WASHINGTON (CN) - Hillary Clinton's grilling by the House Select Committee on Benghazi revealed little new information about attacks on the U.S diplomatic compound in Libya on Sept. 11, 2012, as the former Secretary of State and presidential candidate was relegated at times to watching a partisan battle between members of the committee.
Clinton took responsibility for the deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and the three other Americans who died in the attack, and assured the committee her State Department worked hard to protect Stevens as much as possible.
She spoke passionately about her relationship with Stevens, praising his work building relationships on the ground in Libya in her opening statement.
"I would imagine I've thought about what happened more than all of you put together," Clinton told the committee during the hearing. "I've lost more sleep than all of you put together. I have been wracking my brain about what more could have been done or should have been done."
Clinton told the committee Stevens never asked to pull out of Libya even as conditions deteriorated ahead of the attacks.
But Republican members of the committee grilled Clinton on the denial of Stevens' multiple requests for increased security personnel, the lack of emails from Clinton about Stevens' efforts in the months before the attack and her public comments that suggested the attack was a response to an anti-Muslim video making the rounds on the Internet at the time.
Clinton told the committee Stevens' requests for increased security personnel never came to her desk, the standard protocol for such cables from other State Department employees.
Regardless of agency tradition, Republicans on the committee wondered if Clinton should have gotten in touch with Stevens or made herself more available to him. Clinton told the committee she did not think he had her personal email account, though noted this wasn't unusual for an ambassador.
"I just want to hear from you why, with all of this information in front of you, particularly on the date of Aug. 17, did it not occur to you to pick up the phone and call your friend, Ambassador Stevens, and ask him what he needed?" Rep. Martha Roby, R-Alabama, asked Clinton.
Clinton made a point of saying she did not work exclusively through email while she was at the State Department, meaning not everything she did would show up in the committee's records.
She didn't even have a computer in her office, she told the committee.
Rep. Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican, pressed Clinton on the official narrative that developed after the attack, suggesting the assault was born out of a protest against "Innocence of Muslims," a video that caused demonstrations outside the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and in other countries with large Muslim populations around the world.
Eventually it became clear the attack was premeditated, though Clinton said during the hearing she still believes the video played a role in the attack.
The original theory was the result of the State Department scrambling to keep up with "a lot of conflicting information" in the aftermath of the attack, Clinton told the committee.
She told Jordan she carefully chose her words when telling the public "some" have attributed the attacks to the video.
But Jordan suggested Clinton's reasons for pushing the narrative were more nefarious.