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politics and politicians Title: Meet the Men Behind Hillary Clinton's Private 'Spy Network' Specifically, this new report suggests that three men -- Sidney Blumenthal, Tyler Drumhiller, and Cody Shearer -- were involved in her private intelligence gathering efforts. Each of these men has a reputation for being associated with scandal. We only know about Clinton's spy ring because a hacker who goes by the moniker "Guccifer" hacked the email account of former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal and posted his emails online. (Guccifer is now serving a prison sentence in his native Romania.) Guccifer's emails reveal Blumenthal was providing Clinton with detailed intelligence briefings on events in the Middle East and running the ad hoc spy ring. This arrangement is very curious, considering that the Obama White House made it clear that they didn't want Blumenthal working for the administration after Hillary Clinton previously tried to formally hire him to work at the State Department. Blumenthal is a controversial figure to put it mildly; Andrew Sullivan called the former New Yorker scribe "the most pro-Clinton writer on the planet." He was the subject of intense scrutiny during the Clinton impeachment hearings. The late Christopher Hitchens submitted an affidavit during the Clinton impeachment hearings aleging that Blumenthal had told him that Monica Lewinsky was a "stalker," and subsequently excoriated his former friend for his lack of ethics in his book on the Clintons, No One Left To Lie To. Blumenthal carries a lot of other baggage, as well, such as his virulently anti-Israel, frequently factually challenged son, Max. One memo was sent on August 23, 2012, less than three weeks before Islamic militants stormed the diplomatic outpost in Benghazi. It cites “an extremely sensitive source” who highlighted a string of bombings and kidnappings of foreign diplomats and aid workers in Tripoli, Benghazi and Misrata, suggesting they were the work of people loyal to late Libyan Prime Minister Muammar Gaddafi. While the memo doesn’t rise to the level of a warning about the safety of U.S. diplomats, it portrays a deteriorating security climate. Clinton noted a few days after the Benghazi attack, which left four dead and 10 people injured, that U.S. intelligence officials didn’t have advance knowledge of the threat. On September 12, 2012, the day after the Benghazi attack, Blumenthal sent a memo that cited a “sensitive source” saying that the interim Libyan president, Mohammed Yussef el Magariaf, was told by a senior security officer that the assault was inspired by an anti-Muslim video made in the U.S., as well as by allegations from Magariaf’s political opponents that he had CIA ties. Blumenthal followed up the next day with an email titled “Re: More Magariaf private reax.” It said Libyan security officials believed an Islamist radical group called the Ansa al Sharia brigade had prepared the attack a month in advance and “took advantage of the cover” provided by the demonstrations against the video. So Clinton knew the security situation in Libya was deteriorating before Benghazi, and she was told it was a premeditated terror attack two days afterward. Nevertheless, the Obama administration continued to insist it was not a terror attack and was merely the result of a spontaneous uprising in reaction to a blasphemous YouTube video. It should also be noted that Blumenthal's intelligence reports weren't limited to the Middle East; they also dealt with the goings-on in Europe. Here Blumenthal had an interesting source: Indeed, though they were sent under Blumenthal’s name, the reports appear to have been gathered and prepared by Tyler Drumheller, a former chief of the CIA’s clandestine service in Europe who left the agency in 2005. Since then, he has established a consulting firm called Tyler Drumheller, LLC. He has also been affiliated with a firm called DMC Worldwide, which he co-founded with Washington, D.C., attorney Danny Murray and former general counsel to the U.S. Capitol Police John Caulfield. DMC Worldwide’s now-defunct website describes it at as offering “innovative security and intelligence solutions to global risks in a changing world.” The Gawker and Pro Publica report doesn't delve into it, but Drumheller has his own political baggage. Drumheller briefly became a darling of the left after he told a congressional committee looking into the intelligence used to make the case for the war in Iraq that he knew sources the CIA was relying on regarding WMD in Iraq were flawed. After leaving the agency, Drumheller also wrote a book portraying himself as doomed hero who tried to warn his CIA superiors that the WMD intelligence