Photo

Huma Abedin, center, arrived for a meeting with the House Benghazi panel on Friday.Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Huma Abedin, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s longtime personal aide, testified behind closed doors for eight hours on Friday before the Republican-controlled Benghazi committee, as Mrs. Clinton and House Democrats continued to try to discredit the panel for what they say are efforts to undermine her presidential bid.

Ms. Abedin said in a brief news conference that she had answered all of the committee’s questions, but she declined to address what she said and did not criticize the panel.But Mrs. Clinton’s campaign and the committee’s top Democrat were far more vocal than Ms. Abedin, arguing that the committee had veered away from its investigation of the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, and focused instead on Mrs. Clinton’s unorthodox email arrangement when she was secretary of state.Shortly before she began testifying on Friday morning, the Clinton campaign released a statement saying it was not clear why the committee wanted to question Ms. Abedin, because she knew little about the attacks.Continue reading the main story“The committee’s focus on Huma (as opposed to numerous intelligence and defense community officials still outstanding) is additional evidence that the actual attack in Benghazi, and its lessons about how we might better protect diplomats serving in dangerous places, are the last things on the committee’s mind,” a campaign spokesman, Nick Merrill, said in the statement.A Republican member of the committee, Representative Mike Pompeo of Kansas, who attended the interview, said the panel needed to question Ms. Abedin because she was a senior State Department official at the time of the attacks, which killed four Americans.The committee’s top Democrat, Representative Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, gave a lengthy statement to reporters, citing remarks made this month by Republicans — including one by the House majority leader, Kevin McCarthy of California — who said the panel was designed to undermine Mrs. Clinton.“When you have the No. 2 person in the Republican Party who comes forward — the person who makes plans with the speaker, and the person who is one step away from becoming the speaker — to tell you it’s all about a taxpayer-funded political effort to derail the campaign of Hillary Clinton, ladies and gentlemen, that is a problem,” Mr. Cummings said.Mrs. Clinton is scheduled to testify in a public hearing before the panel on Thursday.The committee’s chairman, Representative Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, who has attended many of the interviews conducted with Mrs. Clinton’s closest aides, was not in Washington on Friday and did not address the news media.A day earlier, Mr. Gowdy found himself on the defensive after Representative Richard Hanna, a moderate Republican from upstate New York, told a Utica radio station that Mr. McCarthy had told the truth when he said that a drop in Mrs. Clinton’s poll numbers had been a result of the committee’s work.“Sometimes the biggest sin you can commit in D.C. is to tell the truth,” Mr. Hanna told the radio station. “This may not be politically correct, but I think that there was a big part of this investigation that was designed to go after people and an individual, Hillary Clinton.”Mr. Gowdy released a statement on Thursday saying that “commentators, and sometimes even members of your own conference, offer thoughts on which they are not familiar.”“It is unfortunate when claims are made by those who do not know what the committee has done, why it has done it, or the results of its work,” he said.Mr. Gowdy said that Republicans had “made a promise to the families about the integrity of this investigation, and no one on the majority side has forgotten it.”An hour before he released that statement, his office put out a news release that announced that Ms. Abedin was scheduled to testify at 10 a.m. on Friday.The release said that Ms. Abedin would “be questioned about issues pertaining to the committee’s charter: the events leading up to, during and after the attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012, and executive branch activities and efforts to comply with congressional inquiries into them.”The release then said that the committee’s charter did not include two matters surrounding Mrs. Clinton’s campaign: the Clinton Foundation and Ms. Abedin’s special employment status, which allowed her to work for outside companies.