Free Republic

And you thought Sidney Blumenthal was shady. Few people have heard of Cody Shearer, the unsanctioned diplomat, private eye, and Clinton flunky whose name surfaced in connection with the so-called intelligence reports Sidney Blumenthal was channeling to Hillary Clinton during her time at the State Department. But this shadowy fixture of the Clinton machine was everywhere in the 1990s — including war-torn Bosnia, where he became the subject of a State Department investigation after he represented himself as an agent of the U.S. government and took cash from a genocidal warlord.

wo big Clinton stories landed last week. The first is that Hillary Clinton destroyed the electronic copies of her State Department emails on her private server after the State Department subpoenaed her emails. The second is that Hillary Clinton had an aide running a "secret spy network" that was, among other things, feeding her information on Benghazi, according to a report by Pro Publica and Gawker. Earlier this month, I noted the myriad ways that Clinton running her own private email server breathes new life into the Benghazi investigation, but this last revelation takes things to a whole new level....

Spinal Tap has reunited — this time in a Los Angeles court to challenge the French studio Vivendi S.A. for millions in profits from the mockumentary “This Is Spinal Tap.” Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Rob Reiner on Tuesday joined a federal lawsuit filed last year by bandmate and Spinal Tap co-creator Harry Shearer. Shearer, who also voices numerous characters on “The Simpsons,” sued Vivendi S.A. and its subsidiary StudioCanal in October alleging that the companies fraudulently withheld profits from the 1984 film. …

Have you seen the Dos Equis “Most Interesting Man in the World” ads? Well now check out "Bill White: the Most Mysterious Liberal in the World" ad!

Revelations from emails purloined by a Romanian hacker show that Hillary Clinton was being secretly advised about Libya -- before and after the Benghazi terrorist attack -- by an off-the-shelf private spook group associated with controversial former Clinton confidante Sydney Blumenthal that claimed to be helping the Libyan opposition and considered placing ground operatives near the border. What's this all about? It's not completely clear, but apparently the goal of the rogue group, which included a former high level CIA covert operative and a former U.S. General, was, at the very least, to gather and provide sensitive reports to the...

And you thought Sidney Blumenthal was shady. Few people have heard of Cody Shearer, the unsanctioned diplomat, private eye, and Clinton flunky whose name surfaced in connection with the so-called intelligence reports Sidney Blumenthal was channeling to Hillary Clinton during her time at the State Department. But this shadowy fixture of the Clinton machine was everywhere in the 1990s — including war-torn Bosnia, where he became the subject of a State Department investigation after he represented himself as an agent of the U.S. government and took cash from a genocidal warlord. Now evidence suggests Shearer, working with his partner Blumenthal,...

...Hillary’s private email server acted as portal to a private intelligence network that included retired members of special operations, former CIA clandestine personnel and foreign informers. Acting in some indeterminate capacity over it was Sidney Blumenthal, former aide to president Bill Clinton and now apparently a retainer to the family dynasty. It was the compromise of Blumenthal’s emails by the Romanian hacker Guccifer that in part led to journalists to discover Hillary’s private email account. Publicly available sources describe Guccifer as a taxi driver who penetrated the email accounts of the Bush family, Colin Powell and of course Sidney Blumenthal...

Harry Shearer, the voice of Ned Flanders, Mr. Burns, Principal Skinner, Otto, Smithers, and many more on The Simpsons, has apparently left the show. Shearer used Twitter to indicate that he wouldn't be returning in upcoming seasons of the long, long-running cartoon, suggesting that his desire to work on other projects was the reason for the decision. The actor quoted Simpsons writer and producer James L. Brooks' lawyer, who reportedly said that while the "show will go on, Harry will not be part of it."

Jeff Gerth and Sam Biddle explore an important sidebar both to the affair of the Hillary Clinton homebrew email server and to the Benghazi scandal: “Private emails reveal ex-Clinton aide’s secret spy network.” Long story short: enter Sid Blumenthal, one of the most unsavory characters of the Clinton era. Enter Sid Blumenthal along with Tyler Drumheller and Cody Shearer, that is. Mark Hemingway reviews the triumvirate in “Meet the men behind Hillary Clinton’s private ‘spy network’” Ed Morrissey finds NBC’s Chuck Todd commenting regarding Blumenthal that “nothing regarding Blumenthal surprises me,” but Blumenthal enters the story from left field. Gerth...

A Huffington Post blog, "Hillary As An Agent of Change," authored by Derek Shearer was posted yesterday to reassure the "progressives" that Hillary Clinton is really one of their own. Despite the common view among the left that Hillary is a status quo type, Shearer lets us know that she is really quite liberal as you can see in these excerpts: ... Hillary would be a strong leader who manages change in the public interest-at home and abroad--in the manner of FDR or Harry Truman. She is, in fact, the true heir to the New Deal tradition of the Democratic Party,...

Updated March 27 to include responses from the FBI and the State Department. Emails disclosed by a hacker show a close family friend was funneling intelligence about the crisis in Libya directly to the Secretary of State’s private account starting before the Benghazi attack. Starting weeks before Islamic militants attacked the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, longtime Clinton family confidante Sidney Blumenthal supplied intelligence to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gathered by a secret network that included a former CIA clandestine service officer, according to hacked emails from Blumenthal’s account. The emails, which were posted on the internet...