The New York Times ran an alarming report this week on how Sidney Blumenthal, a former Clinton aide from the 1990s and an employee of the Clinton Foundation, may have helped shape U.S. policy in Libya.
Despite being barred by former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel from employment at the State Department when then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tried to hire him in 2009, Blumenthal passed intelligence to Clinton at an email address she had previously maintained she did not use at the time. She evidently took his advice very seriously, routinely forwarding his unvetted memos to senior diplomats. Her aide would anonymize the memos, concealing the fact that Blumenthal — a polarizing figure known in the 1990s for ruthlessly attacking the Clintons’ critics, and accused of attacking Obama during the 2008 campaign — was their source.
Blumenthal’s information “appears to have come from a group of business associates he was advising as they sought to win contracts from the Libyan transitional government,” the Times revealed.
Much of the information Blumenthal handed over was wrong — in some cases ignorantly so, as when he confused two different politicians who had the same last name. But Blumenthal had Clinton’s ear, so that his intelligence was disseminated anyway throughout the upper echelons of the State Department. Clinton even recommended passing information from one of his unvetted memos — purporting to describe the attitude of Libya’s new president toward Israel — to the Israeli government.
The revelation of Blumenthal and his scurrilous, possibly self-serving rumors raises the question of exactly who was running things during Clinton’s tenure at the State Department, and just how public-spirited their goals were.
This would not be nearly as much of an issue if the U.S. military intervention in Libya had gone well. The fact that it has been a disaster — nearly as big as the invasion of Iraq, albeit with fewer American casualties — makes the situation even more troubling. Since the U.S. intervention, Libya has become a failed state featuring rival governments, warring militias and hundreds of thousands of internally and externally displaced persons. It is also a new locus of power for the fanatics of the Islamic State terrorist group, who have become known for proudly posting video of their crimes against humanity online.
The Times report is dispiriting and raises many grave questions. For example, Blumenthal seems to have had Clinton’s ear in a way that American diplomats, with their repeated requests for additional security at their vulnerable facilities, did not.
But more to the point, he had access to a gullible or complicit top government official who was willing to treat his word as fact. If used in a proper and convincing way, this access could have put the resources of the U.S. government into the service of helping Blumenthal and his business partners make a considerable amount of money, even if they never succeeded in doing so.
