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AP Photo Cummings: CIA sees no secret in Blumenthal email to Clinton

The top Democrat on the House Benghazi Committee says the CIA has pulled the rug out from under a Republican claim that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton received and forwarded the name of a sensitive CIA source in her personal email account.

In a letter earlier this month, Benghazi Committee Chairman Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) asserted that an email Clinton got from outside adviser Sidney Blumenthal contained what the U.S. government considers one of its most closely held secrets: the name of a source relied on by the intelligence community.

However, the ranking member on the Benghazi panel — Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland — said the CIA advised the committee on Saturday that the information Gowdy suggested required extreme caution is, in fact, unclassified.

"The CIA yesterday informed both the Republican and Democratic staffs of the Select Committee that they do not consider the information you highlighted in your letter to be classified. Specifically, the CIA confirmed that 'the State Department consulted with the CIA on this production, the CIA reviewed these documents, and the CIA made no redactions to protect classified information,'" Cummings wrote in a new letter to Gowdy (posted here).

Cummings said Gowdy owes Clinton "an immediate apology" for arguing that she jeopardized national security by handling that information on her private email account.

Gowdy responded Sunday that the fact the CIA didn't ask that the information be withheld did not mean it should not be treated with care.

"The name of the alleged source was redacted from the material cleared for public release by someone in the executive branch — the fact that the CIA says it didn’t do it does not mean the material was not sensitive or classified. And in fact, additional information remains in the document that ordinarily would be considered highly sensitive," Gowdy said. "This appears to mean either Mr. Blumenthal conveyed false and unreliable information to Secretary Clinton about Libya and misrepresented it, or the review process is faulty or has been politicized."

Gowdy also snarkily suggested that the panel's Democratic staff was having more success getting key facts from the administration than Gowdy's GOP aides were.

"I am envious of your staff's ability to get information from this administration in less than 45 minutes on a weekend. This is something the majority Members struggle to do on weekdays. Perhaps you would be willing to help us gain access to the information the Committee has been seeking from the administration for over half a year now," the chairman wrote in a new letter to Cummings.

A CIA spokesman declined comment.

Clinton said in an interview Friday that she would have had no reason to suspect information coming from Blumenthal was classified.

"Sid Blumenthal was not a government employee or official," Clinton told CNN's Jake Tapper. "It was not in the category of anything that could be classified because it came from an outside, non-government person passing on what somebody told somebody told him."

In Gowdy's Oct. 7 letter (posted here), he described the identification of the CIA source as "redacted due to sources and methods." However, Cummings' letter Sunday said that redaction was done by Gowdy and his staff, not by the State Department, which is still reviewing many of the messages for public release.

A Clinton campaign spokesman suggested last week that Gowdy's concern about the information might not have been shared by the State Department or the CIA.

"It may be the redaction that Trey Gowdy included in the email is not one the State Department has yet performed," Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon said on CNN. "They're still reviewing the emails. This is a redaction that we suspect he performed because he knew it was already venturing out on to shaky territory by even excerpting the email in part."