Benghazi: Episode 6 - Radicals

This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Are we living in a new world of strength, power, and force? Well, that's what President Trump's advisor, Stephen Miller, says. The recent U.S. intervention in Venezuela suggests we may be moving into a new world order. So every day this week, the Global Story is joining forces with our BBC podcast friends around the world who have unmatched reporting expertise in their regions. What is a sphere of influence? Who's got one? And if you're not a predator these days, does that mean you're a prey? Listen to The Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Pushkin. Previously on Fiasco. There were some mysteries embedded in Benghazi that needed to be answered, so that gave it legs. A number of conservative media outlets were particularly ginned up. Because you never knew what would get traction. Who told the military to stand down? Where in the world is Hillary Clinton? What's her legacy going to be? Benghazi. This is the final episode of our season on Benghazi. But before we get into how the story ended, I want to stop for a second and dwell on a question that so far we've only come at sideways. It's actually a two-part question. First, what did the people who were outraged about Benghazi actually think Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama did wrong? And second, what did they think their motivations were? There's no question. Hillary lied and people died. I don't mean to sound defensive on behalf of Clinton or Obama. I just think it's surprisingly hard to pin this down, given how many specific accusations were leveled against the administration. So the administration knew in real time there wasn't a mob. They knew in real time that this was a well-coordinated attack. They have absolutely lied to the American people from day one. The White House consigned those people to death. What I've been trying to figure out is how did all these accusations fit together? What did they add up to? And the closest I've come to an answer to a unified theory of the Benghazi scandal is that at a basic level, many Republicans saw the attack as a repudiation of a worldview they have long despised. The president's problems with Benghazi make a bigger point about his approach to governing. Benghazi is the result of the failures of the Obama-Clinton foreign policy. The argument was that Obama and Clinton were idealistic liberals who didn't understand the threat of Islamic extremism. They thought America could solve its problems in the Arab world with diplomacy and deference and leading from behind. Maybe they wanted to believe the lie governed by the ideology of hurt feelings. It's hipster diplomacy at its worst. If you're reluctant to call terrorism by its name, can you ever defeat the terrorists? Benghazi was proof that Obama, Clinton, and their fellow liberals were fundamentally wrong about America's place in the world. The reason we have Libya is the Obama administration. Terrorism has expanded all across the region. Now, Mr. President, it's your feckless, weak foreign policy that is creating a danger zone for all Americans. At best, the Democrats had gotten people killed with their naivete. And at worst, they had deliberately prioritized their liberal values over protecting American lives. Bad things happen when you avoid reality, and unfortunately we've just seen that. It was a powerful story. But what strikes me is just how far the debate around Benghazi ended up drifting, how baroque and esoteric it got. Because it seems clear the scandal wasn't really about a foreign policy disagreement between left and right. It was about something deeper, and also more shallow. Which is why in this season finale, I want to tell you about two very different investigations into Benghazi that were carried out in parallel. One resulted in a trial in which a Libyan militia leader was accused of orchestrating the murder of Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Glenn Doherty, and Tyrone Woods. The other ended with emails. I'm Leon Nafok. From Prologue Projects and Pushkin Industries, this is Fiasco. Benghazi. The word Benghazi. The ultimate Rorschach test. Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, but we put together a Benghazi special committee. Congressional investigations are partisan in nature. Their sole purpose is to damage your opponent. They actually printed out tickets. It was like tickets to the circus. What is the psychic toll that that takes? Hillary, crooked, Hillary, crooked, so crooked. Episode six, our season finale, Radicals, in which everyone has their own reasons for wanting the truth about Benghazi. We'll be right back. Are we living in a new world of strength, power and force? Well, that's what President Trump's advisor, Stephen Miller, says. The recent U.S. intervention in Venezuela suggests we may be moving into a new world order. So every day this week, The Global Story is joining forces with our BBC podcast friends around the world who have unmatched reporting expertise in their regions. What is a sphere of influence? Who's got one? And if you're not a predator these days, does that mean you're a prey? Listen to The Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. It's funny, when you see it for the first time, and then you see it for the thousandth time, you cannot believe how much you missed the first time. Julianne Himmelstein watched the surveillance footage from the Benghazi compound over and over and over. It was grainy. It was black and white. But that was the nugget that we started from. At the time of the attack, Himmelstein was an assistant U.S. attorney, and she was assigned by the Department of Justice to serve as one of the lead federal prosecutors in charge of the criminal inquiry into Benghazi. We really were investigating it as a pure and simple murder case and terrorist attack. Himmelstein's partner in the investigation was an FBI counterterrorism specialist named Mike Clark. You know, we got the call on September 11th through the normal channels, and immediately I was notified that I was going to be the lead case agent. We got our team together and we deployed. On the night of September 12th, the diplomatic security agents and CIA contractors who had been in Benghazi during the attack were in Germany, having just evacuated from Libya. Clark and his team needed to debrief them about what they'd seen. My first responsibility was to take my team to our forward operating base in Germany and interview the Americans that had survived the attack, mostly the DSS agents that were there on scene. Afterwards, Clark flew to Libya to personally pick up the surveillance footage that had been pulled off a dozen or so cameras set up around the Benghazi compound. Back in the United States, Clark and Himmelstein watched the videos together, sitting in a small room at an FBI office crowded with boxes and furniture. They would stop every few seconds, then rewind, then stop again, then rewind again. They would do this for hours, and eventually years. When you first look at those videos, and you don't know who the people are, it does look like a chaotic mess. But once you start being able to identify who the people are, what groups they belong to, then it becomes clearer and clearer. For Clark and Himmelstein, identifying the people in a video was the top priority. They received some promising leads from intelligence reports, but in order to build a case, they needed to connect that intelligence to the nameless individuals in the footage. And to do that, Himmelstein and Clark needed witnesses. The only way that we were able to identify anyone is to talk to people in Benghazi who knew them. It was hard to convince people who were there to talk to the FBI. There was an incredible witness who was in Benghazi and present on the night of the attack. Very, very young man. He was the first one to identify Abu Qatala. Ahmed Abu Qatala was a construction worker by trade. During the Libyan revolution, he had taken up arms against Muammar Gaddafi and raised a small battalion in Benghazi called Ubeda Ben-Jara. They were adherents to the ultra-conservative Salafist interpretation