Free Republic

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...

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,...

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...