What specific actions and communications did Hillary Clinton take during the Benghazi attacks on September 11, 2012?
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Executive summary
On the night of September 11, 2012, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton engaged in high-level communications and public messaging about the Benghazi attacks—placing calls to senior intelligence officials, issuing public statements that evolved as new information arrived, sending private emails, and later accepting institutional responsibility for security lapses while defending her Department’s actions; her conduct has been the subject of multiple investigations that produced competing interpretations [1] [2] [3]. Republicans and some commentators have accused her and her staff of mishandling security and messaging, while Democrats and several official reviews have emphasized failures at lower levels of the State Department and dispute direct personal wrongdoing by Clinton [3] [4] [5].
1. Immediate wartime communications: a late-evening coordination call with the CIA
During the hours after the assault, authorities in Washington were receiving incoming intelligence and imagery and Clinton made at least one documented operational call to the CIA: at 5:41 p.m. ET she telephoned CIA Director David Petraeus to coordinate the federal response as a drone feed began providing video to Washington, a call that has been cited repeatedly in contemporaneous timelines of the attack [1].
2. Public statements and messaging that shifted with new information
On the night of the attack and in the days after, Clinton issued public statements characterizing the incident and confirming casualties—she issued a statement confirming that a State Department official had been killed and later described the deaths and the attacks in formal remarks—while publicly referencing the possibility of mob violence tied to an Internet video in some early remarks and later labeling the event a terrorist attack in subsequent public comments [2] [6] [1].
3. Private communications: the Chelsea email and internal cables
Clinton sent at least one private email the night of the attack—an 11:12 p.m. message to her daughter Chelsea that, according to published timelines, referred to the attackers as “an al Qaeda-like group” and noted the deaths of two officers including the Ambassador [2] [5]. Earlier cables and emails in 2012 show diplomats warning about deteriorating security in Benghazi, and those records became a flashpoint in later criticism even as Democrats on investigative panels said Clinton did not personally deny security requests [7] [4].
4. Coordination in Washington and the transfer-of-remains events
Clinton participated in senior-level meetings and situation-room activity in Washington in the days following the attack, meeting with U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and attending the White House situation room before the arrival ceremony for the remains on Sept. 14, where she spoke at the transfer-of-remains and expressed condolences and deflected the notion that the film alone explained the violence [8] [1].
5. Accountability, inquiries, and her testimony about communications
Clinton convened or supported post-attack reviews—appointing experienced figures to assess security and policy—and repeatedly testified that most of her Libya work was not conducted by email; she later sat through an 11-hour House Select Committee hearing in 2015, defending her record and contesting various Republican allegations even as multiple congressional and independent investigations parsed different layers of responsibility [9] [10] [11].
6. Competing narratives and what the record supports—and does not
Official timelines and journalistic reconstructions document Clinton’s phone calls to intelligence leadership, her public statements, the Chelsea email, and her participation in Washington’s post-attack meetings; at the same time, long-running political scrutiny produced sharply divergent conclusions—Republican-led panels highlighted department failures and Clinton’s leadership role, while other reviews and Democratic investigators emphasized lower-level operational failures and did not place criminal blame on Clinton—leaving a factual record strong on her communications and public role but contested on ultimate culpability for security decisions [3] [5] [4].