of Islam. And their vision for Libya involved ridding the country of every imperialist foreign power, particularly the Americans. When you talk about Ubeda ben Jara and Abu Qatala, you're talking about an extremist militia that doesn't believe that any government entity should be involved in anything involving Libya. He wanted Libya to be governed under strict Sharia law. Investigators learned that Abu Qatala had met many of his compatriots in Ubeda ben Jara during the Gaddafi regime, when they were imprisoned together at Abu Salim, the prison where more than 1,000 inmates were killed in a massacre in 1996. That's where many of them formed their friendships and relationships. And it was just, you know, just a horrible environment, just the worst that you could ever think of. And there was torture. And actually, Abu Qatala was tortured. At some point, Abu Qatala affiliated himself with a hard-line Islamist militia called Ansar al-Sharia. A few months before the attack on the U.S. compound, He and about 200 other members of Ansar al-Sharia took part in a rally through Benghazi intended to show their force. The rebel fighters from Libya's revolution had brought their weapons along while demanding that their country impose Sharia, Islamic law. They drove trucks brandishing artillery and loudly condemned the coming elections, Libya's first since the fall of Gaddafi. We need to kill the kuffar. Kufar? Yeah. To kill the infidels? Yes, yes. It didn't take long for investigators to start circling Abu Qatala. Libyan witnesses told the FBI that they had seen him directing fighters during the attack. And sources from various local militias said Abu Qatala had approached them several weeks earlier, trying to acquire weapons and vehicles. He was also discreetly and diplomatically, in some cases, going to other more mainstream militia leaders and basically telling them, you know, it would be a bad idea to interfere with our plans should something happen. The witness interviews that generated these details were hard won. People in Libya were scared of Abu Qatala. Those are the people that made the case. Some of them paid the ultimate sacrifice. We had witnesses that were killed. We had witnesses that their houses were burned to the ground by the extremists once they found out that they were speaking out against Abu Qatala and other militia groups, extremist groups. They risked everything to cooperate with the FBI because they realized how dangerous the extremists were. A Libyan militia leader who is a suspected ringleader behind the deadly attack on the U.S. consulate Benghazi is basically thumbing his nose at American and Libyan investigators. Abu Qatala was not exactly keeping a low profile. In October, just a few weeks after the attack, he even made himself available to the American media. His name is Ahmed Abu Qatala. He socialized with journalists last night at a hotel in Benghazi. In meetings with reporters from The New York Times, CNN, and Fox News, Abu Qatala spoke in a tone that was described as taunting. During his Times interview, he sipped on a strawberry frappe. Could have been a ringleader, may be a suspect, may be just bragging about his contentions, but is walking around free as a bird in Benghazi a couple of days ago and talking to the New York Times. Abu Qatala denied playing a role in the attack. But he made no secret of his contempt for the American government and made clear that he wanted the U.S. out of Libya. According to Mike Clark, the FBI agent leading the investigation, Abu Qatala was also convinced that the U.S. mission compound in Benghazi was not what the United States had claimed. Abu Qatala never believed that the special mission was an embassy, was a diplomatic facility. He always believed, even to the time when I interviewed him, that it was a spy base and it was a front for illegal American activities. In this respect, Abu Qatala had something in common with a certain subset of Americans. Whether he knew it or not, there was a theory, popular in conservative media, that Chris Stevens' real reason for being in Benghazi was to broker a secret weapons deal with Turkey. The theory didn't exactly say the Benghazi mission was a CIA front, but it suggested Stevens was not acting as an average ambassador. In any event, Abu Qatala thought every American in Benghazi was suspect. While the FBI slowly developed their case, Republicans in Congress were focused on a different investigation. A bunch of them, actually, all taking place on Capitol Hill, where multiple House committees were looking into various aspects of the attack. Five separate House committees are looking into this thing. four or five different committees that are looking into Benghazi. Each committee had its own jurisdiction. So, for example, the House Armed Services Committee was focused on the Pentagon's response to the attack. And the Foreign Affairs Committee was focused on the State Department. The broadest scope belonged to the House Oversight Committee. You heard about their work in our previous episode. They were the ones who interviewed the whistleblowers and asked repeatedly about a stand-down order. How did the personnel react to being told to stand down? They were furious, he said. This is the first time. Suzanne Saxman-Grooms was the chief counsel for the Oversight Committee's Democratic staff. In that capacity, she worked under Congressman Elijah Cummings. So the Oversight Committee was called back in immediately after the attacks and had its first hearing in October of 2012, and then continued to heavily and actively, aggressively investigate the Benghazi attacks for that full year and a half. Between the Oversight Committee investigation and all the others, the Benghazi attack was being scrutinized from every angle. The committees interviewed dozens of witnesses. They reviewed tens of thousands of pages of documents. There was a lot of classified interviews and briefings, and there were a number of public hearings. By mid-2013, polls were showing that Benghazi was being processed completely differently by Democrats and Republicans. The ultimate Rorschach test in American politics today may be the word Benghazi. For one thing, Republicans were just much more interested in the story. According to a Pew survey, they were twice as likely as Democrats to be following Benghazi in the news. The same survey showed that among Democrats, 60% thought Republicans had gone too far with the investigations. Among Republicans, 65% said the investigations had been handled properly. You could see a corresponding schism on Capitol Hill, where Democratic lawmakers were arguing that Benghazi was a manufactured scandal that Republicans were dragging out for political gain. There's an obsession with Benghazi, Hillary Clinton, that some of my Republican colleagues have in the House. while Republicans insisted that the real truth had still not come out. You know, I think the Benghazi issue is quite significant because we still don't have truth in regards to what happened there. And that was part of the message of the Tea Party. Hey, everybody. Leading the charge on the Republican side was a cohort of arch conservatives who felt the existing committees weren't being aggressive enough about Benghazi. That included members of the Tea Party, a flamboyant, anger-fueled wing of the GOP that rose to power during Obama's first term. What they wanted was a new investigation into Benghazi, a special select committee that would find the smoking gun that had so far eluded Congress. More than anything, the desire for a select committee was about the promise of a less restrained approach than Republicans have been taking thus far Part of the appeal was symbolic select committees have been created to investigate name scandals like Watergate and Iran So it was only right that Benghazi should get one too But there was a practical appeal as well. The select committee wouldn't be limited by jurisdiction and could therefore investigate any aspect of the scandal they wanted. There were Republicans who believed that the people leading these other investigations were not sufficiently bloodthirsty. This is Tim Alberta, author of a book called