The title given to Michael Isikoff’s piece is “Benghazi Committee, Under Fire, Releases More Clinton Emails,” but the big news is right up front, in the first few paragraphs: Hillary Clinton carelessly exposed a top CIA human intelligence asset in Libya, in an email sent through her unsecure private mail server.
On March 18, 2011, Sidney Blumenthal — Clinton’s longtime friend and political adviser — sent the then secretary of state an email to her private account that contained apparently highly sensitive information he had received from Tyler Drumheller, a former top CIA official with whom Blumenthal at the time had a business relationship.
“Tyler spoke to a colleague currently at CIA, who told him the agency had been dependent for intelligence from [redacted due to sources and methods],” the email states, according to Gowdy’s letter.
The redacted information was “the name of a human source,” Gowdy wrote to his Democratic counterpart, Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, and was therefore “some of the most protected information in our intelligence community.”
“Armed with that information, Secretary Clinton forwarded the email to a colleague — debunking her claim that she never sent any classified information from her private email address,” wrote Gowdy in a letter to Cummings.
“She is exposing the name of a guy who has a clandestine relationship with the CIA on her private, unprotected server,” explained former CIA officer John Maguire, who said a “crimes report” should have been sent from the CIA to the Justice Department over this security breach.
Another expert, former CIA counsel John Rizzo, noted the identity of a human intelligence source is “the most sensitive kind of classified information.” He then listed various steps Hillary Clinton should have taken, but evidently did not.
It’s true that this particular security breach bounced between a couple of other people before it got to Clinton — one of whom, the above-mentioned Tyler Drumheller, has since passed away — but her blithe handling of the information is shocking.
One of the Clinton camp’s talking points is that Hillary understands sensitive information better than anyone on Earth, and was engaged in a one-woman war with the CIA to make them change their silly classification ways. In reality, there is no evidence she ever put much thought into handling classified material, beyond doing whatever seemed most convenient for herself at any given moment.
Isikoff puts this story of the ongoing political struggle between Rep. Trey Gowdy’s House Benghazi Committee, partisan Democrats such as the shameful Rep. Elijah Cummings, and Clinton’s campaign team.
Recently, the Democrats were handed some rhetorical ammunition by then-Speaker-in-Waiting Kevin McCarthy when he foolishly described the Benghazi committee as a political exercise, thus marking the first and only time left-wing politicians and their pet media regarded McCarthy’s word on anything as authoritative.
But the election of a President is a political act – indeed, given their disdain for Congress and the law, Democrats have lately been telling us it’s the only political act that really matters.
So the judgment and honesty of a candidate like Hillary Clinton is highly relevant. She has a habit of trying to protect what’s left of her honesty by portraying herself as someone with extremely poor judgment — the sort of person who would set up an unprecedented, rule-breaking, security-threatening private mail server because carrying two smartphones around was too much of a chore.
Everything that happened in Libya is highly relevant to voters as they assess Clinton’s judgment, and nothing that happened in Libya reflects well on it. It’s clear that she was massively dishonest, both with the American people and her boss, President Barack Obama, about her relationship with Sid Blumenthal. He never should have been interacting with her at all, never mind looping her into emails that exposed the name of a CIA asset on an unsecure system. Anyone other than Hillary Clinton would be in severe legal jeopardy over something like this.
Democrats have no business telling us she shouldn’t even be in political jeopardy.
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