On Tuesday, Sidney Blumenthal, longtime friend and confidant to Bill and Hillary Clinton, is scheduled to testify before the House committee investigating the 2012 Benghazi attacks and ABC’s Good Morning America and NBC’s Today ignored it altogether. CBS This Morning devoted a mere 20 second news brief to the story during its Tuesday broadcast.
CBS's Gayle King described how “[a] longtime friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton faces a grilling by lawmakers investigating the Benghazi attacks. Sidney Blumenthal will testify this morning about e-mails to the then-Secretary State Clinton. He offered her advice about growing unrest in Libya. The 2012 attacks killed 4 Americans including Ambassador Christopher Stevens.”
According to the New York Times’ Michael S. Schmidt, the e-mails between Clinton and Blumenthal “raise new questions about whether the State Department and Mrs. Clinton have complied with a series of requests from the panel.”
King vaguely mentioned that Blumenthal gave Mrs. Clinton “advice about growing unrest in Libya” but the CBS anchor failed to explain, as the Times did, the extent of their e-mail correspondence and the details contained within:
The emails, provided by Sidney Blumenthal, a close adviser to Mrs. Clinton, include information about weapons that were circulating in Libya and about the security situation in Benghazi in the year and a half before the attacks. The committee has asked the State Department and Mrs. Clinton several times in the past year for emails from her and other department officials about “weapons located or found in” Libya and about the decision to open and maintain a diplomatic mission in Benghazi.
But the panel has called that an excuse to protect Mrs. Clinton and to slow the investigation of the attacks, which occurred on Sept. 11, 2012, and resulted in the deaths of four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens.
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In response to a subpoena from the committee, Mr. Blumenthal on Friday handed over dozens of pages of emails between him and Mrs. Clinton. The emails are similar to others between Mr. Blumenthal and Mrs. Clinton that were provided to the committee by the State Department in February.
Those included dozens of memos about Libya that Mr. Blumenthal sent to Mrs. Clinton. She forwarded many of them to her deputies to seek feedback. The deputies often said that Mr. Blumenthal’s information was false or misleading.
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In the emails he gave to the committee, there are several references to weapons in Libya. One describes how a Libyan opposition leader feared that the United States did not want to provide weapons to opposition groups because the arms could fall into the hands of Al Qaeda or other radical Islamist groups. Another email included a list of weapons said to be possessed by the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