American Carnage, about the recent history of the GOP. They believed desperate times call for desperate measures, and we've got this incident that left four Americans dead, and we have the likely nominee of the Democratic Party right at the center of it, and nobody has even laid a glove on her yet. And so all of these fact-finding missions that are playing by the rules of Congress are all fine and well, but isn't it about time that we tested some of those boundaries and that maybe we broke a couple of those rules? Calls for the formation of a select committee began just a few months after the attack. But the drumbeat got louder over the course of 2013. That summer, a freshman congressman from Texas announced that he had collected 1,000 signatures from special ops veterans in support of a select committee. The congressman planned to unveil the signatures in the form of a 60-foot-long scroll that he wanted to spread over the Capitol steps. The 60-foot scroll. At noontime, I do believe, it's been signed by 1,000 special ops veterans. Will this happen today or are you getting resistance on that from Capitol Police? Well, the Capitol Police say that we're not allowed to do it, but we're working with them right now. We're going to unfurl the scroll, and it's demanding that we have a special investigation. We owe it to the survivors. We also owe it to the victims that were killed there. The power to appoint a select committee on Benghazi lay with one man, House Speaker John Boehner, the surly, headstrong congressman from Ohio. What you see is what you get. I know who I am. I'm comfortable in my own skin. And everybody who knows me knows that I get emotional about certain things. Trying to catch my breath so I don't refer to this as chicken crap, all right? But this is nonsense, all right? Boehner had a history as something of a renegade in the GOP. But after 20 years in the House, he had evolved into a quintessential establishment figure, Someone who would go on to support Jeb Bush and John Kasich in the Republican primary over their more erratic challengers. The term institutionalist gets thrown around a lot in Congress. But there's really no one in Congress at this time who is more of an institutionalist than John Boehner. This is somebody who is really, really sort of obsessed with the long-term health and stability and credibility of the U.S. Congress. Whatever anyone thinks about the Speaker of the House, John Boehner may have the toughest job in Washington. Though Boehner had initially celebrated the Tea Party wave, he quickly found himself at odds with the Republican Party's ascendant right flank, many of whom he regarded as politically immature and unserious about governing. His problem has been the rise of the Tea Party faction, the newly arrived and highly motivated members who do not go along or get along with the wishes of the leadership. And so John Boehner, time after time after time, since he becomes speaker in January of 2011, he's butting heads with the far right of his conference. While Boehner owes his speakership to the Tea Party victories that put Republicans in charge, the Tea Party's headstrong confrontations put his leadership on the rocks repeatedly. They are just ready to light fires and lob bombs and sort of engage in these guerrilla tactics against not only the Obama administration, but more and more against members of their own party. The Tea Party's guerrilla tactics included pushing conspiracy-based legislation that Boehner opposed, like a bill requiring presidential candidates to show their long-form birth certificates. What do Obama and God have in common? Neither has a birth certificate. But this strikes of racism, in the very least, he's foreign, he's alien, He's the other. Tea Party members also forced government shutdown and tanked several of Boehner's carefully crafted compromises with the Obama White House. On one occasion, Congresswoman Michelle Bachman demanded a spot on a powerful House committee and threatened to go on Sean Hannity's show to disparage Boehner if he didn't seat her. This was par for the course for Tea Party members, who regularly used Fox News as a way to bypass Boehner's agenda and gain influence by talking directly to their base. In private meetings, Boehner attempted to strong-arm the renegades with little effect. He had a stern message for Tea Partiers. Boehner told them, get your ass in line. Dom Boehner's a pissed-off Speaker of the House. Boehner declined to be interviewed for this podcast. But Tim Alberta says the Speaker was uncomfortable with how the Republican Party was changing. At the same time, Alberta emphasizes that Boehner's discomfort wasn't about policy or ideology, so much as tactics and temperament. Boehner saw himself as the adult in the room. And when he started getting pressure to form a special select committee to reinvestigate Benghazi, he bristled. What's really giving Boehner a great degree of heartburn is he's beginning at this point to appreciate what it is that these folks are really after. They're looking for the House of Representatives to do what traditionally a partisan opposition research firm would do, which is spend a whole lot of money and a whole lot of time and a whole lot of energy trying to dig up dirt on a particular subject. And for Boehner, that makes him extremely uncomfortable because he knows in his bones that that is inappropriate. On some level, Boehner's heartburn was about appearances. He had no problem with cutthroat political maneuvering. He just didn't want the Republican Party to look shameless. There are new developments on Benghazi. Some of the families of the four Americans killed, pressing House Speaker John Boehner to create what's called a select committee and investigate. By the spring of 2014, the pressure on Boehner to appoint a select committee was building. It was no longer just the zany, angry new right calling out for it. It was all kinds of Republicans who were hearing from voters back home that not enough was being done about Benghazi. Author Tim Alberta again. Lots of the constituents, even in these sort of moderate suburban Republican districts, the folks that we thought at the time were just your sort of traditional Republicans, you know, Chamber of Commerce, Country Club, give me some tax cuts, and Supreme Court justices, Republicans, they're, you know, tuning into Fox News every night and they're bringing these concerns now to their members of Congress saying, hey, why aren't you looking at the Benghazi? Why are you letting Hillary Clinton off the hook? He's got 167 members of the Republican Congress have written to Boehner asking to create this committee. One month of billboards advocating a Watergate-style committee going up in Boehner's district. And it wasn't just the Tea Partiers who were sort of battering at the gates of the House leadership asking for this investigation. More and more, the drumbeat was coming from across the conference. In April, John Boehner sat for an interview on Fox News with Megyn Kelly, in which she pressed him on why he was resisting calls for a new investigation. You've got 190 members in the House who are in favor of a select committee, and yet you are overruling or ignoring the will of your own majority. There are four committees that are investigating Benghazi. These committees all have subpoena power. At this point in time, I see no reason to break up all the work that's been done and to take months and months and months to create some select committee. But you own people want it. You've got 190 House Republicans who say they need it. I understand that. Later that month, the conservative legal group Judicial Watch published an email they had obtained through a FOIA request. In it, a White House communications advisor laid out a series of talking points for Susan Rice's appearance on the Sunday news shows. The memo directed Rice to underscore that the recent unrest in the Arab world, including the Benghazi incident, was, quote, rooted in an internet video and not a broader failure of policy. The president of Judicial Watch said the documents read like a PR strategy, not an effort to provide the best available intelligence