Stuart Varney: Let's get to Hillary Clinton because she is testifying tomorrow before the Select Committee on Benghazi. Joining me now the author of the book Architects of Disaster: The Destruction of Libya, former congressman Pete Hoekstra. Pete, welcome to the program.
Pete Hoekstra: Hey great to be with you. Thanks you. Good morning.
Varney: Here's what I've got to say, take it or leave it. I say that unless Trey Gowdy, who is the chair of the Benghazi committee, unless he comes up with new facts, actual facts that are brand new and revelatory, the Republicans lose this one because it will be dismissed. And Hillary Clinton will win because they will dismiss it as just a political exercise. What say you?
Hoekstra: I would tend to agree with that. They have to come up with a few "ah-ha" moments tomorrow where people say, "Wow we didn't know that, we didn't understand that, this is something new." If they fall short of that standard I think you're absolutely right, it will look like a political witch hunt.
Varney: And can also look like it's men brow-beating a woman. The optics of that are bad. The politics of that are bad.
Hoekstra: And they're gonna go full force and full face into the Clinton political machine. It's gonna be a major test for that committee tomorrow.
Varney: Do you think that Hillary Clinton is over this, that she's kind of leapfrogged over it or gone around the side of it, that this is in the past for her? I don't know how she's going to perform tomorrow, but that the moment it looks a bit like she's over it.
Hoekstra: I think you've got two issues here. One is I think she believes and tomorrow we'll find out if she's over the Benghazi issue. The issue with the server and the emails, that's not gonna go away very quickly. That's a very dangerous position and a very damaging position for the former Secretary of State to be. For almost anybody else in the intelligence community or in the political world to have done what she did with her emails and her server and those types of things, they'd be facing criminal indictments at this point.
Varney: But the public perceives it as all one problem, all the same – Benghazi, emails is just all wrapped into one. So if she leapfrogs over Benghazi and gets that behind her, the public probably will think well the email scandal has gone as well.
Hoekstra: Well the public may think that the email scandal has gone but the FBI is not at that point yet. They haven't finished their investigation. It'll be very interesting to see where they end up. It's very possible there could be an indictment.
Varney: I'm just going to break away for one second Pete because we have news on the potential hacking of Hillary's private server. That was brought to us about a half hour ago. Liz what is that story?
Liz: What we're hearing from Justice Department officials, they fear that while Hillary Clinton was overseas that she was hacked by foreign telecom workers. In other words, they could break into her emails and then get into the server as well. The cyber researchers are telling us they fear there was a 3 month gap where the hackers could get in from January 2009 to March 2009 because she didn't have the proper layers of internet security.
Varney: So Pete Hoekstra that means that her judgment is in question. How could you let yourself be open to this kind of hacking? I guess that's the question.
Hoekstra: Well that's exactly right. When I was on the Intelligence Committee I traveled to over 84 countries around the world, and for many of the places I visited the first thing that you would get is you would get a briefing on what to do with your electronic equipment, what you would do with your Blackberry, what you would do with your computers and all of those types of things. I assume she got those briefings and if she didn't tell people that she was working off a personal server she really made herself and her system and the content very, very vulnerable. These people are good.
Varney: Pete Hoekstra, we know your name and we'll see it again. Thank you very much indeed Pete Hoekstra. Come again soon.
Hoekstra: Thank you.