A. Mrs. Clinton’s biggest challenge is to appear composed and patient during many hours of questioning. Some Democrats believe that the Republicans will spend the first several hours of the hearing asking Mrs. Clinton about the Benghazi attacks as a way to wear her down, and then question her about emails in the final round. 
 
 The last time Mrs. Clinton testified before Congress was in 2013, when she appeared before House and Senate committees looking into the Benghazi attacks. That day, Mrs. Clinton accepted responsibility for the security lapses in Benghazi, but said that requests for additional security at the State Department outpost were not sent directly to her. At one point, she became exasperated with the questioning and said there was too much focus on how the Benghazi attacks had been characterized in their early hours. “Was it because of a protest, or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided they’d go kill some Americans?’’ she said, her voice rising. “What difference, at this point, does it make?” 
 
 Q. What do we still not know about Mrs. Clinton’s private email account? 
 
 A. It is still unclear who at the State Department gave Mrs. Clinton approval to use a private rather than an official government account. It is also unclear why Mrs. Clinton did not hand her emails over to the State Department when she left office in 2013. ||||| Getty House Intel Committee dismisses some Benghazi myths 
 
 The House Intelligence Committee dismissed on Friday a number of the most persistent myths about the 2012 terrorist attacks at a diplomatic outpost in Benghazi. 
 
 The committee, chaired by Republican Chairman Mike Rogers of Michigan, found the U.S. government didn’t fail to send assistance to the Americans under siege by Islamic militants and there was no “stand down order” from the State Department. The committee also dismissed the notion that there was an “intelligence failure” the allowed the attacks to occur. 
 
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 But the committee did rule that a number of individuals involved with Al Qaeda were involved with the attacks and Abu Sufian bin Qumu, a Libyan national, “probably played some role” in the attacks. Qumu was a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay before he was transferred to Libya in 2001. 
 
 “We spent thousands of hours asking questions, poring over documents, reviewing intelligence assessments, reading cables and emails, and held a total of 20 Committee events and hearings. We conducted detailed interviews with senior intelligence officials from Benghazi and Tripoli as well as eight security personnel on the ground in Benghazi that night,” Rogers and Maryland Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, the top Democrat on the committee said. “Based on the testimony and the documents we reviewed, we concluded that all the CIA officers in Benghazi were heroes. Their actions saved lives.” 
 
 Some Republicans in Congress have continued to cling to initial reports that surfaced after Ambassador Chris Stevens and two others were killed in the attacks. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the White House have been routinely criticized for failing to protect Stevens and for not quickly sending aide to protect the Americans. 
 
 But Rogers’ committee has long said its investigation would disproved those myths. The report, released quietly on a Friday night, dismisses the bulk of the most damning critics against the administration. The report was first reported by the AP. 
 
 Earlier this year, the House established a select committee to investigate the attacks. A spokesperson for the panel said on Friday that Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) would incorporate the Intel Committee’s findings into the Benghazi panel’s work. 
 
 “It will aid the Select Committee’s comprehensive investigation to determine the full facts of what happened in Benghazi, Libya before, during and after the attack and contribute toward our final, definitive accounting of the attack on behalf of Congress,” the spokesperson said. 
 
 The report is likely to spur criticism against the State Department over the shape of its security protocols as the agency knew it was unprepared to defend the outpost in case of a well-organized and heavily armed attack - a high probability in highly volatile region. 
 
 The report said State Department agents felt “ill-equipped and ill-trained to contend with the threat environment in Benghazi.” ||||| WASHINGTON — An independent inquiry into the attack on the United States diplomatic mission in Libya that killed four Americans on Sept. 11 sharply criticized the State Department for a lack of seasoned security personnel and for relying on untested local militias to safeguard the compound, according to a report by the panel made public on Tuesday night. 
 
 The investigation into the attack on the diplomatic mission and the C.I.A. annex in Benghazi that resulted in the deaths of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans also faulted State Department officials in Washington for ignoring requests from the American Embassy in Tripoli for more guards for the mission and for failing to make sufficient safety upgrades. 
 
