If the Clinton campaign is the greatest hits of the 1990s returning in a Time-Life boxed set to be sold on late-night television to people with chronic insomnia, Sidney Blumenthal is that Smashing Pumpkins song that happens to be the only Smashing Pumpkins song you can readily identify as a Smashing Pumpkins song because it played as literally every other video on MTV for basically your entire time in high school. That is, until Total Request Live discovered the massive appeal of bands that didn’t make you want to shove the shards of a broken DiscMan headphone into your own jugular.
Like the Smashing Pumpkins, Clinton crony, “press whisperer” and in-house slimeball Sidney Blumenthal refuses to be relegated to the dustbin of history. This week, as Hillary Clinton continues to avoid press questions, the New York Times discovered that, while Hillary Clinton was padding her resume at the State Department, he was padding his pockets as a consultant, both for Clinton’s family foundation and for a bunch of Libyans who appear to have wanted an easy in with the nation’s top diplomant. And Rep. Trey Gowdy wants to find out exactly how deeply he was involved in some key events.
Representative Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, a Republican who is leading the congressional committee investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, plans to subpoena Mr. Blumenthal, 66, for a private transcribed interview.
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.
Blumenthal wasn’t supposed to be interacting with the State Department. In fact, he was prohibited from doing so, at least informally, by the Obama Administration. And while he was ostensibly advising Hillary Clinton, he was also working for the Clinton Foundation, as a paid consultant to Media Matters and as a consultant to Clinton’s formative 2016 campaign.
None of these would have given Mr. Blumenthal any kind of inside information on Libya (unless he was collecting donations for the CGI and CF from yet another group of brutal dictatorS), but another of Blumenthal’s clients would have – a group of businessmen who were competing to win contracts with the Libyan government. Those projects, which the Libyan government ultimately rejected, would have required State Department approval, which Blumenthal could have gotten by continuing his friendship with Clinton (the businessmen were already trying to get to Clinton through her aides. Of course, he could have also built up his credibility with her by forwarding her these advice memos, questionable as they were.
All of this could have led, of course, to the disasterous events surrounding the US Embassy in Benghazi. Which is what Trey Gowdy intends to find out. And while he’s there, he might also be able to shed light on how Hillary Clinton communicated with her staffers through her private email server. He might even have a few stray emails lying around from Hillary Clinton that aren’t yoga related, and wouldn’t that be something?
The emails. Not the yoga.
