Hillary Rodham Clinton’s longtime adviser Sidney Blumenthal on Tuesday testified before a US congressional committee that dozens of memos he sent her when she was US secretary of state were written by a longtime high-ranking CIA official.
During a seven-and-a-half-hour deposition behind closed doors before the US House of Representatives committee investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, Blumenthal identified the official as Tyler Drumheller, according to a person with knowledge of his testimony.
Drumheller was part of a group of former US intelligence and military officials seeking to do business in Libya as the government of Muammar Qaddafi fell in 2011 and was replaced by a coalition of rebel forces.
Speaking to reporters after the deposition, committee Chairman Trey Gowdy raised questions about the credibility of the official because of his financial interests.
“It means that one of the folks providing her with the largest volume of information was simply and merely a conduit” of someone who “may very well have had business interests in Libya,” Gowdy said.
Blumenthal and Gowdy, making short statements to reporters after the hearing, did not identify Drumheller, although Blumenthal said that the author of the e-mailed memos was a “respected” official.
He added that he had told Clinton that he was not writing the memos and that she could use the information “as she saw fit.”
About the time last month when the US Department of State released a trove of Clinton’s e-mails about Libya, Gowdy subpoenaed Blumenthal to appear before the committee.
Among the about 900 pages of e-mails that were made public, about one-third were intelligence memos that Blumenthal had sent to Clinton about Libya in 2011 and 2012.
On Friday last week, Blumenthal turned over to the panel 120 pages of e-mails he had exchanged with her.
However, Gowdy on Tuesday cast doubt on the reliability of the information in the memos, saying that it had not been vetted.
The memos, which Clinton circulated widely, stand in stark contrast to the intelligence reports prepared for senior US officials through a rigorous interagency process.
“I am interested in the reliability of the information being presented to our top diplomat, and the reality is, having been in the room all day, he has absolutely no idea whether the information is credible or not,” Gowdy said.
Drumheller, a career CIA clandestine officer, gained notice for his public accusations that former US president George W. Bush’s administration ignored warnings from spies that the White House was overstating claims about Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons program before the Iraq invasion in 2003.
In particular, Drumheller said that he had tried unsuccessfully to get assertions that former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein had developed mobile biological weapons laboratories removed from then-US secretary of state Colin Powell’s speech to the UN in January 2003.
The claims about the biological labs were shown to be fabrications from an Iraqi defector, code-named Curveball.
Blumenthal said his deposition as a stunt by US Republicans aimed at drawing negative attention to Clinton rather than offering insight into the attacks, which killed four Americans.
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