With Washington's attention on the struggle by House Republicans to find a new Speaker, another story slipped by that will surely have long-run implications for the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton. Clinton has come under fire this year for choosing to withhold her work emails from the State Department, and the public, for as many as five years after she began her employment as secretary of state. Clinton's decision to conduct all work on a private server, and to keep the contents of that server to herself for more than a year after leaving office, was undertaken out of a false sense of entitlement to privacy. It not only kept the public in the dark as to her communications in office but it also placed sensitive and classified information within reach of hackers, because the server was not properly secured. Just how much sensitive or classified information are we talking about? The full extent remains unknown, but some of it was very highly classified — "Top Secret" and "Sensitive Compartmentalized." And this week, it emerged that the name of a top CIA contact in Libya was contained in one of the emails she chose to keep in her unsafe computer. Sid Blumenthal, a former Clinton-era White House staffer whom President Obama had forbidden Clinton to hire at State, nevertheless sent her periodic email updates on foreign affairs. She appears to have taken these seriously, encouraging him to send them and at times even forwarding his communiques to staff. On March 18, 2011, Blumenthal wrote to Clinton about a conversation he had had with Tyler Drumheller, a former CIA official, who divulged the name of the contact. When the email was released to the Select Committee on Benghazi, the name was redacted. "Tyler spoke to a colleague currently at CIA," Blumenthal wrote, "who told him the agency had been dependent for intelligence from [redacted due to sources and methods]." It is bad enough that Drumheller, who had business interests in Libya along with Blumenthal, was able to learn so much from intelligence officers in the field. It is worse that he was so indiscreet as to tell Blumenthal, who had no business knowing and certainly no business sending email from his AOL account. But worst of all, this information reached Clinton in a way that left it open to anyone with the right computer skills. It should go without saying that people working for the CIA in dangerous countries such as Libya have a way of dying or disappearing when their identities are exposed. Yet Clinton forwarded this email to a State Department colleague anyway. etting aside Blumenthal's obvious culpability, Clinton's choice to place herself above the rules and use private email made this information available to the world before she had even sent it along. And there is no indication that she so much as scolded Blumenthal for handling information so carelessly, information he had no business knowing in the first place. Clinton may have had a duty to report this incident, but so far there is no indication that she did. Clinton was fortunate to have this story buried behind the current chaos in Congress. But once that chaos is ended, she will have to answer for this egregious breach, if not to the FBI, then at least to voters. The Benghazi Committee's investigation continues to reveal the depths of her dishonesty and incompetence in office, and that's the reason Democrats are now so eager to shut it down.
