TEL AVIV – Michael Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to the United States, has strongly denied a claim made about him in a recently released email sent to Hillary Clinton by her longtime confidant Sidney Blumenthal.
Blumenthal claimed that Oren stalked the West Wing searching for a former Israeli prime minister who was allegedly visiting the White House behind the Israeli government’s back.
“Total and utter fabrication,” Oren told Breitbart Jerusalem in response to the email in question.
The latest batch of 550 emails released on Saturday by the State Department contains an October 4, 2012 dispatch from Blumenthal passing on to Hillary a third-person claim about Oren that Blumenthal says he heard from his son, Paul, a campaign finance and money-in-politics reporter for the Huffington Post.
The tale was meant to highlight the divisions between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud politics and the center-left Labor party. It allegedly involves Oren racing around the West Wing to discover the reason for a purported visit to the White House by Ehud Barak, Israel’s former prime minister and a longtime Labor party leader.
Blumenthal relates that his son had learned from another Huffington Post reporter that Thomas Donilon, Obama’s former National Security Advisor, “heard about Oren’s frantic snooping and raced after him, catching him, and escorted him out.”
The email reads:
My son, Paul, the one who covers money & politics at the Huffington Post, last night, to break the settling gloom as we watched the “debate,” told me the following story:
According to Paul, another reporter at Huff Post told him that he was informed by a staffer on the NSC that Barak was at the White House recently having a secret meeting with the President.
At the same time, Michael Oren had finished some meeting at the NSC and somehow heard that Barak was in the building.
Oren raced around the West Wing searching for Barak, opening doors and looking in rooms. Donilon heard about Oren’s frantic snooping and raced after him, catching him, and escorted him out. Apocryphal? True? If false, it still reflects the split between Bibi and Barak. What is true is that a reporter at Huff Post was told this story by an NSC staffer. Biden has to save the day.
Who knew?
Clinton found the story difficult to believe, replying 13 hours after the email was sent, “Doubt that it happened, but, these days, who knows???”
Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio.” Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook.
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