Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) has identified the author of the memos on Libya and the 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi that Hillary Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal passed on to her while she was secretary of State.
{mosads}The chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi said the author of the memos was Tyler Drumheller, a former CIA official, who was mentioned in some media reports following Blumenthal’s roughly nine-hour deposition. Gowdy initially refused to name Drumheller.
“Not only was he providing unvetted, uncorroborated, unsubstantiated intelligence to our top diplomat, he was just simply forwarding on intelligence that somebody by the name Tyler Drumheller was sending him,” Gowdy said of Blumenthal Tuesday night during an interview on Fox News’s “The Kelly File.”
Blumenthal “didn’t know if the sources were legitimate; he didn’t know whether or not the information had been corroborated. He was merely a conduit between somebody who may have had a financial interest in Libya and our nation’s top diplomat,” Gowdy added.
Reading from a prepared statement after his marathon closed-door interview on Tuesday, Blumenthal said he “testified about sending some reports written by a respected former high-ranking CIA official I thought might be informative to the secretary for her to use or not as she saw fit.”
Speaking to reporters who staked out the deposition room Tuesday night, Gowdy said the select committee “might” call on the author of the memos to testify, arguing that, while Clinton might have known the source of the messages, she might not have been aware of how he or she compiled their information.
“We have a CIA. So why would you not rely on your own vetted source intelligence agency?” he asked.
Meantime, the select committee’s five Democrats on Wednesday sent Gowdy a letter demanding the release of 60 previously undisclosed emails Blumenthal turned over to the panel last week, as well as the full transcript of Tuesday’s proceedings.
The issue simmered throughout Blumenthal’s interview, with the chairman saying he was “open-minded” to the idea of publishing the transcript. Gowdy said, however, that it would be up to Rep. Elijah Cummings (Md.), the panel’s top Democrat, to persuade him to do so, as the select committee hasn’t released any of its previous depositions.
“The fact of the matter is that you are treating Mr. Blumenthal differently. You are the one who ordered Marshals to go to his home – without any debate or vote by the Committee – to serve the subpoena compelling his testimony at yesterday’s deposition without even contacting him first,” Democrats wrote.
They chastised the chairman for only offering to make public the latest cache of documents, but not the transcript that could put the emails in proper context.
“Given your own words on this topic warning against the selective release of information from the Committee’s investigation, it has become impossible to understand your revolving policy on when the Select Committee will release information and when it will not,” lawmakers wrote.
–This report was updated at 11:34 a.m.