Sidney Blumenthal Fathers Yet Another Clinton Scandal

My article in today's FrontPage magazine:

Sid Vicious #1 (L) and Sid Vicious #2 (R),
or is it the other way around?

Sidney Blumenthal Fathers Yet Another Clinton Scandal

By Matthew Vadum

Longtime Clinton attack dog Sidney Blumenthal is under fire over allegations that he used his connection to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to promote an unusual business scheme involving Libya and possibly the embattled Clinton Foundation.

Blumenthal, Bill Clinton’s legendary hatchet man who earned the richly deserved sobriquet “Sid Vicious” for his scorched-earth assaults on Clinton’s enemies, is now at the center of yet another percolating Clinton scandal that promises to be, like all Clinton scandals, extraordinarily messy and drawn out.

All the details of Blumenthal’s would-be transactions aren’t yet known, but at first glance his half-assed plotting bears more than a passing resemblance to the cockamamie business deal that the late Billy Carter, President Jimmy Carter’s always embarrassing brother, tried to broker in Libya decades ago.

Needless to say, congressional Republicans are more than a little interested in finding out about Blumenthal’s misconduct.

Benghazi Select Committee chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) has already subpoenaed Blumenthal for what the New York Times previously called “a private transcribed interview.” Reuters obtained a copy of the subpoena which commands Blumenthal to appear before Gowdy’s committee on June 3.

Sources in the know suggest Blumenthal, who knows as much about Libya and military strategy as Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), the lawmaker who said Guam might be in danger of becoming “so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize,” knows about geophysics, gave terrible advice to Mrs. Clinton.

Emails obtained by the Times show that Clinton took Blumenthal’s questionable advice memos very seriously.

Blumenthal possesses a robust self-esteem that in his mind allows him to weigh in on important diplomatic matters, so the fact that he wasn’t even an official State Department employee was not an obstacle. (Obama White House officials torpedoed Hillary’s request to put him on State’s payroll.)

But Mrs. Clinton, like so many other powerful politicians, values loyalty over competence so a way was found for Blumenthal to participate in the ripping apart of North Africa. As the nation’s top diplomat, Hillary forwarded her old supplicant’s amateur pontifications “to senior diplomatic officials in Libya and Washington and at times ask[ed] them to respond,” the newspaper reported. The former Miss Rodham “continued to pass around” Field Marshal Blumenthal’s “memos even after other senior diplomats concluded that Mr. Blumenthal’s assessments were often unreliable.”

Revived Questions about Huma Abedin

My article in today's FrontPage magazine:

Revived Questions about Huma Abedin

By Matthew Vadum

Republican lawmakers are probing why Hillary Clinton’s longtime Islamist aide Huma Abedin was allowed to work at the State Department under a special, part-time status while simultaneously working at a politically-connected consulting firm.

Demands for information are coming from Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) after the public learned both women used Clinton’s private Internet server and email accounts for Department of State correspondence.

But that’s only part of the endless sleaze and intrigue surrounding Clinton.

The media has also reported that Sidney Blumenthal, the Clinton administration damage-control expert known for his relentless attacks on Clinton family enemies and for being the father of Israel-hating pseudo-journalist Max Blumenthal, was apparently doing freelance work for Mrs. Clinton. Clinton tried to hire the elder Blumenthal at State but the Obama White House nixed the appointment because of Blumenthal’s aggressively slimy attacks on Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign.

After Blumenthal’s email was hacked in 2013, it was revealed that “starting weeks before” the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, “Blumenthal supplied intelligence” to then-Secretary Clinton that was “gathered by a secret network that included a former CIA clandestine service officer.”

Reports got some of the details wrong, according to the Wall Street Journal‘s James Taranto.

“The reporters asked the most obvious question and got a partial answer: ‘A Clinton spokesman told Gawker and ProPublica . . . that she has turned over’—meaning to the State Department—’all the emails Blumenthal sent to [Mrs.] Clinton,'” he writes.

That is incorrect, Taranto notes. “[I]n reality she turned over no emails, only printouts,” which are of limited value as evidence.

Meanwhile, as evidence continues to accumulate that Clinton’s cavalier approach to state secrets put U.S. national security in jeopardy, the shady background of Abedin, who has known ties to the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood, is barely acknowledged on Capitol Hill.

Instead of examining Abedin’s disturbing family ties that make her employment by the U.S. government a threat to national security, Grassley is honing in on the sweetheart arrangement that allowed the operative to get on the public payroll while raking in money from private consulting.