Hillary’s Spymaster

And the latest question to emerge is a doozy: Did a former CIA officer on Hillary Clinton’s payroll orchestrate a major media scandal in order to discredit Benghazi critics? 

In March, a joint investigation by Gawker and ProPublica dug through Hillary Clinton’s emails and found that longtime Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal had been working with a former CIA officer named Tyler Drumheller as part of a “private spy ring.” Blumenthal is a particularly oily operative best known for accusations that he dishonestly smeared Monica Lewinsky to the press. Of late, he’s drawn a salary from the Clinton Foundation while, according to the New York Times, acting as “a paid consultant to Media Matters and American Bridge, organizations that helped lay the groundwork for Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 campaign.” If Blumenthal has a particular role in Clinton World, it’s manipulating the media.

Like Blumenthal, Drumheller has a somewhat questionable reputation. He left the CIA in 2005 and wrote a book accusing his superiors of ignoring his warnings that evidence used to justify invading Iraq was flawed. Former CIA director George Tenet, who served under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, used several pages of his 2007 memoir At the Center of the Storm to discredit and otherwise challenge Drumheller’s version of events.

As for what these two men were doing working together, emails show Drumheller was producing intelligence reports on Libya and other trouble spots that Blumenthal was passing on to Secretary Clinton. Drumheller was also coordinating operations with Osprey Global Solutions, an outfit headed by David L. Grange, a retired major general with a background in special forces. Osprey Global Solutions was being paid—we don’t know by whom—to send men to terrorist hot spots such as Tunisia to gather intelligence that was also passed on to Clinton. 

Emails documenting this activity went on through much of 2013. But just recently, on September 29, The Weekly Standard reported online that Drumheller was working as a consultant on intelligence matters for CBS News and 60 Minutes while simultaneously working for Blumenthal and Clinton. The overlap here raises questions, because this roughly coincides with 60 Minutes stumbling into the biggest media scandal in recent memory. 

A 60 Minutes report aired on October 27, 2013, told the tale of a private military contractor named Dylan Davies who claimed to have heroically tried, but failed, to save the four Americans killed in the Benghazi attack the year before, on September 12, 2012. According to Davies, more could—and should—have been done by the U.S. government to rescue those who died. Davies’s eyewitness account of what went down was a damning condemnation of the Obama administration’s conduct.

But Davies, who had a book deal to tell his Benghazi story with a publisher owned by CBS’s corporate parent, suddenly went silent after the October 27 report aired. Questions were being raised about the truth of his account, and his tale was contradicted by statements he had given to his employer, private security company Blue Mountain Group, and to Hillary Clinton’s State Department. 

With Davies unwilling stand by his previous account, 60 Minutes retracted the report, going so far as to ask that the transcript be pulled off of news services. It was the worst television news screw up since Dan Rather rushed onto the air with documents, later shown to be fabricated, claiming President George W. Bush had failed to fulfill his obligation to the Texas Air National Guard. And once again, the phony news was a product of 60 Minutes, and the integrity of CBS’s legendary flagship news program was being called into question. Speculation immediately began to swirl that the reporter behind the segment, Lara Logan, would be let go by CBS News. (Logan ended up taking a seven-month leave of absence from the network.)

It’s difficult to overstate how much former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration benefited from the collapse of 60 Minutes’s report. After the report aired, both Clinton and Obama had faced heavy criticism for obscuring who was behind the Benghazi attack for over a year. Logan’s report also punched holes in a common media narrative that had been very helpful to the White House—that Benghazi was not a terror attack. 

The problems with Logan’s report were prominent in the news in November 2013. Then in December, the New York Times published a lengthy Benghazi report declaring “months of investigation by the New York Times, centered on extensive interviews with Libyans in Benghazi who had direct knowledge of the attack there and its context, turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault.” For defenders of the Obama administration, the 60 Minutes scandal and the Times’s authoritative-sounding report were a one-two punch of vindication. It appeared that critics who’d spent the last year accusing Obama and Clinton of obscuring the fact that Benghazi was a terror attack were both wrong and politically motivated. 

But two years later, the media have had to come to terms with certain facts about Benghazi. For one thing, Logan was right where the New York Times was wrong: A report last year from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence removed all doubt that Benghazi was in fact a planned attack with al Qaeda involvement. 

So what, exactly, went wrong with Logan’s Benghazi report? A 6,500-word New York magazine piece—“Benghazi and the Bombshell: Is Lara Logan too toxic to return to ‘60 Minutes’?”—attempted to uncover the story behind Logan’s discredited report. While the New York piece lobs a lot of superficial, even catty, criticism at Logan personally, it contains an interesting revelation: Logan had been working on her Benghazi report for six months before the focus shifted to telling Dylan Davies’s personal story.