to the American people. The State Department had not previously disclosed the email when responding to document requests from Congress. In a statement, John Boehner said he was appalled. Speaker Boehner said, quote, the administration's withholding of documents is a flagrant violation of trust, and it forces us to ask the question, what else about Benghazi is the Obama administration still hiding? Appointing a select committee would earn Boehner credit with the Republican Party's loudest, most ideological voices. In his book, Tim Alberta tells a story about Boehner going up to New York and meeting with Fox News chairman Roger Ailes. John Boehner and Roger Ailes have been friends for a very long time. They talked frequently. When Ailes took over Fox News, he and Boehner had long dinner conversations about Ailes' vision for the network. These two were really, in some ways, peas in a pod. These guys were buddies. Boehner planned to tell Ailes that he had decided to go ahead and form the select committee so many on Fox News had been demanding. What Boehner wanted in exchange was for Ailes to get Fox News off his back. Not just about Benghazi, but about everything. Boehner wanted the crazies, his word, to tone down their criticism of the Republican Party. And he wanted Fox News to stop giving them a platform. Boehner says to Ailes, he says, listen, Roger, I want you to know that I'm the one giving this thing the green light. And I want you to know that we'll be communicating with you and with your anchors and with your hosts about this. And we're going to make sure that Fox News has a front row seat for everything that's happening with this committee. But Roger, I'm telling you this because I need you to call off the hounds. I need you to give me a break here. I need you to treat this as something of a peace offering. Essentially, Boehner was offering to trade Ailes more Benghazi content for a friendlier Fox News. Boehner had long understood Ailes to be obsessed with ratings, but he viewed him ultimately as a reasonable man. Ailes gave Boehner no indication that he was willing to tone anything down. Ailes hears the word Benghazi and basically spirals out into a little dark world of his own in which he begins to talk about, as Boehner said, the black helicopters flying all around his head. He talks about how the Obama administration is spying on him and how he has to create a safe room in his house to make sure he's not being monitored and how his property has armed guards to protect against potential assassins coming to take him out. Boehner walks out of that meeting thinking, if the head of Fox News is this conspiratorial and this lost and this deep down some of these crazy wormholes believing this stuff, then how does that bode for this country and for the conservative movement and for the Republican viewers, millions of them around the country, who are essentially addicted to watching his network every single night. At this time, I would yield to the gentleman, the Speaker of the House, the gentleman, Mr. Boehner from Ohio. I believe the whole House and the American people deserve to know how I came to the decision that brings us here today. Boehner announced the formation of the Select Committee on May 2, 2014, not long after his meeting with Ailes. He billed it as the definitive Benghazi investigation, the one that would settle the case once and for all. This doesn't need to be, shouldn't be, and will not be a partisan process. And we will not allow any sideshows that distract us from those goals. Boehner's pick to chair the new committee was Trey Gowdy, a Tea Party favorite from South Carolina. It was as clear a sign as any that Boehner was thinking of the Select Committee as a way to appease the Republican Party's most extreme members. Gowdy, with that wonderful Southern accent, leading that committee hearing. I am not surprised that the President of the United States called this a phony scandal. I'm not surprised that Secretary Clinton asked, what difference does it make? Gowdy had the track record of a hardline conservative. During Obama's first term, the congressman had advocated for getting rid of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. He had also been a particularly vocal critic of the administration's handling of the Benghazi attack. No one has been arrested. No one has been prosecuted. No one has been brought to justice. We don't even have access to the witnesses. At the same time, Gowdy was seen as a sort of thinking man's Tea Partier, someone who could throw punches but wasn't reckless about it. True to that image, Gowdy vowed that the select committee on Benghazi would be fair and apolitical, a fact-finding mission that had nothing to do with attacking Hillary Clinton and everything to do with answering the unanswered questions. Can you tell me why Chris Stevens was in Benghazi? Do you know why we were the last flag flying in Benghazi after the British had left and the Red Cross had been bombed? Do you know why requests for additional security were denied? Do you know why... This messaging was consistent with Speaker Boehner's desire to keep up appearances. I have no friends to reward and no foes to punish. We're going to go wherever the facts take us. Facts are neither. And so Trey Gowdy was sort of that rare specimen in the eyes of Boehner who was going to make the Tea Party guys happy, but who also could be expected to run a professional investigation that was not going to bring any sort of embarrassment to the institution. Democrats were unconvinced by Gowdy and Boehner's promises. Remember, this was the spring of 2014, and Hillary Clinton was widely expected to run for president in 2016. No matter how apolitical Gowdy and Boehner wanted it to look, the select committee would inevitably be an early battleground in the upcoming election. And initially, the Democrats considered boycotting it so as to avoid giving it the appearance of legitimacy. But House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi calls it a political stunt and is still considering whether her party will participate. Ultimately, the Democrats decided they couldn't trust Gowdy and Boehner to run a fair hearing on their own. And so they sat five members of their party, including Elijah Cummings, alongside the seven Republicans Boehner had selected. Elijah Cummings, a seasoned vet when it comes to all things Benghazi, having suffered through Daryl Ice's House Oversight Committee on the very same subject, At that point, Suzanne Grooms, the Democratic staffer you heard from earlier, transitioned along with her team from the Oversight Committee to the new Select Committee. Here's Grooms again. We saw our role as to fact check and ensure that the most accurate information about what happened in the Benghazi attacks was going to be made public and that any conspiracy theories would be done away with. To that end, the first thing Grooms and her team did was make a website. A website intended to preemptively push back on the expected avalanche of Republican rumors and conspiracy mongering. It was titled Benghazi on the Record, Asked and Answered. And its purpose was to address more than a dozen frequently asked questions about Benghazi, including why was security in Benghazi inadequate despite repeated requests? And did Secretary of State Clinton order the military to stand down? The website was based on a very earnest premise, that if the Democrats could just get all the relevant information in one place, anyone who was intrigued by the conspiracy theories they were hearing about on Fox News could just consult the record and set themselves straight. According to Suzanne Grooms, the Democrats even thought there was a chance that upon seeing the website, Trey Gowdy himself would be compelled to narrow the scope of the committee's investigation. Our hope was at the beginning that if there was some chance for bipartisanship, Trey Gowdy would sort of look at some of these conspiracy theories that had been debunked already and make a powerful statement pointing to these factual pieces of evidence that were already in existence And we could take those off the table and maybe we could stop the