A longtime confidant to former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will testify Tuesday before a special congressional committee investigating the 2012 deadly attack on the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya.
Sidney Blumenthal will tell the House Select Committee on Benghazi in a closed door session about a series of emails he sent to Clinton about the situation in Libya after the overthrow of longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi in 2011. Blumenthal has been close to both Hillary Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, ever since he served as aide to Clinton during his administration. He sent the emails to the personal email account Hillary Clinton used during her tenure as secretary of state, a process which led to massive criticism and charges that she was hiding information.
Blumenthal turned over the emails to the committee last week in response to a subpoena. The emails were not part of the hundreds of emails involving the Benghazi attack that the State Department turned over to the House panel earlier this year.
The attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi left four Americans dead, including Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens.
Clinton, the front-runner for the nomination to represent the Democratic Party in the 2016 presidential election, admitted to using a private server and email address during her tenure as secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.
The personal email account she used was hosted on a private server in her New York state home instead of a government one. She has said she used a private account because it was more convenient and points out that she violated no rules.
‘Only the facts’
A spokeswoman for the committee, Amanda Duvall, said the GOP-led panel “is only interested in the facts,” adding that Blumenthal was called to testify because of the large number of emails he sent Clinton regarding Libya.
Hillary Clinton’s earlier efforts to hire Blumenthal, who has spent nearly two decades working for the Clinton family, as a State Department employee were rejected by White House aides. Those aides feared that Blumenthal’s role spreading harsh attacks against Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential primaries would cause discomfort within the Obama administration.
Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, R-Ga., said he and other committee members want to know the depth of Blumenthal’s involvement in Libya policy, why he had the information and who gave it to him.
The five Democrats on the Benghazi panel said their Republican colleagues were no longer interested in discovering facts about Benghazi, but merely were trying to prove that Clinton “engaged in some sort of conspiracy” over the attacks.
Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., the senior Democrat on the panel, said Blumenthal’s deposition was the latest example of how the committee “has strayed far from investigating the Benghazi attacks and is now focused like a laser on attacking Secretary Clinton in her run for president.”
Cummings called it a “travesty” that the committee has spent more than $3.5 million on what he called a “partisan fishing expedition with no end in sight.”
Blumenthal was willing to testify yet was served with a subpoena by armed marshals, Cummings said. He called the subpoena, issued by the panel’s chairman, Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., “abusive” and difficult to understand.
Some material for this report came from the Associated Press.
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