Bombshell? Clinton relied on faulty intel from businessman/friend in Libya

As Hillary Clinton lays low, it's becoming increasingly clear that her emails generated while serving as secretary of state -- those that are slowly being released by the State Department and those that she deleted from her private Internet server -- will emerge as a far more contentious presidential campaign issue than many pundits previously envisioned.

The New York Times has a potential bombshell piece today in which they report that  a longtime confidante of the Clintons fed her faulty intelligence on the 2012 chaos in Libya, during the Arab Spring, in order to benefit his business interests.

A summary by Mediaite reveals that Sydney Blumenthal, a former Bill Clinton aide and speechwriter, sent Hillary Clinton intelligence memos of questionable veracity based on information he had received from the barely emergent transition government in Libya.

Blumenthal was an employee of the Clinton Foundation at the time and an adviser for the Constellations Group, a private consulting company that hoped to “pursue business leads in Libya”.

While the Constellations Group was on the ground in Libya, Blumenthal sent supposedly insider information to Hillary Clinton, who then sent the memos around to senior State Department officials. According to emails obtained by the Times, not only did Blumenthal’s reports lack the usual rigorous fact-checking and vetting, they seemed outwardly inaccurate to her staff.
“Some of Mr. Blumenthal’s memos urged Mrs. Clinton to consider rumors that other American diplomats knew at the time to be false,” the Times noted. “Not infrequently, Mrs. Clinton’s subordinates replied to the memos with polite skepticism."

One diplomat noted that Blumenthal's advice was unreliable to the extent that he "confused Libyan politicians with the same surname."

Now, Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, the Republican leading the latest congressional committee investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, plans to subpoena Blumenthal.

According to the Times, Gowdy’s primary interest is a series of memos that Blumenthal wrote to Clinton about events unfolding in Libya before and after the death of Col. Muammar Qaddafi. Clinton took Blumenthal’s advice seriously and she continued to pass around his memos even after other senior diplomats concluded that Blumenthal’s assessments were often unreliable.

Here's more from the Times:               

"... Blumenthal’s involvement was more wide-ranging and more complicated than previously known, embodying the blurry lines between business, politics and philanthropy that have enriched and vexed the Clintons and their inner circle for years.

"While advising Clinton on Libya, Blumenthal, who had been barred from a State Department job by aides to President Obama, was also employed by her family’s philanthropy, the Clinton Foundation, to help with research, 'message guidance' and the planning of commemorative events.

"... During the same period, he also worked on and off as a paid consultant to ... organizations that helped lay the groundwork for Clinton’s 2016 campaign.

"Much of the Libya intelligence that Blumenthal passed on to Clinton appears to have come from a group of business associates he was advising as they sought to win contracts from the Libyan transitional government. The venture, which was ultimately unsuccessful, involved other Clinton friends, a private military contractor and one former CIA spy seeking to get in on the ground floor of the new Libyan economy."