Within days of the first reports, the story of Hillary Clinton’s secret spy ring is percolating as a subset of the E-Mail Scandal

“Mrs. Clinton’s ‘Vicious’ Circle - The secretary had a private spy network” –  WSJ

Breakthrough was tied to hacking of certain secret Blumenthal-Clinton E-mails by a convicted Romanian criminal hacker

In a  “...  ‘stunning’ and ‘breath-taking’ course of events, Jeff Gerth of Propublica came on Breitbart News Sunday to discuss his recent article detailing how an ex-Hillary Clinton aide crafted a secret spying network in the lead up to the Benghazi terror attack and corresponded with Clinton via her private email account...” –  Breitbart News

“The Weekly Standard” also did a feature on the Blumenthal-Clinton E-mails hacked by Marcel-Lehel “Guccifer” Lazar — also naming and giving the pedigree of Clinton Operatives:  Sidney Blumenthal, Tyler Drumhiller, and Cody Shearer 

Within days of the earlier reports on the subject, including the Sunday post on this blog ( See “THE ULTRA VIRES SECRETARY OF STATE HILLARY CLINTON: Was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton [and/or her private operatives] running an Un-official, “Off-Book” or “Back Channel” Operation In Libya ? by Galewyn Massey, 3/29/15, Brooklyn Independent GOP Fountainhead [above on this blog] [http://galewynmassey.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-ultra-vires-secretary-of-state.html ]) the story has been picked up and carried by major outlets like the Wall Street Journal, Breitbart News and “The Weekly Standard” just on Monday.

COVERAGE BY THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

According to a report in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, “... the journalistic odd couple of ProPublica and Gawker report that as secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton appears to have relied on not only a private communication network but a private intelligence network. We know this thanks to a Romanian criminal, Marcel-Lehel “Guccifer” Lazar, who in 2013 hacked the email of Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime Clinton family consigliere. ***  The Blumenthal hack had been reported [and noted in the Wall Street Journal on] March 3. The new story goes into considerable detail and raises questions about Benghazi. According to ProPub/Gawker’s reviews of the purloined messages, “starting weeks before” the September 2012 attack [on Benghazi], ‘Blumenthal supplied intelligence’ to Secretary Clinton that was ‘gathered by a secret network that included a former CIA clandestine service officer.’ ***   The reporters asked the most obvious question and got a partial answer: ‘A Clinton spokesman told Gawker and ProPublica... that she has turned over’—  meaning to the State Department  — ‘all the emails Blumenthal sent to [Mrs.] Clinton.’ Again, in reality she turned over no emails, only printouts. ***   Left unanswered is the question whether she turned over printouts of emails she sent to Blumenthal. ‘There’s no indication in Blumenthal’s emails whether [Mrs.] Clinton read or replied to them before she left State on February 1, 2013 ’ ...” (See “Mrs. Clinton’s ‘Vicious’ Circle - The secretary had a private spy network” by James Taranto,  3/30/15, Wall Street Journal/ Best of the Web [http://www.wsj.com/articles/mrs-clintons-vicious-circle-1427744871]).

The Wall Street Journal goes on to say that  “...[t]he ProPub/Gawker report raises but does not answer other questions: ‘It’s unclear who tasked Blumenthal, known for his fierce loyalty to the Clintons, with preparing detailed intelligence briefs. It’s also not known who was paying him, or where the operation got its money.’...”   However WSJ does note that “... [i]t does seem to have been a serious operation: ‘The memos were marked “confidential” and relied in many cases on “sensitive” sources in the Libyan opposition and Western intelligence and security services. . . . The reports appear to have been gathered and prepared by Tyler Drumheller, a former chief of the CIA’s clandestine service in Europe,” who now runs an eponymous consulting firm. Among the emails is an exchange in which Drumheller and Blumenthal haggle over the former’s request for $60,000 to cover expenses for sending operatives to Tunisia....”

The Wall Street Journal also asks some questions that it is not able to answer, such as this: “Did Blumenthal’s intelligence play a role in the government’s botched response to the Benghazi attack? There’s no way to know without further investigation, but the ProPub/Gawker report does suggest that the State Department itself was not exactly on the ball [giving details of the poor State Department operation(s) in place in Libya and the region around the time of the Benghazi attack in 2012].