was flawed. He was also interviewed by 60 Minutes and served as a source for the New Yorker's Jane Mayer who emerged as one of the Bush administration's toughest critics. In Drumheller's telling, the CIA recruited Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri in Europe during the late summer of 2002. According to his Wikipedia entry, Sabri "told the CIA that Saddam did not have an active nuclear or biological weapons program." Wikipedia's citation for this claim is a 2007 article at Salon.com authored by none other than Sidney Blumenthal. In that article, Blumenthal leans heavily on Drumheller's version of events, and Blumenthal claims that two anonymous CIA sources support Drumheller's version of events. Drumheller further claims that Sabri's assertion that Iraq did not have WMD programs was ignored in favor of contrary intelligence provided by a German source that went by the name "Curve Ball." As the CIA's man in Europe, Drumheller says he tried to inform his superiors that Curve Ball was unreliable and that his warnings were ignored. As for Drumheller's claims about Sabri, a 2006 Senate Intelligence Committee minority report pushed back against Drumheller -- hard: "We can say that there is not a single document related to this case which indicates that the source said Iraq had no WMD programs. On the contrary, all of the information about this case so far indicates that the information from this source was that Iraq did have WMD programs." It's true that Curve Ball's intelligence did not turn out to be reliable. However, Drumheller's story that he heroically tried to warn his superiors about Curve Ball in advance of the Iraq war doesn't seem to hold up to any scrutiny at all. Former CIA director George Tenet -- who headed the agency under both Clinton and Bush -- takes pages in his book At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA to call out Drumheller for not telling the truth and dismantle his version of events brick by brick. Tenet’s case against Drumheller is exhaustive and damning, but here a few choice passages: Drumheller, whom I always considered to be a capable officer, now says the German [intelligence counterpart] told him, “You do not want to see him [Curve Ball] because he’s crazy. Speaking to him would be ‘a waste of time.’” The German reportedly went on to say that his service was not sure whether Curve Ball was telling the truth, that he had serious doubts about Curve Ball’s mental stability and reliability. Curve Ball, he said, may have had a nervous breakdown. Further, the [German Intelligence Service] BND representative worried that Curve Ball was “a fabricator.” According to Drumheller’s account, the German cautioned, however, that the BND would publicly and officially deny these views if pressed, because they did not wish to be embarrassed. If that is true, this is how it should have played out: What the German had to say at that lunch in late September or early October 2002 should have been immediately and formally disseminated as a matter of record in a report that would have alerted intelligence and policy officials to the potential problem with Curve Ball. A second, corresponding formal report also should have been instantly sent across the intelligence and policy communities to analysts and policy makers who had received previous Curve Ball reporting. The transmittal of these two reports would have immediately alerted experts doing the work on Iraq WMD issues across the intelligence community to a problem requiring resolution. No such report was disseminated, nor was the issue ever brought to my attention. In fact, I’ve been told that subsequent investigations have produced not a single piece of paper anywhere at CIA documenting Drumheller’s meeting with the German. The lead analyst on this case in our Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control Center (WINPAC) insists she was never told about the meeting. ... Drumheller has told the media in various interviews that he personally went to see John McLaughlin about the time of Colin Powell’s UN speech to express concern about Curve Ball’s information. He has said he doesn’t remember John’s exact response but that it was something to the effect of “Oh my, I hope that’s not true.” John is convinced that this did not happen. I have absolute confidence that had such a meeting taken place, John would have pursued the matter in the meticulous style for which he is well known. He fought steadfastly against White House attempts to stretch the evidence on Iraq–al-Qa’ida ties. He understood the importance being placed on Curve Ball’s information, and he would have battled just as hard to keep Curve Ball’s information out of the Powell speech had someone made the case to