Gowdy: Sidney Blumenthal, Hillary Clinton Sent Classified Info

House Benghazi committee chairman Trey Gowdy (R., S.C.) has accused Hillary Clinton confidante Sid Blumenthal of outing a CIA source in Libya, and using his close ties to the then-secretary of state to profit from the 2011 American intervention that brought down Moammar Qaddafi. 

Yesterday, Gowdy sent a fiery letter accusing Elijah Cummings (D., Md.), the ranking Democrat on the Benghazi committee, of improperly politicizing the committee’s 17-month investigation by selectively leaking information. In the face of Democratic calls to disband the committee, Gowdy’s letter sought to justify the committee’s existence by highlighting some of its key findings.

In particular, Gowdy pointed to the committee’s substantial collection of e-mails between Secretary Clinton and Blumenthal, who had been specifically barred from working at the State Department by White House officials. Gowdy noted that approximately half of all of Clinton’s messages pertaining to Libya were between her and Blumenthal, prompting him to label the former journalist “Secretary Clinton’s primary advisor” on U.S. policy in the North-African country. 

Between the start of the Libyan uprising and the time when American missiles first hit Tripoli, Blumenthal lobbied tirelessly for a U.S. military intervention against the Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi. “Perhaps more disturbing is that at the same time Blumenthal was pushing Secretary Clinton to war in Libya,” Gowdy wrote, “he was privately pushing a business interest of his own in Libya that stood to profit from contracts with the new Libyan government — a government that would exist only after a successful U.S. intervention in Libya that deposed Qaddafi.”

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