WASHINGTON -- Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton received monthly missives about the growing unrest in Libya from a longtime friend who was previously barred by the White House from working for her as a government employee, according to emails received on her personal account.
The messages show the role played by Sidney Blumenthal, who was working for the Clinton family foundation and advising entrepreneurs trying to win business from the Libyan transitional government. Blumenthal repeatedly wrote dispatches about the events in Libya to Clinton, who often forwarded them to her aides at the State Department.
Clinton's earlier efforts to hire Blumenthal, who has spent nearly two decades working for the Clinton family, as a State Department employee had been rejected by officials in President Barack Obama's administration who said they feared his role spreading harsh attacks against Obama in the 2008 presidential primaries would cause discomfort among members of their new White House team.
Clinton is running for the Democratic nomination for president, which has heightened the scrutiny of her use of a private email account and server while serving as secretary of state.
Blumenthal's continued role was revealed in nearly 350 pages of emails, published Thursday by The New York Times, about the 2012 attacks on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens.
The Times obtained about a third of the 850 pages of emails. They appear to back up Clinton's previous assertions that she did not receive classified information at her private email address.
But some of the emails contain what the government calls "sensitive" information or "SBU" -- sensitive but unclassified. This includes details of the whereabouts of State Department officials in Libya when security there was deteriorating during the 2011 revolution. One email from a year and a half before the attacks that was marked sensitive but unclassified contained the whereabouts of Stevens as he considered leaving Benghazi during the uprising against Moammar Gadhafi's regime because of the deteriorating security.
"The envoy's delegation is currently doing a phased checkout (paying the hotel bills, moving some comms to the boat, etc.)," said the email that was forwarded to Clinton from a close aide, Huma Abedin. "He will monitor the situation to see if it deteriorates further, but no decision has been made on departure. He will wait 2-3 more hours, then revisit the decision on departure."
The emails also show that Clinton was circulating information about the attacks in Benghazi that contradicted the Obama administration's initial narrative of what occurred and that she was concerned about how Republicans could use the attacks to undermine Obama.
Blumenthal subpoenaed
Last year, Clinton gave the State Department 55,000 pages of emails that she said pertained to her work as secretary of state sent from the personal address she used while at the agency. The messages about the events in Libya were given for review to a special House panel investigating the attacks. They likely will be released by the State Department in the coming days after months of delay.
The panel, which was initially formed to investigate Stevens' death, has become a vehicle to broadly question Clinton's tenure at the State Department. This week, the panel subpoenaed Blumenthal to testify on Capitol Hill.
There is nothing in the emails to suggest that Clinton was actively soliciting Blumenthal's advice or alleged intelligence information, although the documents contain few replies she may have sent to him.
The evening after the Benghazi attack, Blumenthal forwarded to Clinton an analysis of the situation from former CIA official Tyler Drumheller that purported to contain information from "sources with direct access to the Libyan National Transitional Council as well as the highest levels of European governments as well as Western intelligence and security services."
The memorandum said a top Libyan official, Mohamed Yousef el-Magariaf, had told close associates that the Benghazi attack was carried out by the militant group Ansar al-Sharia and that Libyan security officials believed the group "took advantage of cover provided by" demonstrations against an Internet video seen as insulting to the Prophet Mohammed to conduct it.
The memo, citing an unidentified source passing on information from unnamed Libyan security officials, said that 21 members of Ansar al-Sharia had joined with about 2,000 demonstrators outside the Benghazi facility. Citing the same source, the memo said that some Libyan officials believed the protest was organized solely as cover for the attack.
The unidentified source cited by Drumheller said some Libyan security officials had told el-Magariaf that the group had been planning the attack for about a month.
Clinton forwarded Blumenthal's email to her deputy chief of staff, Jake Sullivan, with the instruction, "We should get around this asap."
Other emails to Clinton from Blumenthal after the attack offer additional material from similar unnamed sources describing Egyptian and Libyan governments' concerns about the situation and growing sectarian violence. They also contained rumor and speculation about various internal Libyan government deliberations.
Some of Blumenthal's analysis was questioned by State Department officials and even by Clinton. Gene Cretz, Stevens' predecessor as ambassador to Libya, described one note as "odd," saying the author appeared to have confused two individuals with similar names.
Passing on an April Blumenthal note, Clinton wrote Sullivan: "This one strains credulity. What do you think?"
The report claimed French and British intelligence services were activating long-standing contacts with tribal leaders in Libya, encouraging them to establish a breakaway, semiautonomous area.
"Definitely," Sullivan responded, likening it to "a thin conspiracy theory."
From time to time, Blumenthal commented on the administration's political strategy. In October 2012, a month before Obama was re-elected, he also passed along a news article predicting the Republicans might try to use Benghazi as a campaign tool in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election. Five hours later, Clinton replied to Blumenthal, saying: "Thanks. I'm pushing to the WH."
1,200 emails kept private
More than 1,200 emails of more than 30,000 turned over to the State Department by Clinton have been deemed personal by National Archives officials -- and will never be required to be made part of the public record.
The National Archives and Records Administration reported its finding to the State Department in a May 6 letter about the former secretary of state's emails, which endorsed an earlier determination by the department itself.
"The goal of this review was to validate that the department correctly applied federal statutes, regulations and guidelines in identifying the personal correspondence of the former secretary," the letter said.
The exclusion is in addition to 31,000 emails that the public will never see because Clinton said they were personal and destroyed them before turning over her email files to the State Department. Clinton's excisions were reported by her lawyer, David Kendall.
This week, a U.S. district judge ruled that nearly 30,000 other emails Clinton did turn over in December -- and which the State Department is continuing to review before releasing -- must be made public on a rolling basis, rather than in one release early next year as the State Department had proposed.
Meanwhile, the Clinton Foundation reported Thursday that it has received as much as $26.4 million in previously undisclosed payments from major corporations, universities, foreign sources and other groups.
The foundation's disclosure came as it faced questions over whether it fully complied with a 2008 ethics agreement to reveal its donors and whether any of its funding sources present conflicts of interest for Clinton as she begins her presidential campaign.
The money was paid as fees for speeches by Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton. Foundation officials said the funds were tallied internally as "revenue" rather than donations, which is why they had not been included in the public listings of its contributors published as part of the 2008 agreement.
According to the new information, the Clintons have delivered 97 speeches to benefit the charity since 2002. Colleges and universities sponsored more than two dozen of these speeches, along with U.S. and overseas corporations and at least one foreign government, Thailand.
The payments were disclosed late Thursday on the organization's website, with speech payments listed in ranges rather than specific amounts. In total, the payments ranged between $12 million and $26.4 million.
Information for this article was contributed by Lisa Lerer, Matthew Lee, Bradley Klapper and Matthew Daly of The Associated Press; by Billy House of Bloomberg News; by Michael S. Schmidt of The New York Times; and by Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger of The Washington Post.
A Section on 05/22/2015