right media from kind of constantly repeating them by having an authoritative source say that they were not true. Maybe that was overly hopeful. Now, normally, this is where I'd tell you that the Republicans were taking a much more relentless tack than the Democrats, that they were focusing less on humbly educating the public and more on scoring direct hits against their opponents. But that's not really what happened after the select committee was formed. Instead, Trey Gowdy's investigation got off to a conspicuously slow start. House Democrats explicitly said that they didn't know where this committee was going. They said that it was rudderless. Essentially, they had no organizational meetings, that they had no long-term timeline. During the first year of the committee's existence, Gowdy presided over just three days of public hearings, and none of them offered much in the way of fireworks. Where is the outrage from Republicans? I heard Brett Baer's reporting today earlier, and he was laying it out. It's going to be kind of like a slow roll. When is the roll part of the slow coming? To Brad Podliska, who joined the Republican staff of the Select Committee as an investigator in September of 2014, it looked like his new colleagues weren't doing much of anything at all. It was well known that staffers were surfing the web, staffers were drinking in the office. It was just very, very slow. Podliska says he was disappointed. He was a military intelligence analyst, and he says he really wanted to conduct a meaningful investigation. And so he buried his nose in State Department documents, including a bunch of Hillary Clinton's emails that had previously been obtained by the Oversight Committee. Basically, there was no day-to-day oversight. You would show up at 9 o'clock in the morning, go down to the document room, and look through documents all day long with no director from above, nothing to look for in particular. It was just start to look through the documents to see if you find anything interesting. And then at the end of the day, you would simply clock out and go home. You just pull out a random one from a box? Basically. And it was just start shuffling through documents. If you found anything good, you would simply highlight it, set it aside with marking, and then move on to the next one. I should mention here that Brad Podliska went on to sue Trey Gowdy and the select committee for wrongful termination. So he's not exactly an unbiased source. But he says the lack of urgency around the investigation was an open joke at the office, especially after Elijah Cummings, the lead Democrat on the committee, criticized Gowdy for the glacial pace of the committee's work. He says, quote, at every turn, the select committee comes up with new excuses to further delay its work and then blames the glacial pace on someone else. Cummings was suggesting that the Republicans were slow walking the investigation on purpose so that they could extend it further into the 2016 race, when each little morsel of information could do more damage to Hillary Clinton. He suspected that we were trying to draw this investigation into the election year. And, you know, we took that in jest. Soon a staff member had designed and produced a lapel pin that said glacial pace on it. Another staff member designed and produced wine glasses that said glacial pace on it. And this became a running joke within the office. Trey Gowdy said the problem was that the Obama administration wasn't responding quickly enough to document requests and subpoenas. It would be shame on us if we intentionally drug this out for political expediency. On the other hand, if an administration is slow-walking document protection, I can't end a trial simply because the defense won't cooperate. Regardless, not much was happening. And that was the state of play on the committee until early 2015. Meanwhile, over at the Department of Justice, Prosecutor Julianne Himmelstein and FBI agent Mike Clark were making progress. Sunday night, on orders from the commander-in-chief, the United States military conducted an operation to capture Ahmed Abu Qatala. On June 15, 2014, almost two years after the attack, the FBI and a team of special forces arrested Ahmed Abu Qatala in Benghazi. They then transported him by ship to the U.S. to stand trial. Qatala has been charged for his role in the attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya. on September 11, 2012. It was the climax of a process that, unlike the political drama on Capitol Hill, had unfolded almost entirely out of sight, with FBI agents working with confidential informants in Libya to build the case against Abu Qatala before taking him into custody. Qatala was lured to a location south of Benghazi. Intelligence gleaned from local Libyans helped draw Qatala to the location. Among the informants was a man whom the FBI paid $7 million as a reward for infiltrating Abu Katala's inner circle. Once again, Mike Clark. He basically went in and befriended Abu Katala and developed enough information to allow us to develop a pattern of life and then get him legally captured and then transported back to the United States where he faced justice in Washington, D.C. There's also the question of how they plan to prosecute him. The Obama administration says Abu Qatala will be tried in civilian court. The fact that the Obama administration wanted Abu Qatala to stand trial as a civilian, rather than sending him to Guantanamo Bay and prosecuting him as an enemy combatant, was instantly controversial among conservatives. Send him to Gitmo. That is the course of action recommended by one Republican senator after another. Rubio, Cruz, even John McCain. On Fox News, the administration also took criticism for not capturing Abu Ghatala sooner. It certainly doesn't look like it was a top priority. Let's face it, 642 days, it took us that long. But again, I don't know the details. I can't make that accusation. What I can tell you what is not a priority of this administration is holding members of his administration accountable for their day-election. Both Himmelstein and Clark told me they were able to mostly tune this stuff out, along with the rest of the public dialogue around Benghazi. We were protected. The investigation team was protected from so much of the noise that was happening all around us. And we never thought about any of the, you know, silliness. I don't know if I should use that word, but it's the only word that came to mind. People have used ruder words, don't worry. Yes. We'll be right back. Are we living in a new world of strength, power and force? Well, that's what President Trump's advisor, Stephen Miller, says. The recent U.S. intervention in Venezuela suggests we may be moving into a new world order. So every day this week, The Global Story is joining forces with our BBC podcast friends around the world who have unmatched reporting expertise in their regions. What is a sphere of influence? Who's got one? And if you're not a predator these days, does that mean you're a prey? Listen to The Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Despite the capture of Abu Qatala, it's fair to say that the Benghazi story was stuck in neutral. Then, on March 2nd, 2015, the New York Times published an article about Hillary Clinton's personal email account. According to the article, the account had come to light after the select committee on Benghazi sought correspondence between Mrs. Clinton and her aides about the attack. Hillary Clinton has some explaining to do. New York Times story this morning about when she was secretary of state, she never had a government account. She exclusively communicated using a personal email account. The story, written by reporter Michael Schmidt, said that while serving as Secretary of State, Clinton had declined to use a government email address and instead had relied exclusively on a personal one, hdr22 at clintonemail.com. Schmidt noted that federal law required government officials to preserve all their correspondence on government servers, and that Clinton's staff had handpicked which emails to hand over to the State Department. Schmidt's reporting was immediately picked up by