SECRET AGENT: SLEAZY SID BLUMENTAHL

Posted By on May 23rd, 2015

http://www.wsj.com/articles/secret-agent-sidney-1432333139

Secretary Clinton relied on a political crony for backdoor intelligence.

The State Department on Friday published about 848 of the some 55,000 pages of emails that Hillary Clinton personally decided were relevant before erasing the rest of her private server. Yet even this twice cherry-picked dossier—with a focus on the 2011-2012 Libya crisis—is revealing about the kind of operation she was running at Foggy Bottom. All that’s missing is the shoe phone from the “Get Smart” spy farce.

In the pre-Memorial Day weekend news dump, long-time Clinton plumber Sidney Blumenthal plays Maxwell Smart, passing along intel on Benghazi from half a world away. Secret Agent Blumenthal apparently derived this wisdom from his new business associates who were attempting to win contracts from Libyan nationals. Mrs. Clinton often circulates the memos among her top diplomats with comments like “useful insight” and “very interesting,” and they would often then push them down the chain of command, without identifying the source.

Mrs. Clinton was the Secretary of State, for heaven’s sake, one of the five most powerful national security positions in the U.S. government. She had the entire State Department intelligence division at her disposal, known as the Bureau of Intelligence and Research or INR, and presumably had access to the 16 other U.S. agencies that make up the intelligence community.

Yet she’s consuming and taking seriously information from an “analyst” who knows nothing about the subject. Mr. Blumenthal’s expertise is in political wet work and monetizing his connections to the Clintons. The imprimatur that Mrs. Clinton’s office put on Mr. Blumenthal’s outside improv offered him a way to influence policy even after the Obama White House had barred Mrs. Clinton from formally hiring him.

Somehow we doubt the distinguished likes of Dean Acheson or George Shultz were taking the measure of Moscow on the counsel of amateur stringers dabbling in Kremlinology and sending hearsay over the transom.

Mrs. Clinton now wants to be an American President. Will we have Sid set up his own parallel intelligence service from Blair House? What other Clinton henchmen will be reprising their roles from the 1990s, only this time with a national-security portfolio?

Mr. Blumenthal even does a cameo on the terrorist assaults on the Benghazi diplomatic mission and CIA annex that killed four Americans including Ambassador Christopher Stevens. On Sept. 12, 2012, Mr. Blumenthal reports to Mrs. Clinton—based on “Sources with direct access to the Libyan National Transitional Council, as well as the highest levels of European Governments, and Western Intelligence and security services”—that the attack was merely a mob inspired by what they viewed as a “sacrilegious internet video.”

The Administration went with that narrative, with National Security Adviser Susan Rice repeatedly claiming that “it was a spontaneous, not a premeditated response.” The goal was to blame YouTube, not the Administration’s foreign policy failures.

Yet the next day, citing “sensitive sources,” Mr. Blumenthal recanted and explained that the attack had been orchestrated by al Qaeda affiliate Ansar al-Sharia. “We should get this around asap,” Mrs. Clinton told Jake Sullivan, who did work at State. No wonder she couldn’t get her Benghazi story straight for so long.

Notably, and intriguingly, there are also selective omissions in the State disclosures that do not appear in the batch of emails obtained by the New York Times, about a third of the Libya trove. On April 8, 2011, for example, Mrs. Clinton (“hrod17@clintonemail.com”) suggests that “The idea of using private security experts to arm the opposition should be considered.” This line was redacted by State.

Mrs. Clinton also seems to have had sensitive, if not classified, information on her email like the location and travel schedules of U.S. security officials. They could have been compromised if foreign enemies hacked her unsecured personal email account, which is why there are supposed to be protocols to protect high-level communications.

The larger question isn’t Mr. Blumenthal’s faux life of danger. It’s why a potential Commander in Chief invested so much trust in such a figure. The Southern Gothic novel that is Clinton family political history—with its melodrama, betrayals and paranoia—has left them dependent on insular loyalists like Mr. Blumenthal whose opinions are never second-guessed. Voters should know they’d not only be electing Hillary, and Bill, and Chelsea, but this entire menagerie.

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