 The panel also said American intelligence officials had relied too much on specific warnings of imminent attacks, which they did not have in the case of Benghazi, rather than basing assessments more broadly on a deteriorating security environment. By this spring, Benghazi, a hotbed of militant activity in eastern Libya, had experienced a string of assassinations, an attack on a British envoy’s motorcade and the explosion of a bomb outside the American Mission. 
 
 Finally, the report blamed two major State Department bureaus — Diplomatic Security and Near Eastern Affairs — for failing to coordinate and plan adequate security. The panel also determined that a number of officials had shown poor leadership, but they were not identified in the unclassified version of the report that was released. 
 
 “Systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels within two bureaus,” the report said, resulted in security “that was inadequate for Benghazi and grossly inadequate to deal with the attack that took place.” 
 
 The attack in Benghazi and the Obama administration’s explanation of what happened and who was responsible became politically charged issues in the waning weeks of the presidential campaign, and Republicans have continued to demand explanations since then. Susan E. Rice, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, took herself out of consideration for secretary of state after Republican criticism of comments she made in the aftermath of the lethal attack threatened to become a divisive political battle. 
 
 The report affirmed there were no protests of an anti-Islamic video before the attack, contrary to what Ms. Rice had said on several Sunday talk shows days after the attack. 
 
 While the report focused on the specific attack in Benghazi, the episode cast into broader relief the larger question of how American diplomats and intelligence officers operate in increasingly unstable environments, like those in the Arab Spring countries across North Africa and the Middle East, without increased security. 
 
 In response to the panel’s findings, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a letter to Congress that she was accepting all 29 of the panel’s recommendations, five of which are classified. “To fully honor those we lost, we must better protect those still serving to advance our nation’s vital interests and values overseas,” Mrs. Clinton said in the letter. She is already taking specific steps to correct the problems, according to officials. 
 
 They say the State Department is asking permission from Congress to transfer more than $1.3 billion from contingency funds that had been allocated for spending in Iraq. This includes $553 million for hundreds of additional Marine security guards worldwide; $130 million for diplomatic security personnel; and $691 million for improving security at installations abroad. 
 
 Noting that the Libyan militias in Benghazi proved unreliable, the report recommended that in the future the United States must be “self-reliant and enterprising.” 
 
 In recent weeks, teams of State Department and Pentagon security specialists have been sent to 19 “high threat” diplomatic posts around the world to conduct assessments. 
 
 The State Department last month for the first time also appointed a senior official — a deputy assistant secretary of state — to ensure that embassies and consulates in dangerous places get sufficient attention. To that end, the department is revamping deployment procedures to increase the number of experienced and well- trained personnel serving in those posts, and to reduce the high turnover rate that the panel identified as a problem.
– A Republican report on the 2012 attack in Benghazi finds Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration should have realized an attack was possible before it took place. The report from the House Benghazi Committee notes the administration failed to recognize the risks of rising crime levels and gun ownership. "It is not clear what additional intelligence would have satisfied either [aide Patrick Kennedy] or the Secretary in understanding the Benghazi mission compound was at risk—short of an attack," the report says, per CNN, adding that requests for additional security were met with silence or a resounding "no" from senior officials—though not Clinton directly. However, a separate analysis from the panel's conservative members blames a "tragic failure of leadership," per CNN. The panel says it was "shameful" of Clinton to turn her emails over to the State Department, which decided what to release, rather than to the committee itself, per Politico. It adds that State and Defense officials "consistently refused to answer questions" relating to reports that President Obama approved an operation to arm the Libyan opposition ahead of the attack, reports Politico. In their own report on Monday, Democrats say the report is "a conspiracy theory on steroids bringing back long-debunked allegations with no credible evidence whatsoever" in an attempt to hurt Clinton's presidential bid, per the AP. The State Department adds the "essential facts ... have been known for some time," thanks to numerous investigations. "We have made great progress towards making our posts safer since 2012."