According to new reporting conducted by Gawker and ProPublica, Hillary Clinton received information through a “secret spy network” about the unfolding crisis in Libya during the weeks leading up to the Benghazi attacks. The intelligence was allegedly funneled to her through longtime Clinton family friend and former Bill Clinton White House aide Sidney Blumenthal via her private email account; sources gathering info appear to include a former CIA clandestine service officer.
The emails were first leaked to the internet in 2013 after a Romanian hacker, working under the pseudonym Guccifer, broke into Blumenthal’s AOL account and found correspondence with the then-Secretary of State as well as a third associate. That correspondence contained discussions about Hillary Clinton potentially contracting with a retired army special operations officer to monitor Libya’s civil war, in addition to detailed reports about the instability within the country (among other things). All these exchanges occurred through Clinton’s private email server, which has since been wiped clean.
Since Clinton’s use of her private address for government matters has come to light, Republicans have accused her of everything from compromising security to withholding information. “There are gaps of months and months and months,” said Representative Trey Gowdy of Clinton’s public email record on the CBS’s Face the Nation. Rep. Gowdy (R-S.C.) is currently leading a House investigation into Clinton’s 2012 handling of the Benghazi attacks. “It strains credibility to believe if you’re on your way to Libya to discussion Libyan policy that there is not a single document to turn over to Congress.”
At a press conference on March 10th, Clinton addressed concerns about both the contents of the emails as well as matters of State record. She said that she opted to use her personal email account for convenience sake: “Looking back, it would’ve been better if I’d simply used a second email account and carried a second phone, but at the time, this didn’t seem like an issue.” She also also pointed out that because the vast majority of emails sent were to government addresses they would have been captured by the State Department server anyway.
The State Department review of the 55,000 pages of Clinton’s email correspondence is still underway, and could take months to complete. Hillary, for her part, encouraged the government to release them all via Twitter early in March. No doubt the Clinton camp wants the dust to settle sooner than later: Allegations of rogue operations and secret intelligence networks don't exactly bode well for the potential presidential candidate.
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