Thursday at the hearing of the the House Select Committee on Benghazi Chairman Trey Gowdy confronted former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on her claim that the large amount of emails she received form her confidant and “old friend” Sidney Blumenthal advising her on Libya were “unsolicited.”
Gowdy asked, “What does the word unsolicited mean to you?”
Clinton said, “It means that I did not ask him to send me the information that he sent me, and as I have previously stated, some of it I found interesting, some of it I did not, some of it i forwarded, some of it I did not. I did not know anything about any business interests. I thought that just as i said previously, newspaper articles, journalists of which he is one, former journalist, had some interesting insights and so we took them on board and evaluated them and some were helpful and others were not.”
Gowdy continued, “We will get to all the points you just made but I want to start with your public comment that these emails were unsolicited. You wrote to him, another keeper, thanks and please keep them coming, greetings from Kabul and thanks for keeping this stuff coming, any other info about it question mark, what are you hearing now question mark, got it will follow up tomorrow, anything else to convey question mark, Now, that one is interesting because that was the very e-mail where Mr. Blumenthal was asking you to intervene on behalf of a business deal that he was pursuing in Libya. what did you mean by what are you hearing now?’
Clinton answered, “I have no idea, congressman. they started out unsolicited and as I said, some were of interest, I passed them on, and some were not. So he continued to provide me information that was made available to him.”
Gowdy pressed, “I don’t want to parse words and I don’t want to be hyper-technical because it’s not a huge point but it is an important point. You didn’t say they started off unsolicited. You said they were unsolicited.”
Clinton answered, “Well, they were unsolicited, but obviously, I did respond to some of them and I’m sure that encouraged him. “