Mr. Gowdy’s chief interest, according to people briefed on the inquiry, is a series of memos that Mr. Blumenthal — who was not an employee of the State Department — wrote to Mrs. Clinton about events unfolding in Libya before and after the death of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. According to emails obtained by The New York Times, Mrs. Clinton, who was secretary of state at the time, took Mr. Blumenthal’s advice seriously, forwarding his memos to senior diplomatic officials in Libya and Washington and at times asking them to respond. Mrs. Clinton continued to pass around his memos even after other senior diplomats concluded that Mr. Blumenthal’s assessments were often unreliable.
But an examination by The Times suggests that Mr. Blumenthal’s involvement was more wide-ranging and more complicated than previously known, embodying the blurry lines between business, politics and philanthropy that have enriched and vexed the Clintons and their inner circle for years.
While advising Mrs. Clinton on Libya, Mr. Blumenthal, who had been barred from a State Department job by aides to President Obama, was also employed by her family’s philanthropy, the Clinton Foundation, to help with research, “message guidance” and the planning of commemorative events, according to foundation officials.
Much of the Libya intelligence that Mr. Blumenthal passed on to Mrs. Clinton appears to have come from a group of business associates he was advising as they sought to win contracts from the Libyan transitional government. The venture, which was ultimately unsuccessful, involved other Clinton friends, a private military contractor and one former C.I.A. spy seeking to get in on the ground floor of the new Libyan economy.
– From the New York Times article: Clinton Friend’s Memos on Libya Draw Scrutiny to Politics and Business
Keeping tabs on the shadiness, cronyism and ineptitude of Hillary Clinton while she was Secretary of State alone is a full time job. I’m not even kidding, it feels like every day I wake up to another story that in itself should be enough to disqualify her as a Presidential candidate. Yet she remains the front runner to win in 2016, which proves without a shadow of a doubt that America is not a functioning democracy, but a clownish oligarch-owned Banana Republic.
Before I get into the many disturbing and dangerous angles to the Sidney Blumenthal story, it’s important to highlight what a complete and total disaster U.S. foreign policy in Libya has been during the Obama Administration. Rather than helping the situation, NATO destroyed the nation and left it far worse than it ever was under Qaddafi. I highlighted this fact in detail earlier this year in the post, The Forgotten War – Understanding the Incredible Debacle Left Behind by NATO in Libya. Here’s an excerpt:
In retrospect, Obama’s intervention in Libya was an abject failure, judged even by its own standards. Libya has not only failed to evolve into a democracy; it has devolved into a failed state. Violent deaths and other human rights abuses have increased severalfold. Rather than helping the United States combat terrorism, as Qaddafi did during his last decade in power, Libya now serves as a safe haven for militias affiliated with both al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). The Libya intervention has harmed other U.S. interests as well: undermining nuclear nonproliferation, chilling Russian cooperation at the UN, and fueling Syria’s civil war.
As bad as Libya’s human rights situation was under Qaddafi, it has gotten worse since NATO ousted him. Immediately after taking power, the rebels perpetrated scores of reprisal killings, in addition to torturing, beating, and arbitrarily detaining thousands of suspected Qaddafi supporters. The rebels also expelled 30,000 mostly black residents from the town of Tawergha and burned or looted their homes and shops, on the grounds that some of them supposedly had been mercenaries. Six months after the war, Human Rights Watch declared that the abuses “appear to be so widespread and systematic that they may amount to crimes against humanity.”
As a consequence of such pervasive violence, the UN estimates that roughly 400,000 Libyans have fled their homes, a quarter of whom have left the country altogether.
You wonder how American “leaders” can be so inept, and then you realize that they have no idea what they are doing. Rather than making informed policy decisions, U.S. leaders and their “advisors” are mainly thinking about how they can make millions in the wake of death and destruction they created. Don’t believe me? Read the following excerpts from the New York Times:
Mr. Gowdy’s chief interest, according to people briefed on the inquiry, is a series of memos that Mr. Blumenthal — who was not an employee of the State Department — wrote to Mrs. Clinton about events unfolding in Libya before and after the death of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. According to emails obtained by The New York Times, Mrs. Clinton, who was secretary of state at the time, took Mr. Blumenthal’s advice seriously, forwarding his memos to senior diplomatic officials in Libya and Washington and at times asking them to respond. Mrs. Clinton continued to pass around his memos even after other senior diplomats concluded that Mr. Blumenthal’s assessments were often unreliable.
But an examination by The Times suggests that Mr. Blumenthal’s involvement was more wide-ranging and more complicated than previously known, embodying the blurry lines between business, politics and philanthropy that have enriched and vexed the Clintons and their inner circle for years.
While advising Mrs. Clinton on Libya, Mr. Blumenthal, who had been barred from a State Department job by aides to President Obama, was also employed by her family’s philanthropy, the Clinton Foundation, to help with research, “message guidance” and the planning of commemorative events, according to foundation officials.
Much of the Libya intelligence that Mr. Blumenthal passed on to Mrs. Clinton appears to have come from a group of business associates he was advising as they sought to win contracts from the Libyan transitional government. The venture, which was ultimately unsuccessful, involved other Clinton friends, a private military contractor and one former C.I.A. spy seeking to get in on the ground floor of the new Libyan economy.
