Sidney Blumenthal, a confidant who was paid by the Clinton Foundation, told the Select Committee on Benghazi Tuesday that the information he supplied the sitting Secretary of State came from a “respected former high-ranking CIA official,”
Sources close to the Benghazi investigation identified the official as Tyler Drumheller, a 25-year veteran of the CIA who retired from the agency in 2005 and has since worked in private consulting.
After retiring from the CIA, Drumheller emerged as a vocal and high-profile critic of the second Bush administration’s post-9/11 intelligence analysis and push to invade Iraq.
In his 2006 account of the buildup to the Iraq war, he accused the administration of allowing politics to distort intelligence assessments, including the vetting of testimony used by the government to make the claim that Saddam Hussein had a biological weapons program.
Since his retirement, Drumheller has also contributed to various Democratic politicians, according to records maintained by the Center for Responsive Politics. In 2005, he contributed a combined $800 to the Senate campaigns of former Sens. Mark Pryor and Mary Landrieu, and donated $500 to Rep. Bill Pascrell, D-New Jersey, in 2011, the Center for Responsive Politics said.
Clinton often sent Drumheller’s memos to aides with instructions to print, or “distribute as you determine,” according to emails released by the State Department. While some featured approving commentary (“very interesting,” she wrote on an August 2012 memo on Libya’s new president), others were met with more skepticism (“This one strains credulity,” she wrote of a March 2012 memo claiming France and the United Kingdom engineered Libya’s civil war.)
In 2001 and 2002, Mr. Drumheller served as European Division chief at the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, where he was a highly controversial figure whose disinformation campaigns often landed him in hot water. As investigative journalist Kenneth Timmerman has pointed out, Mr. Drumheller was at the center of the Niger uranium story later used by the left and the press to claim that President George W. Bush had “lied” about Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). “On three separate occasions,” Mr. Timmerman wrote, “he passed the Niger information up the food chain as validated intelligence, when the CIA had been warned that it was not.”
On Sept. 6, 2007, Mr. Blumenthal published a column at Salon.com in which he cited an April 2006 “60 Minutes” interview with Mr. Drumheller, who claimed that the CIA had received “documentary intelligence” from Saddam’s foreign minister that he did not have WMD. In his column, Mr. Blumenthal stated “two former senior CIA officers have confirmed Drumheller’s account to me,” leading Mr. Blumenthal to accuse Mr. Bush of “lying.”
It appears that Mr. Drumheller and Mr. Blumenthal were simpatico, at least regarding criticism of pre-war intelligence. Was that, in fact, the start of a mutually beneficial relationship? After leaving the CIA, Mr. Drumheller advised John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign; three years later, he and Mr. Blumenthal worked on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.