In her early months in office, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in contact with unofficial adviser Sidney Blumenthal more often and on a wider range of topics than was previously known, a set of about 3,000 Clinton emails released Tuesday night by the State Department revealed.

While Blumenthal’s role as a provider of off-the-books intelligence reports on Libya has stirred controversy, the newly disclosed emails show he also acted as an intermediary with officials involved in the Northern Ireland peace process and shared advice with Clinton on issues from Iran to British politics to how to blame China for the breakdown of global climate talks.


A series of emails show that in October 2009, Blumenthal sought to draw Clinton into efforts to elect former British Prime Minister Tony Blair to the presidency of the European Council.

Read all the emails released on Tuesday here.

“Tony is somewhat downcast on his chances,” Blumenthal wrote in an Oct. 28, 2009, email suggesting that Clinton might want to “weigh in” with her European counterparts. “Your part in this may yet be important.” (The post eventually went to Belgian Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy.)

When Blumenthal sent Clinton notes on themes to strike in speeches she was to give in Germany, she passed them on to her most senior aides.

“The speechwriting crew is taking Sid’s points below and massaging them into a set of remarks,” Director of Policy Planning Jake Sullivan assured Clinton.

In a June 14, 2009, email on Iran’s elections “and CIA/torture,” Blumenthal forwarded Clinton two articles about rigged elections in the Middle Eastern nation — and a third about a yet-to-be-published New York Times story detailing the administration’s internal deliberations on torture. The author had interviewed CIA director Leon Panetta.

But Blumenthal advised Clinton not to go that route. Don’t comment, he urged.

“Jane Mayer’s piece details the many moving and uncontrolled parts of the torture debate, which has become chronic and will flare up again and again,” he said of the story. “The ‘distraction’ will not go away. I would avoid ever being drawn into commenting on any aspect.”

A few days earlier, on June 12, 2009, he sent Clinton a note suggesting he had some sort of hand in a post criticizing National Security Adviser James Jones, written by Steve Clemons, top editor at The Atlantic and director of the American strategy program at the New America Foundation.

“Your request is being processed …” was all Blumenthal wrote, linking to a story that summarizes Jones’ critics labeling him as a “plodding, slow-moving, out of touch retired general who was better prepared to think about the last era rather than the one we are moving into.”

Clemons said Wednesday he was baffled by Blumenthal’s apparent effort to claim credit for the story.

“He had absolutely nothing to do with that piece,” Clemons said. “The emails I received and the communications I had absolutely nothing to do with Hillary’s people. Everyone who I spoke to about that piece was a White House staff person.”

Blumenthal has been questioned by Republican Benghazi investigators about similar episodes in which he wrote messages such as “got all this done,” then linked to Media Matters blog posts blasting the GOP’s reaction to the Benghazi attacks. Blumenthal has said he had no part in writing, editing or placing the posts — despite the fact that he seemed to take credit for them while passing them on to Clinton.

Clinton has described Blumenthal’s advice as unsolicited. However, it’s clear from the emails that — at least in her first year in office — the two were in regular contact and Clinton sometimes sought Blumenthal’s counsel.

“Are you still awake?” she wrote in an email to Blumenthal sent on Oct. 8, 2009, at 10:35 p.m. that does not provide details on the issue prompting the message. “I will call if you are.”

Clinton even attempted to get Blumenthal a State Department post in 2009, but aides to President Barack Obama blocked the appointment because of what they viewed as Blumenthal’s role in spreading rumors about Obama during the 2008 presidential primary fight with Clinton.

However, the idea of a job at State for Blumenthal seemed to be a live one through June 2009, although aides to Clinton were nervous about Blumenthal’s role getting too much attention.

“We have heard from an AP reporter that Sydney [sic] outed himself about coming to the Department, mentioning it without realizing he was talking to someone who actually covers our building,” State spokesman P.J. Crowley wrote to Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills on June 5, 2009.

Within hours, Mills forwarded the message to Clinton’s personal email account.

About two weeks later, Clinton wanted an update. “What is latest re Sid Blumenthal?” she asked Mills in a June 22, 2009, message.

“Will see — he is doing the paperwork,” Mills replied early the next morning.

While Blumenthal never got a State Department job, he was hired as a consultant for the Clinton Foundation at a rate of $10,000 a month, POLITICO reported in May.

The emails appear to reflect some anxiety among Clinton and her top aides about her stature in the Obama administration in the early months of her tenure.

In June 2009, Clinton complained that she had twice shown up for meetings at the White House organized by Jones, the national security adviser, only to be told they had been canceled some time before.

“I arrived for the 10:15 mtg and was told there was no mtg,” Clinton wrote to her aides. “This is the second time this has happened. What’s up???”

Earlier that month, Clinton emailed her aides to say she’d heard “on the radio” there was a Cabinet meeting that day. “Is there? Can I go?” she asked.

The emails also show that aides kept Clinton informed when the White House highlighted Vice President Joe Biden’s role in Iraq policy in a way reporters interpreted to signal that Clinton might have been displaced.

Sullivan told an inquiring State spokesman that Clinton would “be back in Iraq before long.” He sent the exchange to Mills, who immediately passed it to the secretary.

“Read traffic all the way down,” Mills wrote. The bottom of the email chain consisted of White House spokesman Robert Gibbs’ comments that Biden would now “oversee” Iraq policy.

The emails also provide the broadest look yet at who was in Clinton’s inner circle as a result of having access to her personal email address. Most of the exchanges involve mundane departmental matters and are between Clinton and her closest aides, Mills, Sullivan and Huma Abedin. But a host of outside correspondents also sought out favors from Clinton or passed along their regards.