This is where Drumheller’s role at the network looks awfully suspicious. A source with personal knowledge of how the report came together told The Weekly Standard that when Logan started working on the report soon after the attack, in the fall of 2012, it was originally focused on establishing al Qaeda’s role and the White House and State Department’s attempts to obfuscate this central fact. According to the source, Drumheller was working behind the scenes to discourage Logan from making her report about the Obama administration’s evading questions about al Qaeda’s role in Benghazi. 

A second source very familiar with CBS News operations confirmed Drumheller’s behind-the-scenes meddling and told The Weekly Standard that Drumheller’s closest relationship at CBS was with 60 Minutes executive editor Bill Owens. According to New York magazine, Owens was responsible for vetting Logan’s story. 

Asked about Drumheller’s role in shaping Logan’s report, a CBS spokesman simply told The Weekly Standard, “Tyler Drumheller was not involved in any way on the Benghazi story.” From the perspective of CBS management, that statement might be, to the best of their knowledge, true. CBS is hardly the only news operation that has former spooks and other shady operatives on the payroll to help them chase down leads. Such arrangements raise questions about how the news we get regarding sensitive issues may be manipulated. As a consultant on retainer, Drumheller had years to build up relationships with individual reporters and producers at CBS and 60 Minutes. As to his qualifications, Drumheller was the former head of the CIA’s clandestine operations in Europe—and ostensibly knew a thing or two about spreading misinformation and identifying, cultivating, and manipulating people to act for his own benefit. CBS brass would likely have no idea who at the network their intelligence consultant was talking to. And, if asked, individual reporters and producers might be reticent to answer questions about whether they had been duped into getting a story wrong. 

If Drumheller was telling people at 60 Minutes to back off the issue of al Qaeda’s involvement in Benghazi, that would stand at odds with what he knew. The day after the Benghazi attack, emails show Drumheller authored a memo that was passed on to Secretary of State Clinton identifying terrorist group Ansar al Sharia as being behind the attack. (Though the connection was hardly a secret at the time, it would be two years before the U.N. would get around to adding Ansar al Sharia to the list of groups being sanctioned for their ties to al Qaeda.) Despite the information in Drumheller’s memo, Clinton went on television the next day and blamed the attack on a spontaneous protest that was a result of a blasphemous YouTube video. 

If this seems too much like it was ripped from the pages of a spy novel, it is hardly the only time 60 Minutes has been suspected of manipulating coverage to benefit Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration. In an interview with 60 Minutes the day after Benghazi, President Obama told Steve Kroft it was “too early to know” whether Benghazi was a terror attack. A month later, whether Obama would admit that the attack was terrorism became a flashpoint in the presidential race, particularly during the second presidential debate, where GOP candidate Mitt Romney accused Obama of playing fast and loose with the truth. Though the clip of Obama vacillating about whether it had been a terrorist attack had tremendous news value, CBS, instead of rebroadcasting it, sat on the footage and quietly released a transcript of the interview two days before the election. In the meantime, former CBS investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson charges that twice in five days following the presidential debate CBS headquarters in New York inserted “the same line and Obama soundbite in an Evening News story to imply that the president had called Benghazi a terrorist attack the next day.” 

The latest revelation is only a week old: On October 1, two days after The Weekly Standard first reported that Drumheller worked simultaneously for 60 Minutes and Hillary Clinton, CNN reported on a new batch of emails in which a State Department official brags about planting questions in another 60 Minutes report, this one about WikiLeaks. CBS News again told The Weekly Standard their intelligence consultant had nothing to do with another high-profile report on intelligence issues. CBS also declined to comment when specifically asked if they’d done any internal review to determine whether Drumheller had unfairly colored any of their politically sensitive reports. It’s hard to deny that CBS and 60 Minutes’s coverage of issues affecting Secretary of State Clinton has been suspiciously favorable. Aside from Drumheller’s role, it is worth noting that CBS News president David Rhodes is the brother of White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes.

The House Select Committee on Benghazi dragged Blumenthal in for questioning this summer: After ignoring multiple requests, he had to be served by federal marshals. And when pressed about his specific relationship with Drumheller, Blumenthal was characteristically slippery.

It turns out Blumenthal had a lot to hide. On October 7, Benghazi committee chairman Trey Gowdy released a long letter with new emails revealing that Blumenthal and Drumheller—along with Cody Shearer, another Clinton operative with a dubious reputation—were working with Osprey Global Solutions, and the company stood to profit from U.S. involvement in Libya. Gowdy promises to release many more emails spelling this out. The Benghazi committee could also release a transcript of Blumenthal’s appearance before a closed-door session before the end of the year. If Blumenthal’s testimony and the contents of the emails don’t match, a big scandal is going to get bigger.

As for what was happening at CBS News, unfortunately the man best positioned to clear the air is unavailable. Tyler Drumheller died in August after a bout with pancreatic cancer. But with many more email revelations coming, both CBS News and Hillary Clinton are going to have to answer some pointed and uncomfortable questions.

Mark Hemingway is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.