This probably needs its own thread, but…
Bernie Sanders may have been chivalrous when he told a beleaguered Hillary Clinton, “The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails.” But when it comes to actually reading some of Clinton’s confidential exchanges, that’s another matter.
In December 2014, Hillary Rodham Clinton began providing the State Department with personal emails sent or received during her tenure as Secretary of State. The final batch was released on February 29, 2016. The entire collection is now posted on the State Department’s Public Reading Room and is searchable via this link.
But the collection is not complete. Clinton admits to having deleted 32,000 emails“deemed private.” Among the missing are a number of politically charged emails sent to Secretary Clinton by a trusted colleague named Sidney Blumenthal. Blumenthal’s emails were allegedly captured and copied by Marcel Lazar Lehel, an unemployed Romanian taxi driver better known as “Guccifer” and “Small Fume.” In April of this year, Lehel became an instant celebrity after he was identified as the cyber-savvy interloper who had hacked into Clinton’s official email account during her time as Secretary of State. (Lehel was recently awarded an all-expenses-paid trip from a Romanian prison to the US where he will spend his days in an American jail cell under 18-month extradition order.)
Guccifer’s sudden celebrity may seem a bit odd, given the fact that he initially released Clinton’s compromised communiqués some time ago—back in 2013, to be precise.
Before Guccifer became tabloid-fodder in the West, he had already popped a number of eyes by sharing his disclosures with the Russian media organization RT (“Hillary Clinton’s ‘hacked’ Benghazi emails: FULL RELEASE“) on March 20, 2013. (A second bundle of Guccifer’s Blumenthal-Clinton emails was released on March 22, 2013.)
Given the current frenzy over Guccifer and his revelations, it is remarkable that his headline-grabbing “leaks” went virtually unreported when he first twisted the spigot back in 2013. At the time, the mainstream media took little notice. The only “news outlets” to pick up on Guccifer’s cyber-pranks were a few conspiracy sites like The Smoking Gun and Cryptome. [Note: You may experience trouble trying to access the Cryptome website.]
The tranche of Clinton’s “damn emails” subsequently posted by RT included some pretty damning revelations. Perhaps none was more shocking than the disclosure that the deadly attack on the American consulate in Benghazi on September 11, 2012—which took the life of US ambassador John Christopher “Chris” Stevens—was secretly financed by powerful figures in Saudi Arabia.
This information was contained within the text of four messages Secretary Clinton received from Blumenthal. It should be noted that Blumenthal was not an employee of the US State Department. He was an employee of the Clinton Foundation, earning salary of $10,000 a month as a consultant providing memo-worthy Intel to Secretary Clinton. On the side, Blumenthal also was serving an entrepreneurial role inside a Libyan company called Osprey that was hoping to reap lucrative medical and military contracts under the new post-Qadaffi government. (Since such business deals could require State Department approval, Hillary Clinton might be asked someday whether this relationship with Blumenthal posed a “conflict of interest.”)