Among those in possession of the private address: Democratic pollster Mark Penn, Washington spinmeister Lanny Davis, Tony Blair’s wife Cherie, former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, retired Gen. Wes Clark, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel (though he, along with White House adviser David Axelrod, had to ask permission). Also trading emails with Clinton: Ambassador Scott Gration (later ousted from his post by Clinton’s team), Clinton childhood friend Voda Ebeling, Bill Clinton college roommate and newspaper publisher Brian Greenspun, education activist and philanthropist political donor Jill Iscol and former Hillary Clinton Senate chief of staff Tamera Luzzatto.

Some of the emails contain references that are puzzling or downright odd. There are several mentions of appointments involving Clinton and someone referred to as “Santa.” In one message, Clinton urges Center for American Progress chief John Podesta to “please wear socks to bed to keep your feet warm.”

There are also some not-so-funny jokes Clinton received after injuring her elbow by falling outside the White House in June 2009. “When I wanted you to trip the light fantastic. I didn’t mean that literally,” Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) wrote.

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell also had a quip. “Hillary, Is it true that Holbrooke tripped you? Just kidding,” he wrote.

The roughly 3,000 pages of emails went public Tuesday night as the State Department complied with a court order mandating monthly releases of the trove of messages she sent or received on a private server and returned to her former agency in December.

While Clinton insisted earlier this year that all of the messages were unclassified, the State Department concluded that about two dozen of the emails released Tuesday warrant classification because they contain sensitive diplomatic or foreign government information.

“Portions of 25 emails were subsequently upgraded” to classified, State spokesman Alex Gerlach said late Tuesday. “It is routine to upgrade information to classified status during the FOIA process. … The information that has been classified today through our FOIA review was sent in 2009. The occurrence of a subsequent upgrade does not in itself mean that anyone did something wrong or violated the law when they sent or received this information.”

It’s not the first time State decided some of the information on Clinton’s private account should be classified. When State released about 850 pages of Benghazi-related emails in May, the FBI asked that portions of one email be classified “secret.”

All of the larger volume of information declared classified in the new release was classified at the lowest level: “confidential.”

State Department officials insisted that the unusual 9 p.m. release was the result of the complexity of organizing and publishing the large volume of records online — and not an effort to dampen press coverage of Clinton’s correspondence.

“This is really a function of physics for us. We have a lot of emails to get through. … That’s what’s driving the time,” State Department spokesman John Kirby told reporters at a daily news briefing at the agency’s headquarters. “The 9 o’clock release date [sic] is not deliberately intended to make your life harder. … I recognize that it’s inconvenient for you in the media. I can assure you this is not an attempt or an effort to be less than forthcoming or to try and steer away from news coverage of this.”

Kirby sounded resigned to the fact that many in the media and elsewhere would not believe him on that point. “I know that’s going to be the going assumption,” he said.

He pointed to an order in May in which a federal judge instructed the State Department to make releases of some of the 55,000 pages of emails by the end of each month, starting Tuesday. U.S. District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras told the agency to “aspire” to put 7 percent of the records in the first monthly release.

“We all recognize that turning in our homework at 9 o’clock the night before is probably not ideal,” Kirby quipped in front of a room of journalists griping about the nighttime release. “I certainly apologize for the inconvenience that is going to cause.”

After a request from the State Department last October, Clinton in December returned about 30,000 printed emails from her personal email account. She also said she had instructed her aides to delete a slightly larger number of emails her lawyers deemed private or personal.

The State Department, which Kirby insisted Tuesday is committed to transparency, initially proposed releasing the bulk of the available Clinton emails under the Freedom of Information Act next January — more than a year after Clinton turned them over. Contreras, however, insisted on monthly releases.

Kirby noted Tuesday that most of the 55,000 total pages of Clinton emails are unrelated to Libya or Benghazi. “The vast majority have nothing to do with the work of the select committee,” he said.

However, in a separate development, the State Department on Tuesday turned over to the House Benghazi Committee another 3,600 pages of Libya-related documents involving three top officials under Clinton, according to a spokesman for the panel’s Democratic members.

Included in the newly provided records are emails to or from former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, Sullivan and Mills, the spokesman said.

A court filing Tuesday in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking records related to talking points for Rice’s early public comments on the 2012 Benghazi attacks indicates that at least some of the records turned over to the committee were not actually in the State Department’s possession until Friday.

Justice Department lawyers handling the suit by the conservative group Judicial Watch said State indicated in April that it “might receive additional potentially responsive documents from three individuals whose state.gov email accounts had been searched.”

“On June 26, 2015 … Defendant did receive some such documents,” the Justice lawyers wrote. The court filing did not elaborate on how or from whom the State Department received the records.

A State spokesman confirmed the new hand-over of documents to the House Benghazi panel, but — citing a policy of not commenting on ongoing litigation — declined to say where the records came from.

A Republican staffer on the Benghazi panel also confirmed receipt of the new set of documents from State, but had no further comment.

The State Department confirmed in March that it had asked former staffers to return any official emails they had in their possession. The agency has not disclosed whether any of the aides forked over records in response to that request.

In a letter accompanying the documents sent to Capitol Hill on Tuesday, Assistant Secretary of State Julia Frifield noted that State has “provided the Benghazi Committee with over 50,000 pages of documents” and that “many” records in the new set are duplicates of ones previously given to the panel.

However, Frifield also said State is holding back some records. “A small number of documents implicate important Executive Branch institutional interests and are therefore not included in this production,” she wrote.

Rachael Bade, Blake Hounshell, Annie Karni and Karey Van Hall contributed to this report.