him that it posed problems. If Drumheller or anyone had brought to John McLaughlin or me these doubts about Curve Ball’s credibility, let alone his sanity, we would have gone to great lengths immediately to resolve the matter. Unfortunately, the first either of us learned of Tyler Drumheller’s lunch with the German BND official and of the latter’s supposed warnings—and his refusal to stand publicly behind them—was when we were interviewed by the Silberman-Robb Commission as it prepared its March 2005 report, two years too late to do a damn thing about it. Our senior officer in Germany at the time says Drumheller never apprised him of the luncheon conversation, nor did the Silberman-Robb Commission ever interview him. The German BND representative was asked by CIA officers in 2005 about his 2002 lunch with Drumheller. He denied ever having called Curve Ball a “fabricator” and said he only warned that he was a “single source” whose information the Germans could not independently verify. A search of CIA records in 2005 revealed that a cable did come in to our headquarters from our rep in Germany on December 20, 2002. The cable went to Drumheller’s office for action. It contained a letter addressed to me from the chief of the BND saying that Curve Ball would not agree to go public himself and that CIA would not be able to debrief him in person. It said that the Germans did not object to the public use of Curve Ball’s information, as long as we protected the source. The letter went on to explain how the Germans had shared his information with at least two other foreign intelligence services and three U.S. intelligence agencies. It said they found his information “plausible” but that they could not independently verify what he was saying. As far as I can tell, that cable never left Drumheller’s desk in the European Division at Langley. … In 2005 Drumheller told the Silberman-Robb Commission that he spoke with me on the telephone around midnight when I was in New York on the eve of Colin Powell’s UN presentation in February 2003. In a Frontline special in 2006, Drumheller claimed that he said, “Boss…there’s a lot of problems with that German reporting, you know that?” And that I replied, “Yeah, don’t worry about it; we’ve got it.” I remember no such midnight call or warning. Drumheller and I did speak very briefly earlier in the evening, but our conversation had nothing to do with Curve Ball; rather it involved getting clearance from the British to use some of their intelligence in the speech. According to a CIA memorandum for the record, in speaking to Senate Intelligence Committee staffers in 2005, Drumheller said that “way too much emphasis” was being placed on the phone call, and when asked if he could confirm that I understood what he was trying to convey in the purported phone call about Curve Ball, he responded, “No, not really.” Drumheller had dozens of opportunities before and after the Powell speech to raise the alarm with me, yet he failed to do so. A search of my calendar between February 5, 2003, the date of the Powell speech, and July 11, 2004, the date of my stepping down as DCI, shows that Drumheller was in my office twenty-two times. And yet he seems never to have thought that it might be worth telling the boss that he had reason to believe a central pillar in the case against Saddam might have been a mirage. In fact, it seemed that just the opposite was communicated. In May 27, 2003, the head of the German BND, August Hanning, paid me a visit in Washington. My office received an e-mail from Drumheller’s deputy, with a copy that went to Tyler, recommending that I be sure to thank Hanning for agreeing to allow us to use the Curve Ball material in our public discussions. In advance of Hanning’s visit, I received a memo laying out our goals for the session, a matter of course before every meeting with a foreign intelligence official. The memo was signed by Tyler Drumheller. The first page included a list of five suggested talking points to advance our goals. Number three, all in bold, suggests that I: Thank Dr. Hanning for the Iraqi WMD information provided by the BND asset “Curve Ball.” Inform Dr. Hanning that we would like to work with the BND to craft an approach to Curve Ball to secure his cooperation in locating evidence of Iraq’s biological weapons (BW) programs, and about the direct involvement of Dr. Rihab Taha al-Azzawi in Iraq’s mobile BW program. If the chief of the European Division believed that it was a mistake for us to use the Curve Ball material and knew that the Germans had warned us off it, why was he asking me to thank the Germans? So Hillary Clinton was getting intelligence briefings on the side from someone the former CIA director made great pains single