WHY BLUMENTHAL WAS A “FREELANCE” OPERATOR FOR CLINTON

The Wall Street Journal also said this:  “One thing we do know is why Blumenthal was acting freelance rather than working for the State Department, where he would have been subject to background checks, security clearance and the obligation to preserve his own correspondence: Mrs. Clinton ‘tried to hire him . . . in 2009, but White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel reportedly nixed the idea on the grounds Blumenthal was a divisive figure whose attacks on Obama during the Democratic primary had poisoned his relationship with the new administration.’...”

BREITBART NEWS RADIO INTERVIEWS ORIGINAL CO-AUTHOR  —   JEFF GERTH, TWO-TIME PULITZER WINNER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

“In what Breitbart Executive Chairman, Stephen K. Bannon, referred to as a ‘stunning’ and ‘breath-taking’ course of events, Jeff Gerth of Propublica came on Breitbart News Sunday to discuss his recent article detailing how an ex-Hillary Clinton aide crafted a secret spying network in the lead up to the Benghazi terror attack and corresponded with Clinton via her private email account. ***   Longtime Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal’s hacked emails exposed the massive spy network, Breitbart News reported on Sunday....” (See “Journalist Who Unveiled Hillary Spy Network Draws Irna Contra Parallel” by Robert Wilde, 3/30/15, Breitbart News [http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/03/30/exclusive-journalist-who-unveiled-hillary-spy-network-draws-parallels-to-iran-contra/]).

COMPARISON TO IRAN-CONTRA AND A PRIOR LIBYAN OFF-BOOK OPERATION  —   “POLITICAL FIRESTORMS,” WHICH ENDED IN PRISON OR PRESIDENTIAL PARDONS
When the Breitbart interviewer asked Gerth, “Have you ever in your investigations, and you’re stretch as a two time Pulitzer Prize winner investigative journalist for the paper of record in this country, have you ever seen anything in your professional career like this?” Gerth answered by reminding Stephen K. Bannon that he has been doing this for forty years and that there were two instances of which this reminded him.

Gerth then said that the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton email/spy network episode drew some parallels “with the stuff that came out in Iran-Contra with Richard Secord and other people who were out operating… in Nicaragua with the Contras.” Gerth also added that it reminded him of a story that he investigated on the CIA operative and business tycoon, Edwin Wilson, who went to prison for selling arms to Libya back in the late 70’s.

Significantly, Gerth agreed with Breitbart’s Executive Chairman’s characterization that these events were pivotal political “firestorms.”   The Jeff Gerth pointed out that  “Ed Wilson went to jail for decades, and some of the people, of course, in the Nicaraguan Contra situation, either went to jail or were convicted and got pardoned.”

Gerth also said that “there was actual human intelligence sources inside of Libya, for example, who were gathering information and passing it on through this channel. Ultimately winding up in Secretary Clinton’s email account.”

THE WEEKLY STANDARD NAMES HILLARY CLINTON’S NON-GOVERNMENTAL CLANDESTINE OPERATIVES  —   AND SHOWS THEIR PRIOR ASSOCIATIONS WITH THE CLINTONS

There was a similar account of the ProPublica-Gawker report in the Neo-Cons’ main outlet, “The Weekly Standard” ( See “Meet the Men Behind Hillary Clinton's Private 'Spy Network' ” by Mark Hemingway, 3/30/15, The Weekly Standard
[https://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/whos-behind-hillary-clintons-secret-spy-ring_901675.html]).  As the title implies, the article was a who’s who of Clinton operatives. Specifically, this report suggests that three men -- Sidney Blumenthal, Tyler Drumhiller, and Cody Shearer -- were involved in Hillary Clinton’s private intelligence gathering efforts. In addition, according to “The Weekly Standard,” each of these men has a reputation for being associated with their own and other Clinton scandals. The Standard goes into some detail about such scandalous material for each of them.

SPIES, SPY RINGS AND ILLEGAL HACKING BY A CONVICTED FOREIGN HACKER ADD SPICE TO THE UNDERLYING HILARY CLINTON E-MAIL SCANDAL