It turns out that Sidney Blumenthal didn't personally author or vet any of the Libya intelligence memos he sent to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Clinton confidant told a House panel investigating the 2012 Benghazi attacks.
"What we learned today is he's not the author of a single one of those memos. He was passing on information authored by someone else and he has no idea about the credibility or reliability of any of the sources," House Select Committee on Benghazi Chairman Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., told reporters on Tuesday, according to The Hill.
"So, the information passed on to the secretary of State, he didn't vet and we don't know if anybody vetted it."
After Gowdy met with Blumenthal on Tuesday for nine hours behind closed doors at the Capitol, the chairman told reporters that Blumenthal was "merely a conduit" for someone who may have had business interests in Libya, Politico reported.
That someone turned out to be Tyler Drumheller, a former CIA operative who was reportedly looking into business ventures involving Libya's transitional government. Blumenthal was merely copying and pasting from Drumheller's memos and sending them to Clinton, who then often circulated them around the State Department as something worthy of looking into, Politico reported.
"Not only was [Blumenthal] providing unvetted, uncorroborated, unsubstantiated intelligence to our top diplomat, he was just simply forwarding on intelligence that somebody by the name of Tyler Drumheller was sending him," Gowdy said, according to Fox News.
Gowdy said Tuesday that Clinton should have sent the emails to the CIA, rather than forwarding them to staff or encouraging Blumenthal to send more. "There were several instances where she said, 'keep it coming,' 'good stuff,'" Gowdy said.
Last month, the State Department released 300 of the emails Clinton turned over from her private server. About 25 of those were memos from Blumenthal regarding Libya, sent while she was secretary of state. Blumenthal gave the congressional panel nearly 60 previously undisclosed Clinton emails last week, raising concerns over why those additional emails were not previously disclosed as requested.
One of those emails was sent the evening after the September 2012 Benghazi attack. Blumenthal sent Clinton an analysis of the situation, citing high-level Libyan sources and claiming the Benghazi attack was carried out by the militant group Ansar al-Sharia. It further stated that Libyan officials believed the terrorists "took advantage of cover provided by" demonstrations sparked by an Internet video that insulted the Prophet Mohammed, reported Fox News.
Blumenthal was subpoenaed by the Benghazi committee to answer questions on why he was sending Clinton unsubstantiated intelligence about Libya. He explained to reporters that he did so because he thought it "might be informative to the secretary for her to use, or not, as she saw fit," according to The Hill.
He insisted that his correspondence with Clinton on Libya was unsolicited and uncompensated, sources who were in the room told Politico.
The Obama administration banned Blumenthal, a longtime Clinton family friend, from working at the State Department because of campaign attacks he orchestrated against then-Senator Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary. Instead, Clinton brought Blumenthal on as an adviser at the family charity, the Clinton Foundation, where he earned $10,000 a month.
But Blumenthal insisted his work at the foundation "had nothing whatsoever to do with my emails to my friend," according to Politico.
Following the deposition on Tuesday, Blumenthal, reading from a script, criticized the committee for calling him in to testify. "It seems obvious that my appearance before this committee was for one reason and one reason only ... politics," he said as he accused the panel of "spending hours asking me questions about things that had nothing to do with Benghazi."
"I hope I have cleared up the series of misconceptions some members of the committee may have held," he added. "My testimony has shed no light on the events of Benghazi - nor could it - because I have no firsthand knowledge."
