Longtime Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal had been blocked from working for Hillary Rodham Clinton at the State Department by skeptical White House officials.
But that didn't cut his direct line to Clinton on one of the most sensitive matters of her tenure at the agency.
During Clinton's years at the State Department, Blumenthal offered a flood of intelligence and advice to his former boss, sending near monthly missives about the growing unrest in Libya to the personal email account she continued to use as a government employee.
The correspondence, which covered everything from warring Middle Eastern factions to political strategy was absorbed by Clinton, who often forwarded the messages to aides with the instruction "pls print."
Blumenthal's continued role was revealed in nearly 350 pages of emails, published yesterday by The New York Times, about the 2012 attacks on the US diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including US Ambassador Christopher Stevens.
Last year, Clinton gave the State Department 55,000 pages of emails that she said pertained to her work as secretary sent from the personal address she used while at the agency. The messages about the events in Libya were given for review to a special House panel investigating the attacks and are expected to be released by the State Department in the coming days after months of delay.
The panel, which was initially formed to investigate Stevens' death, has become a vehicle to broadly question Clinton's tenure at the State Department, revealing potential ammunition for Republican attacks on the 2016 campaign trail. This week, the panel subpoenaed Blumenthal to testify on Capitol Hill.
Blumenthal, through his lawyer, told The Washington Post yesterday that he will cooperate with the congressional inquiry.
There is nothing in the emails to suggest that Clinton was actively soliciting Blumenthal's advice or alleged intelligence information, although the documents contain few replies she may have sent to him. Her responses are polite, in one case thanking him for "useful" information.
The sources of Blumenthal's information are often unclear. At the time, he was working for the Clinton family foundation and advising a group of entrepreneurs trying to win business from the Libyan transitional government.