out as untrustworthy. And yet, there's one more troubling member of this spy network. According to the Gawker/Pro Publica report: In one exchange in March 2013, Blumenthal emailed Drumheller, “Thanks. Can you send Libya report.” Drumheller replied, “Here it is, pls do not share it with Cody. … It is on the Maghreb and Libya.” Cody is Cody Shearer, a longtime Clinton family operative—his brother was an ambassador under Bill Clinton and his now-deceased sister is [sic] married to Clinton State Department official Strobe Talbott—who was in close contact with Blumenthal. Who is Cody Shearer? This Slate article from 1999 provides a lot of background on him, none of which is reassuring. The Shearer family has long had close ties to the Clintons; Strobe Talbott was a friend of Bill Clinton dating back to his time Oxford. In 1998, just before Kathleen Willey -- who claimed she was sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton -- was to testify in the Paula Jones trial, Willey reportedly had a disturbing encounter where she was approached by a jogger near her home. The complete stranger asked her menacing questions about her children, before Willey blurted out "What do you want? What is it you want to know? Who are you and what do you want to know?" According to Willey, "I'll never forget that look in his eyes ... He just looked at me and he said, 'You're just not getting the message, are you?'" On Hardball in 1999, MSNBC host Chris Matthews identified the mysterious jogger as Cody Shearer. Journalist Joe Conason -- who has a pro-Clinton bias, to put it mildly -- later interviewed Shearer, who said he was in San Francisco the day Willey was approached. Shearer provided some details about his stay including bank withdrawals and the place he stayed, including that he by chance ended up sitting next to former Clinton Secretary of State Warren Christopher -- who happens to be his brother-in-law's former boss -- on the flight home. The story took an even weirder turn when Pat Buchanan's mentally ill brother showed up at his house waving a gun the week after Matthews made his allegation that Shearer had intimidated Willey. Matthews would later apologize for naming Shearer, though he claimed that Willey had been the one who originally identified Shearer. Yes, this stuff reads like it’s straight from the fever swamps of the Clinton years. Still, given Shearer’s history, it's not hard to see why Matthews, who’s not exactly a card-carrying member of the vast right-wing conspiracy, would suspect of Shearer of doing unsavory things. "Is Shearer a private citizen unfairly sucked into the vortex of public scandal? If so, the vortex is awfully good at finding him," Slate remarked. Slate notes this other notable episode involving Shearer: During Sen. Fred Thompson's long, comprehensive, and inconclusive hearings into the Democratic Party's 1996 campaign fund-raising shenanigans … Shearer's name popped up in the course of Sen. Don Nickles' angry questioning of Terry Lenzner, the private investigator who would later, in the thick of the Jones/Lewinsky/Willey/Who Knows Who Else matter, be accused (by Dick Morris, among others) of coordinating efforts to smear and intimidate those women. Shearer had apparently acted as a liaison between Lenzner's firm, Investigative Group International, and the Cheyenne-Arapaho tribe. The tribe had donated more than $100,000 to the Democratic Party, hoping, according to testimony, that the administration would intervene on its behalf in a dispute over drilling rights on tribal land. Lenzner had been retained to uncover compromising links between Nickles--who opposed the tribe's claims--and local oil interests. Lenzner, while he admitted that he had accepted the tribe's retainer, has denied that Cody Shearer had ever worked for IGI--though the firm did once employ his sister Brooke. In 1999, Sam Dealey reported in the New York Post that Shearer was connected to pornographer Larry Flynt, who had been going after Republicans in response to the Clinton scandal: Reporters, too, questioned whether the president's inner circle was passing on dirt. Were White House aides involved? they asked Flynt. ''The only connection that I have got with Bill Clinton is that I voted for him twice. I've never met the man. I've never been to the White House.'' Presidential pit-bull James Carville? ''Well of course I am friends with James, we made a movie together ... But I've never discussed what I am doing with James.'' How about Clinton dirt-digger Terry Lenzner? ''No.'' But asked if he knew Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, Flynt said, ''I haven't seen Strobe Talbott in years. ... But he is married to a sister of a very good friend of mine.'' Surprisingly, that red