the news networks and amplified far and wide. The lead story, email gate. A Hillary Clinton email mess. This story has something for everyone. How Hillary Clinton's use of a personal email address while Secretary of State shielded her and the department from a probe of her public records. Brad Podliska told me he was caught off guard when the Times story broke. As an investigator on the Republican staff of the Select Committee, he had seen some of Clinton's emails, and it hadn't even occurred to him that her use of a personal account might be seen as problematic. We always knew that Secretary Clinton used private emails in her capacity as Secretary of State. And it was just like, okay, well, everybody uses private email if necessary. Not a big deal. We simply want access to those emails. You had come across emails from her that had the email address? Yeah, certainly. We knew her private email address. And like I said, we didn't think anything of it. Podliska was perplexed. Not only was everyone suddenly talking about Clinton's private email server as if it were a huge deal, but the original Times story by Michael Schmidt credited the select committee with discovering it. It was hard to tell from the story how Schmidt was defining discovered. Because it's not like the committee had officially made an issue out of Clinton's email use. The Times did that after an anonymous source told Michael Schmidt about it. Much like Podliska, Schmidt didn't think much of it at first, figuring Clinton probably used her official address for some things but not others. It was only months later, when he asked some other sources about it, that Schmidt realized he had stumbled onto a major story. Here's Schmidt in an interview on Fresh Air. I knew that the committee had these personal email messages, but it wasn't until the end of their reporting, right before I was about to publish, that I learned that she did not have a State Department email account, and she was using this personal account to do government work. So that was a pretty significant fact because it showed that her email system had operated very differently than any other government official. Practically overnight, the Clinton email story injected new vigor into John Boehner and Trey Gowdy's select committee on Benghazi. I thought that maybe the story had a month-long shelf life at the time, meaning that it would have been over by April of 2015. From that point forward, Clinton's use of the private email server became the focus of the investigation, while the events surrounding the Benghazi attack took an unmistakable backseat. As Podliska put it to me, the Republicans on the committee could smell blood in the water. It was no longer a sleepy investigation. This was now front and center in terms of the political world. And this became very much hyper-focused on Hillary Clinton. Why do you think the email story took off? Oh, it feeds into that Clinton narrative of they're hiding things. So going back to Bill Clinton with the Lewinsky scandal and Whitewater and all that, it's the Clintons are hiding things. And so this becomes a self-licking ice cream cone. If you're the Clintons and no matter what you say or do, someone sees that the wrong way and you're in an investigation. So what do you do? Okay, you isolate yourself more and you make really, really dumb decisions, such as setting up an email server in your basement of your house. And then this is discovered. OK, now this is leading to more investigations. And so it became a self-licking ice cream cone in terms of political scandals. The self-licking ice cream cone is a great image. But as a metaphor, it kind of falls apart when you imagine the ice cream gradually melting away or being eaten. Because the Clinton email scandal, like Benghazi before it, never did melt away. It just got bigger, especially after Hillary Clinton formally declared that she was going to be running for president. Hillary Clinton making it official with a two-minute, 19-second video launching her second White House campaign. Everyday Americans need a champion, and I want to be that champion. So you can do more than just get by. You can get ahead and stay ahead. For the next six months, John Boehner and Trey Gowdy made the most of the new Clinton scandal that had fallen into their laps. The subpoenas and the press releases flew. Hillary Clinton using not only private email, but her own private server, and that's causing all kinds of questions and new action. Today, a House committee investigating the Benghazi terror attack subpoenaed private emails from Clinton's time as Secretary of State. The committee sat down with witnesses, including Clinton's longtime confidant and email correspondent, Sidney Blumenthal. He is a close friend to Bill and Hillary Clinton. Apparently, Mr. Blumenthal had private business interests in Libya. At the same time, he was emailing Mrs. Clinton about policy there. We want to talk to all the folks who were providing information to decision makers, and Mr. Blumenthal is part of that. Every little push and pull between the select committee and its target became news. And the decisions Hillary Clinton and her staff had made about her emails started to look more and more suspicious. Will this not be a psychic overhang for her that people will be reminded of, man, all of that stuff from the 1990s, all the Clinton wars, right? That was just, that was impeachment and all of that. If this stretches out and Republicans with Benghazi and there's more subpoenas and there's more of this and there's more of that, what is the psychic toll that that takes on the electorate in terms of first prospects? I can't tell you, but it's not good. If the select committee was on some level a PR battle, the Republicans were now winning. In September of 2015, a Gallup poll found that Clinton's favorability ratings were just 41%, the lowest they'd been in more than 20 years. Later that month, one elected official went on television and couldn't stop himself from gloating about it. Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she's untrustable. Congressman Kevin McCarthy's comments were a perfect example of what people in Washington like to call a Kinsley gaffe, when a politician tells the truth by accident. McCarthy had essentially admitted that the point of the select committee had been to hurt Hillary Clinton in the polls. Many of McCarthy's fellow Republicans were enraged. As you see, all the hammering he's getting today for that statement he made on Fox last night. Well, I think rightfully so. That's an absolute inappropriate statement. It is not how this started. We wanted to get to the truth of it. For months, Kevin McCarthy had been considered a likely replacement for John Boehner as House Speaker. After his comment, his chances were completely shot. It appeared that at least some Republicans still shared Boehner's allergy to appearing shameless. I think I shocked some of you, huh? Mr. McCarthy, how much did your comments about Benghazi last week play into decision to step aside today? Well, that wasn't helpful. Yeah, I mean... Brad Podliska, by this point, was no longer on the select committee staff. He had been fired back in June for reasons he thought were related to his lack of enthusiasm for going after Clinton over her emails. Now Podliska was going public with his long-simmering discontent about how the select committee was being run. Podliska says in March the investigation took a turn after the New York Times broke the story of Hillary Clinton using a personal email server for State Department business. After that happened, the investigation's broader focus narrowed, he says. And I was told that things were now changed. There was this great hubris with the committee after that March 2nd New York Times article of we're kind of on the side of good to go after Clinton because of this email server. And honestly, like, to me, you know, congressional investigations are partisan in nature. Their sole purpose, arguably, is to damage your opponent. And so I didn't see McCarthy's comment as controversial as it turned out to be, but it certainly was damaging to the committee. The timing for the Republicans