Sidney Blumenthal presented Hillary Clinton with false intelligence about the location of Moammar Gaddafi just five days before the Libyan dictator was killed by rebel forces.
The email, obtained by Bloomberg from the House Select Committee on Benghazi, suggests Gaddafi was in the African nation of Chad and cited a friend of reporter Seymour Hersh as the source of the intelligence.
Blumenthal told Clinton in the October 15, 2011 email that Hersh had been offered an “exclusive interview” with the embattled dictator in Chad.
Gaddafi was killed on October 20 of that year in his hometown of Sirte in northern Libya.
When contacted by a Bloomberg reporter, Hersh denied any knowledge of the purported interview or of Gaddafi’s whereabouts in the days before his death.
Rep. Trey Gowdy, chairman of the Benghazi committee, said Blumenthal gave Congress dozens of emails between himself and the former secretary of state that were never submitted to investigators by the State Department. The omission suggests either the agency or Clinton herself withheld key documents from the select committee earlier this year.
The South Carolina Republican has called on committee Democrats to sign off on the release of the previously undisclosed Blumenthal emails.
Rep. Elijah Cummings, the committee’s ranking member, has in turn called on Republicans to authorize the release of the full transcript of Blumenthal’s closed-door deposition, which spanned nearly nine hours Tuesday.
The demonstrably false claim sent by Blumenthal underscores the main concern that lawmakers have expressed in regards to his informal intelligence memos: that Clinton may have relied on his unvetted intelligence as fact.
Blumenthal denied authorship of the memos Tuesday following his interview with the committee, claiming instead that he was simply passing along reports written by a third party. That individual is widely believed to be former CIA operative Tyler Drumheller, according to a number of media reports.
Committee staff told the Washington Examiner the deposition was straightforward and that the tone never turned hostile. The staff said Blumenthal denied writing the memos inside the deposition as well as outside, where — flanked by his lawyer — he read a statement shifting responsibility for the contents of his emails to Clinton.