flag went unnoticed. So who is Talbott's brother-in-law? His name is Cody Shearer, and a review of his White House connections reveals the possible workings of a new plumber operation. A self-styled ''free-lance journalist'' (although he hasn't published in nearly a decade), Shearer is a former business associate of Terry Lenzner's Investigative Group International - the premier opposition-research firm that Dick Morris calls ''the White House secret police.'' Lenzner's connections with Clinton go to the seamier side of politics. The Clinton campaign hired his firm in 1992 to do ''opposition research,'' a euphemism for dirt-digging. Since '94, the president's personal lawyers have had Lenzner on the payroll, reportedly searching under the beds and sniffing through the panties-drawers of Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky and members of Hillary's ''Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy,'' including Starr's team. Lenzner and Shearer are also old tennis buddies from Washington's tony St. Albans Tennis Club. Shearer's a close friend of Sidney Blumenthal's, too, according to published accounts. Could Shearer be passing Flynt the goods on GOP members? Neither Shearer nor Flynt returned calls seeking comment... Shearer has tried to ingratiate himself with this White House before. Last summer, the State Department learned he was doing some free-lance negotiating with Serb and Muslim leaders on partitioning Bosnia - all while claiming he had the backing of the Clinton administration. Talbott himself had to write his brother-in-law to tell him to knock it off. Freelance negotiating in Bosnia? It seems that Shearer's shady operations have been rather ambitious. Two other final details about Shearer of note. One, throughout the 1980s, Shearer, whose father was a major gossip columnist, wrote a syndicated column that reported on Senator John Tower's sexual behavior and alcoholism, sinking his nomination to be Secretary of Defense under George H. W. Bush. "A conspiracy theorist might infer that in helping to sink Tower, Shearer was already acting as the cat's paw of a Democratic dirty tricks operation--or, at least, that the Tower affair whetted his appetite for political dirt-digging and skullduggery," observes Slate. And two, Slate also notes that "it was Shearer who, during the 1992 presidential campaign, introduced the world--through the unlikely medium of Doonesbury--to Brett Kimberlin. Kimberlin, you may recall, was the convicted bomber, habitual liar, and all-around sociopath who claimed to have sold drugs to Dan Quayle. Was Shearer acting on behalf of the legendary Clinton ‘opposition research' outfit, which had floated damaging rumors during the '92 primaries about Paul Tsongas' health and Jerry Brown's drug use? Or was he just an enthusiastic free-lancer?" In recent years, Kimberlin has been involved in number of frivolous lawsuits aimed at shutting down conservative blogs. If Hillary Clinton's "secret spy network" involved the likes of Blumenthal, Drumhiller, and Shearer -- men whose past deeds suggest they may not be trustworthy -- this ought to because for serious alarm. At a minimum, it demands that Congressional overseers take a closer look at what these people were doing on behalf of Hillary Clinton. Bear in mind, this team wasn't just sending Hillary Clinton intelligence briefings. They had contracted out to a company, Osprey Global Solutions, run by a former General and Delta Force member, David L. Grange, to do fieldwork and intelligence gathering in Tunisia. We know this spy ring was not secure -- after all, Blumenthal's emails were hacked and the intelligence reports Clinton was receiving were leaked a year before the State Department asked for Clinton's emails. Other questions remain: Since Blumenthal, Drumhiller, and Shearer were not acting in an official capacity, who was paying for their efforts? Was Clinton sharing the intelligence that these men were involved in gathering so that it could be confirmed by official intelligence agencies such as the CIA? If not, how did she know these intelligence assessments were reliable? Did these intelligence gathering efforts influence her decisions as Secretary of State, and if they did, how so? There are many unanswered questions here. Poster Comment: A very long piece but it puts together all the various angles and players involved with Hillary's email scandal.
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#2. To: TooConservative (#0)
Of course not. He probably had his own personal server. No wonder Manning had no problem getting info for wikileaks.
#3. To: redleghunter (#2)
Maybe Gowdy should just subpoena Hitlery's emails from the NSA.
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