couldn't have been worse. On the heels of the Kevin McCarthy incident and Podliska's emergence as a quasi-whistleblower, the country's attention was about to turn to Hillary Clinton, who finally, after more than a year, would be sitting down before the select committee for questioning. It would be her second time appearing before Congress and addressing Benghazi. But it would be her first as a presidential candidate. Well, this morning, Hillary Clinton testifies before the House committee investigating the attacks on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya. The plan was for each member of the committee to ask questions for 10 minutes before handing it off to the next person in line. After all 12 members got a chance to ask their questions, they would then go around again for a second time, and then again for a third. Democratic staffer Suzanne Grooms again. Chairman Gowdy had told us that he was going to have three rounds and three rounds in a congressional hearing is not ever done because it takes forever The Democrats suspected that taking forever was exactly the point Because we knew that it was going to be such an incredibly long day, one of the larger sort of thought processes around the hearing was whether Clinton would just have the stamina to get through it. Everyone remembered that last time Clinton appeared before Congress as part of a Benghazi investigation, she had lost her cool and uttered a soundbite that had been used against her ever since. The former Secretary of State will try to avoid an outburst like this one before a Senate panel in 2013. What difference at this point does it make? Certainly the concern was that if the goal was just make it last all day long and see if, you know, she has a bad moment in that time period, there wasn't really anything in that space that the Democrats could do about that other than spend some of our time kind of calling out Republicans on their abuses. And so we obviously did that. It felt like the whole Benghazi scandal had been leading up to this final high-stakes confrontation between the former Secretary of State and the Republicans who had been pressing the case against her for more than two years. Good morning. The committee will come to order. The chair notes the presence of a quorum. Good morning. Welcome, Madam Secretary. Welcome to each of you. This is a public hearing of the Benghazi Select Committee. It was crowded. There were a lot of members who came to sit behind Clinton. They actually printed out tickets to the hearing, little paper tickets, which I thought looked just like a terrible thing. It was like tickets to the circus. Everybody was there who could get a ticket to get in. Clinton answered questions for a total of 11 hours, with both Democratic and Republican members trying to create big, memorable moments for the next day's news cycle. For Democrats, the goal was to show just how thoroughly the Benghazi attack had already been litigated, and how little evidence there was that Clinton had done anything wrong, either in the run-up or the aftermath. I know the ambassador was a friend of yours, and I wonder if you would like to comment on what it's like to be the subject of an allegation that you deliberately interfered with security that cost the life of a friend? Well, Congressman, it's a very personally painful accusation. You know, I would imagine I've thought more about what happened than all of you put together. I've lost more sleep than all of you put together. I have been racking my brain about what more could have been done or should have been done. Republicans used their time to cast Clinton as an absentee leader at best and a liar at worst. At one point, she was asked to recount in detail what she was doing on the night of the attack. Okay, and who else was at your home? Were you alone? I was alone, yes. The whole night? Well, yes, the whole night. I don't know why that's funny. I mean, did you have any in-person briefings? I don't find it funny at all. I'm sorry, a little note of levity at 7.15. Well, I mean, the reason I say it's not funny is because... Through it all, Clinton kept her cool, answering every question patiently while also making it clear that she viewed at least some of the people attacking her as political opportunists. Why didn't you just speak plain to the American people? I did, and I said it again in more detail the next morning, as did the president. I'm sorry that it doesn't fit your narrative, Congressman. I can only tell you what the facts were. And the facts as the Democrats... Suzanne Grooms again. Our goal was to have the top takeaways be that there was essentially nothing new found out about Clinton's role in the Benghazi attacks. And that there were Republican abuses in the select committee and that the committee was not legitimate. And I think if you look back at the press from that day, I think those were the takeaways. There was nothing big. There was no major bombshell. And for Hillary Clinton, that's a great thing. Clinton did receive very positive reviews for her performance, including from some conservatives who felt the Republicans had blown an opportunity to take Clinton down. I just got off the phone a few moments ago with the Republican operative. And this person said there was a total wipeout for the Republicans on the committee. Now, maybe he's exaggerating, but she did look presidential. She did look in command today, just like she did at that time. In the weeks that followed, Clinton's poll numbers in the Democratic primary started going up. And even as Republicans continued beating the Benghazi drum as much as they could, the narrative around her testimony was that she had defeated the final boss. Eight months later, when the Republicans on the Select Committee published their majority report, What stood out was how stale most of it felt, and how little there was to personally tie Clinton to any of the decisions that made the Benghazi attack so deadly. The long-awaited House Republican report on Benghazi found no new evidence of wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton or anyone else, but the report blasted the Obama administration for failures in intelligence, coordination, and security. And what the report paints is a narrative of the Benghazi outpost as a bureaucratic and diplomatic no-man's land, which made it unnecessarily hard to get funding and security. I don't see evidence of anything further than what we already knew. And so there's no smoking gun at all about Hillary Clinton. And in fact, what we knew... It was clear that the report just did not have the kind of smoking gun evidence that Hillary Clinton had blood on her hands that a number of Republican folks had wanted. That's just simply because those facts didn't exist. And Trey Gowdy couldn't come up with them because they weren't there. All of a sudden, Trey Gowdy was coming in for criticism from his party's most conservative members, the same ones who had pushed John Boehner to launch the new investigation back in 2014. Trey Gowdy should be impeached for wasting my time. He promised us a lot, remember? Trey Gowdy. Trey Gowdy. The great Tea Party, Trey Gowdy. Everyone loved him. At an event at the National Press Club, a member of the far-right Citizens Commission on Benghazi asked if maybe the GOP leadership had tampered with the evidence in order to benefit Clinton. Has someone in the GOP leadership gotten their fingers involved in watering down some of this against Secretary Clinton? Republican voters around the country had wanted Gowdy to produce new evidence of Clinton's wrongdoing. Something, anything about her giving a stand-down order or leaving Chris Stevens for dead out of political expediency. Among the disappointed was Donald Trump, who by this point was well on his way to securing the Republican nomination and who had referred to Trey Gowdy on Twitter as a Benghazi loser. Trump now says Gowdy is a loser for failing to nail Hillary Clinton on Benghazi. The following month at the Republican National Convention, the Trump campaign invited the mother of Sean Smith to deliver a primetime speech. For all of this loss, for all of this grief, the tragedy in