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Sidney Blumenthal, Hillary Clinton’s Confidant, Turns Over Memos on Libya Sidney Blumenthal, Hillary Clinton’s Confidant, Turns Over Memos on Libya
(about 4 hours later)
WASHINGTON — A close confidant of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s, Sidney Blumenthal, has provided the House committee investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, with dozens of pages of emails between him and Mrs. Clinton about Libya that were not included in the trove of emails that the State Department gave to the panel, according to people briefed on the matter. WASHINGTON — Emails that a longtime confidant to Hillary Rodham Clinton recently handed over to the House committee investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, raise new questions about whether the State Department and Mrs. Clinton have complied with a series of requests from the panel.
The emails are similar to others that were provided to the committee by the State Department in February, the people said. Those emails included information about Libya that Mr. Blumenthal was passing along. Mrs. Clinton often forwarded the memos to her deputies to seek their feedback. The emails, provided by Sidney Blumenthal, a close adviser to Mrs. Clinton, include information about weapons that were circulating in Libya and about the security situation in Benghazi in the year and a half before the attacks. The committee has asked the State Department and Mrs. Clinton several times in the past year for emails from her and other department officials about “weapons located or found in” Libya and about the decision to open and maintain a diplomatic mission in Benghazi.
The committee had issued a subpoena to Mr. Blumenthal for any emails he had exchanged with Mrs. Clinton. The emails from Mr. Blumenthal have widened a rift between the State Department and the committee. State Department officials said that they had complied only with requests and subpoenas related directly to the attacks because the committee’s demands were too broad. The department has “provided the committee with a subset of documents that matched its request and will continue to work with them going forward,” said a spokesman, Alec Gerlach.
It is not clear whether Mr. Blumenthal’s emails were among the 30,000 pages of emails from Mrs. Clinton’s personal account that she provided to the State Department last year. Senior State Department officials have repeatedly said that they had fully complied with the committee’s requests for the emails, while the committee’s chairman, Representative Trey Gowdy, Republican of South Carolina, had harshly criticized the department for not providing documents to the panel. But the panel has called that an excuse to protect Mrs. Clinton and to slow the investigation of the attacks, which occurred on Sept. 11, 2012, and resulted in the deaths of four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens.
Alec Gerlach, a spokesman for the State Department, said, “We provided the committee with a subset of documents that matched its request and will continue to work with them going forward.” Secretary of State John Kerry “has been clear that the State Department will be both transparent and thorough in its obligations to the public on this matter,” he added. It is not clear whether the State Department possesses the emails between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Blumenthal and did not hand them over. It is also possible that Mrs. Clinton never provided them to the department and deleted them off the server that housed the personal account she used exclusively when she was secretary of state.
An official for the committee declined to comment. Mr. Gerlach said that the committee had not told the department which emails Mr. Blumenthal handed over and that it would take some time for officials to determine whether the department had the emails.
Mrs. Clinton said that after she provided the 30,000 emails to the State Department, she deleted roughly the same number of emails from the account, which, she said, were personal and not related to her work as secretary of state. In response to a subpoena from the committee, Mr. Blumenthal on Friday handed over dozens of pages of emails between him and Mrs. Clinton. The emails are similar to others between Mr. Blumenthal and Mrs. Clinton that were provided to the committee by the State Department in February.
Mr. Blumenthal is scheduled to appear Tuesday before the committee for a deposition. Mr. Gowdy wants to question Mr. Blumenthal about where he was receiving his information about Libya and who was paying him to produce the memos. Those included dozens of memos about Libya that Mr. Blumenthal sent to Mrs. Clinton. She forwarded many of them to her deputies to seek feedback. The deputies often said that Mr. Blumenthal’s information was false or misleading.
At the time that Mr. Blumenthal was sending the memos to Mrs. Clinton, he was being paid by the Clinton Foundation. Among Mr. Blumenthal’s responsibilities was to help with research, “message guidance” and the planning of commemorative events, according to foundation officials. Mr. Blumenthal, a former aide to President Bill Clinton, is scheduled to be deposed by the committee on Tuesday. Its chairman, Trey Gowdy, Republican of South Carolina, wants to question him about where he was getting his information and why he was writing intelligence memos for Mrs. Clinton. At the time, Mr. Blumenthal was being paid by the Clinton Foundation.
At the same time, Mr. Blumenthal, a former aide to President Bill Clinton, was a paid consultant to Media Matters for America and American Bridge, organizations that conduct research and answer attacks against Mrs. Clinton. In the emails he gave to the committee, there are several references to weapons in Libya. One describes how a Libyan opposition leader feared that the United States did not want to provide weapons to opposition groups because the arms could fall into the hands of Al Qaeda or other radical Islamist groups. Another email included a list of weapons said to be possessed by the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
Last year, the State Department asked Mrs. Clinton for any documents she had that may be government records. In response, she gave the department about 30,000 emails that she said related to her work. The State Department in February provided the committee with about 900 pages of Mrs. Clinton’s emails that the department said were handed over in response to the panel’s requests, which included a subpoena that the committee had sent to Mrs. Clinton. Mrs. Clinton has said that she deleted about 30,000 other emails from the account that were personal. Republicans have contended that this gave Mrs. Clinton an opportunity to cherry-pick the documents that would be considered government records.
After The New York Times first reported in March that she had exclusively used the personal email account, she said that she had asked the State Department to make her emails public. That process is likely to take months, if not years.
“The department is working diligently to publish to its public website all of the emails received from former Secretary Clinton through the FOIA process,” Mr. Gerlach said, referring to the Freedom of Information Act.