A congressional committee’s decision to subpoena a man who worked for the Clinton Foundation — not the State Department — during Hillary Clinton’s time as secretary of state raises new questions about the role Clinton insiders may have played in the run-up to an attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.
Sidney Blumenthal, a veteran of the Clinton White House and reported brains behind the famous “vast right-wing conspiracy” deflection, leveraged his connections to powerful Libyan businessmen into an off-the-books advisory role at the State Department while working for Clinton’s family philanthropy, the New York Times reported Monday.
Blumenthal pumped informal intelligence reports up a direct line to Clinton despite the fact that the Obama administration had prevented Clinton from appointing him to a high-level position at the agency.
The reports drew from rumors U.S. diplomats immediately recognized as false and from information Blumenthal learned by advising a group of companies that were pushing for a piece of the Libyan economy in the wake of Moammar Gadhafi’s death.
He prepared the intelligence dossiers while working at the Clinton Foundation and advising Media Matters and American Bridge, a pair of left-wing groups aligned with Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Clinton and her staff circulated Blumenthal’s memos to senior diplomats in both Libya and Washington, occasionally disguising the source of the reports as an “anonymous contact.”
One of Blumenthal’s memos to Clinton came hours after the Benghazi attack. In it, the longtime Clinton aide said “the attacks on that day were inspired by what many devout Libyans viewed as a sacrilegious internet video on the prophet Mohammed originating in America.”
The State Department’s subsequent efforts to blame the attack on the YouTube clip mentioned in Blumenthal’s report have become the subject of fierce controversy involving what Obama administration officials knew and when they knew it.
A series of screenshots published by Gawker and ProPublica in 2013 show Blumenthal sent more than a dozen messages to Clinton’s private email account in December 2012 alone, illustrating the close ties he enjoyed with the nation’s chief diplomat despite having been banned from the State Department by the president’s own staff.
The business associates from whom Blumenthal received some of the information he forwarded to Clinton were vying for State Department permits in Libya at the time.
Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., plans to compel Blumenthal to give a private, transcribed interview before the Benghazi Committee as it prepares a final report on the year-long investigation, which is slated for release in 2016.
The committee has also called for Clinton testify twice, once for her use of a private email and once for her role in the Benghazi security failure.
Clinton has said through her lawyer that she only plans to testify once. Critics of the congressional probe have accused Gowdy and other GOP lawmakers of attempting to drag the investigation into the thick of the presidential race.
