Congressional Hearings as Privileged Loci to Display Rhetorical Strategies. Hillary Clinton on Benghazi

The article is intended to illustrate recourse to apologetic discourse in a specialized genre, i.e. congressional hearings. More specifically, the case studies under examination are Hillary Clinton’s two congressional hearings held in 2013, when she was called to testify about the September 11 attack on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, in an appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and House Foreign Affairs Committee. The study shows how, to illustrate her decisions in the Benghazi investigation, Clinton made ample use of apologetic strategies, similar to those employed by companies reporting on their poor financial performance.