Benghazi has wrought upon America, I blame Hillary Clinton personally for the death of my son. Personally. By then, the issue of Clinton's email server had become a reliable set piece at Trump's campaign rallies. Exhibit A of Clinton's corrupt and untrustworthy nature. In other words, Hillary's secret email server existed for the reason we all know, to keep her emails from ever being read by the public. Rigged system, folks. Remember I used to say it, I'm the one that brought that word up. In November of 2017, five years after the attack in Benghazi, Ahmed Abu Katala was found guilty on terrorism charges. He was eventually sentenced to 22 years in prison by a U.S. district court judge. The jury convicted him of material support for terrorism, conspiracy, malicious destruction of property, and also got him on a weapons offense. According to prosecutor Julianne Himmelstein, only one of the Republican congressmen from the Select Committee made a point of attending Abu Qatala's trial. What did it tell you that everybody else didn't show up? I really can't say why they didn't. You know, we just cared so much about the case. You know, we spent six years traveling all over the world trying to find out desperately who did this, who attacked our facilities, who attacked our mission. That's all we thought about. Really, I'm not making a judgment. I'm just saying that they didn't show up. When I first started learning about Ambassador Chris Stevens and what he represented in the world of American foreign policy, what really stopped me cold was how unlikely a martyr he was for the conservative movement. Throughout his career, Stevens had revealed himself to be distinctly unconservative in terms of how he thought about the Arab world, how he conceived of his role as a diplomat, and what he believed America's posture should be towards political Islam. This was a guy who once expressed hope that the U.S. government would give Hamas a chance. He also opposed the Iraq War so strenuously that he refused to be posted there afterwards out of principle, even though at the time it was widely seen as the best way to advance your career in the State Department. Stevens was also a risk taker. Starting in the 1980s, a string of deadly terrorist attacks in Lebanon had caused American embassies all over the world to become more like militarized fortresses, where diplomats were expected to hole up in safety instead of going out and really getting to know their host countries. Stevens didn't want to be that kind of diplomat. And when he was first posted in Benghazi during the Libyan revolution, he went out running every morning, stopped to talk to people in the street, and reveled in his freedom to meet with locals in their homes. What Chris felt about security was making friends increases security. He wanted to be out there with the people and communicating and being on the ground. This is Ann Stevens, Chris's sister, speaking to a Washington Post reporter a few months after the attack. I think what really came out in his work is how inclusive he was. And, you know, at a personal level, when we're deciding who to invite to your wedding, you invite everybody. When you go out into the world, who do you talk to? We talk to everybody. I think that's a wonderful way to live. After her brother's death, Ann Stevens emerged as a spokesperson for her family. and in a series of media appearances, she made it clear that they didn't blame the State Department or Hillary Clinton for what happened. He decided to take the risk to go there, Stevens told the New Yorker. It is not something they did to him. Pretty much every State Department person I've talked to for this podcast told me Stevens knew that Benghazi was dangerous and decided to go anyway. In other words, he wasn't naive about the risks. From what I understand, he made the trip to Benghazi because he thought it was that important for the future of Libya that the United States have a strong diplomatic presence there. The Benghazi attack helped put an end to all of that. Afterwards, the internal divisions left over from Gaddafi's overthrow grew sharper and more violent. As one former diplomat told me in an email, Despite all the U.S.'s imperfections, we can be a force for good and are often uniquely capable of preventing or ending conflict around the globe. When Chris Stevens died, this person said, We not only lost our ability to understand Benghazi and therefore Libya, but Libya lost its best advocate in the United States. The country became political kryptonite so that no U.S. politician could see the point in risking anything to help slow or stop its downward slide. In 2014, the American mission once led by Ambassador Stevens was effectively suspended due to security concerns. The United States has closed and evacuated its embassy in Libya as the security situation deteriorates in the capital of Tripoli. Benghazi became a war zone, as local militias faced off against an army led by Khalifa Haftar, an ex-member of the Gaddafi regime who had defected to the U.S. and returned to Libya after the revolution. Amid the fighting between Haftar and the militias, large parts of Benghazi were reduced to rubble. To this day, people are dying because they just want to return to their homes. For years now, the State Department has urged all Americans to stay out of Libya, while other foreign powers like Russia, the UAE, Turkey, and Egypt have flooded the country with mercenaries and weapons. Clashes between rival militias are growing more fierce and violent. American travelers are also being advised to steer clear of Libya. It's always hard to definitively establish cause and effect. And it would be too simple to say that America's diplomatic withdrawal is the reason why Libya descended into a bloody civil war. But it is clear that the fallout from the Benghazi attack did not just transform American politics. It also transformed Libya. They call it the Second Libyan Civil War as warlord Khalifa Haftar advances on the capital of Tripoli. Back in 2020, when this season of Fiasco was first released, I said that the prospect of building a democracy in Libya was tenuous but real. At the time, the Biden administration was exploring the possibility of reopening the American embassy in Tripoli. A State Department spokesman was quoted as saying that the U.S.'s intent was to begin to resume operations in Libya as soon as the security situation permits. Five years later, the embassy in Tripoli remains closed. While in Washington, Benghazi remains a shorthand for scandal. The difference is that scandal no longer feels like a distraction from politics. It's now the raw material. That's it for this season of Fiasco. You can check out our other seasons on Bush v. Gore, the AIDS epidemic, and Iran-Contra, all in this feed. For a list of books, articles, and documentaries we used in our research, follow the link in our show notes. Fiasco is a production of Prologue Projects, and it's distributed by Pushkin Industries. The show was produced by Andrew Parsons, Ulla Culpa, Sam Lee, and me, Leon Nafok, with editorial support from Sam Graham-Felson and Madeline Kaplan. Our researcher was Francis Carr. Our score was composed by Dan English, Joe Vallee, and Noah Hecht. Additional music by Nick Sylvester, Joel St. Julian, Billy Libby, and Little Cheddar Studios. Our theme song is by Spatial Relations. Audio mix by Rob Byers, Michael Raphael, and Johnny Vince Evans. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at ChipsNY. Copyright Council provided by Peter Yassi at Yassi Butler, PLLC. Thanks to Archive.org, Murad Idris, Nicole Hemmer, Ben Fishman, Ethan Chorin, I also want to thank Alexandra Gerriton, Sarah Bruguer, and everyone at Pushkin who helped bring this season to life. Special thanks to Carrie Baker and Alice Gregory. And thank you for listening. So every day this week, The Global Story is joining forces with our BBC podcast friends around the world who have unmatched reporting expertise in their regions. What is a sphere of influence? Who's got one? And if you're not a predator these days, does that mean you're a prey? Listen to The Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human