A free market economy this is not.
The projects — creating floating hospitals to treat Libya’s war wounded and temporary housing for displaced people, and building schools — would have required State Department permits, but foundered before the business partners could seek official approval.
Quite the business model. Bomb countries into oblivion, then make money building hospitals and temporary housing for displaced people. You can’t make this up.
It is not clear whether Mrs. Clinton or the State Department knew of Mr. Blumenthal’s interest in pursuing business in Libya; a State Department spokesman declined to say. Many aspects of Mr. Blumenthal’s involvement in the planned Libyan venture remain unclear. He declined repeated requests to discuss it.
Of course he did.
“We were thinking, ‘O.K., Qaddafi is dead, or about to be, and there’s opportunities,’ ” Mr. White said in a brief telephone interview. He added, “We thought, ‘Let’s try to see who we know there.’ ”
Mr. White declined to answer follow-up questions about what role Mr. Blumenthal was playing in the business venture. But Mr. Grange described Mr. Blumenthal as an adviser to Mr. White’s company, along with two other associates: Tyler Drumheller, a colorful former Central Intelligence Agency official, and Cody Shearer, a longtime Clinton friend.
Even as their plans sputtered, Mr. Blumenthal continued to draw on the business associates for information about Libya as he shaped his memos to Mrs. Clinton. Sometimes the two realms became blurred.
In January 2012, for example, Mr. Blumenthal sent Mrs. Clinton a memo describing efforts by the new Libyan prime minister to stabilize his fragile government by bringing in advisers with experience dealing with Western companies and governments.
Among “the most influential of this group,” Mr. Blumenthal wrote, was a man named Najib Obeida, who worked at the fledgling Libyan stock exchange. Mrs. Clinton had the memo forwarded to her senior State Department staff.
What Mr. Blumenthal did not mention was that Mr. Obeida was one of the Libyan officials Mr. Grange and his partners hoped would finance the humanitarian projects. The day before Mr. Blumenthal emailed Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Grange wrote to a senior Clinton aide at the State Department to introduce the venture with Mr. Obeida in Libya and seek an audience with the United States ambassador there. Mr. Grange said he had not received a reply.
Can you believe this? This clown Blumenthal was pretending to be passing on real intelligence to Hillary (and she repeatedly passed on his nonsense), all the while working to further business interests.
Mr. Blumenthal sent Mrs. Clinton at least 25 memos about Libya in 2011 and 2012, many describing elaborate intrigues among various foreign governments and rebel factions.
Mrs. Clinton circulated them, frequently forwarding them to Jake Sullivan, her well-regarded deputy chief of staff, and requesting that he distribute them to other State Department officials. Mr. Sullivan often sent the memos to senior officials in Libya, including the ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens, who was killed in the 2012 attacks in Benghazi.
In many cases, Mr. Sullivan would paste the text from the memos into an email and tell the other State Department officials that they had come from an anonymous “contact” of Mrs. Clinton.
He didn’t even have the decency to admit where the information was coming from, since Mr. Blumenthal was specifically banned by the Obama Administration from serving under Hillary in an official capacity. And you wonder why the American political system is circling the toilet bowl.
But the skepticism did not seem to sour Mrs. Clinton on Mr. Blumenthal. She continued to forward Mr. Blumenthal’s memos, often appending a note: “Useful insight” or “We should get this around asap.”
The emails suggest that Mr. Blumenthal’s direct line to Mrs. Clinton circumvented the elaborate procedures established by the federal government to ensure that high-level officials are provided with vetted assessments of available intelligence.
The above certainly explains why American foreign policy is such a dangerous joke, but it gets even worse. It appears the entire time Blumenthal was providing the State Department with inaccurate, crony and clownish “intelligence” on Libya, he was earning $10,000 per month from the Clinton Foundation. We learn from Politico that:
Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime confidant of Bill and Hillary Clinton, earned about $10,000 a month as a full-time employee of the Clinton Foundation while he was providing unsolicited intelligence on Libya to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, according to multiple sources familiar with the arrangement.
Blumenthal was added to the payroll of the Clintons’ global philanthropy in 2009 — not long after advising Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign — at the behest of former president Bill Clinton, for whom he had worked in the White House, say the sources.
Blumenthal has been subpoenaed by the U.S. House committee investigating the 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and Clinton’s handling of it. He is expected to testify next week about a series of memos containing sometimes specious intelligence on the situation in Libya, which he sent to Hillary Clinton’s personal email account.
Clinton, whose efforts to hire Blumenthal as an adviser at the State Department were rebuffed by top aides to President Barack Obama, last week defended her relationship with her old ally but also minimized his influence.
To summarize, I think Ben Mathis-Lilley at Slate put it best:
To recap the whole situation: In 2011 and 2012, Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, used an off-books email account to discuss national policy with a private citizen who might have been violating the law by participating in the conversation, who had a related business interest (though not a “financial interest”?) in the subject of his advice that he may or may not have disclosed to the government, and who was simultaneously employed in a questionable “full-time” capacity at significant expense to a nonprofit that has been accused of acting as the bag man for a Clintonian influence-peddling operation.
Must be nice.
