Congressional hearings have a high-stakes history

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's marathon grilling before the House Select Committee on Benghazi in October 2015 was her moment — an extremely long moment — to push back against critics' suggestions that her State Department failed to protect U.S. diplomats in Libya before the 2012 attack that killed four Americans.

In hours of sometimes testy testimony, Clinton, by then front-runner for the Democratic presidential candidate, said it was "deeply unfortunate" that the Benghazi attacks were being "used for political purposes."

The 1991 Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas will forever be remembered for the lurid accusations of sexual harassment leveled by a young former subordinate, Anita Hill.

When Marine Lt. Colonel Oliver North, his chest brimming with medals, stood and raised his right hand to be sworn in at a 1987 Senate hearing, it became the enduring image from the Iran-Contra scandal, a covert arms-for-hostages overture to Iran.

[...] here that former White House counsel John Dean said he'd told Nixon there was "a cancer growing on the presidency" and revealed that Nixon had approved plans to cover up the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters.

Retired generals and respected foreign policy analysts were among the witnesses who testified in the same caucus room where the Titanic and Army-McCarthy hearings had been held in earlier decades.

The hearings helped produce a shift in public opinion by "making it respectable to question the war," according to a Senate historical account.

[...] the hearings uncovered shady dealings that made Albert Fall the first former cabinet officer to go to prison and turned Walsh into a national hero, according to an account posted on the Senate's website.

In April 1912, a special Senate subcommittee investigating the sinking of the Titanic met first at New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, then in the new caucus room of the Russell Senate Office Building.