Politics

Left-Wing Writer Max Blumenthal Helped Craft Hillary’s ‘Youtube Video’ Benghazi Explanation

Patrick Howley Political Reporter
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Left-wing writer Max Blumenthal helped inspire Hillary Clinton’s debunked talking point that an obscure YouTube movie called “Innocence of Muslims” was responsible for the deadly terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya in 2012.

The son of Clinton’s longtime political adviser and informal Libya consultant, Max Blumenthal pushed his conspiratorial theories onto the secretary of state in the hours after Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others were killed.

The Daily Caller reported in December that Hillary Clinton received the “Youtube video” talking points before the rest of the Obama administration. Clinton was the first administration official to suggest that the violence in Benghazi was caused by spontaneous reaction to the anti-Muslim video, rather than by a terrorist group affiliated with al-Qaida.

Clinton first mentioned the video publicly on the morning of Sept. 13, 2012. Obama’s White House speechwriter Ben Rhodes, an NYU-educated fiction writer who was initially blamed for crafting the talking points, didn’t mention the video until Sept. 14, when he sent around a memo preparing Susan Rice and others for Sunday-show appearances to discuss the attack.

Now we know that Hillary became aware of the video on Sept. 12, the day after the attack, through her political adviser Sidney Blumenthal — Max Blumenthal’s father.

Sidney Blumenthal served as the Clintons’ political hatchet man during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, helping to tar Lewinsky’s credibility. He served as Hillary’s anti-Obama hatchet man during the 2008 Democratic primary, which was why David Axelrod and other Obama officials denied him an official State Department adviser job under Clinton.

So Blumenthal acted as an informal adviser to Clinton, citing his own personal sources and unclassified information to feed Clinton 25 memos on Libya during Clinton’s disastrous military intervention in the country.

In the hours after the deadly terrorist attack on Clinton’s consulate, Sidney Blumenthal rushed political guidance to the secretary.

“During the afternoon of September 11, 2012 new interim President of Libya Mohammed Yussef el Magariaf spoke in private with senior advisors, including the members of the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood, to discuss the attacks by demonstrators on U.S. missions in Tripoli and Benghazi,” Blumenthal reported to Clinton in a memo dated Sept. 12 at 12:50 a.m.

“During this session, a senior security officer told Magariaf that the attacks on that day were inspired by what many devout Libyans viewed as a sacrilegious internet video on the prophet Mohammed originating in America. The Libyan attacks were also inspired by and linked to an attack on the U.S. mission the same day,” Blumenthal said.

At 2:11 p.m. on Sept. 12, Hillary Clinton personally forwarded a link to an article about “Innocence of Muslims” to a colleague. That article was posted on MaxBlumenthal.com, and was written by Sidney Blumenthal’s son Max, who is now the senior writer for the far-left website AlterNet.

Max Blumenthal’s article was entitled “Meet the Right-Wing Extremist Behind Anti-Muslim Film That Sparked Deadly Riots.” In the piece, he implicated anti-Muslim activist Steve Klein as a consultant on the Hollywood-produced film.

“Pls print,” Hillary Clinton wrote to her colleague, referring to Max Blumenthal’s article.

Where did Hillary get the link from originally? That part is redacted.

Max Blumenthal spent that day feverishly promoting the obscure film’s role in the Benghazi violence.

He also appeared that day on Al-Jazeera English to discuss the YouTube video.

On Sept. 13, hours after Hillary Clinton first publicly acknowledged the video, Max Blumenthal published an article for The Guardian about the YouTube video, again focusing on Klein’s involvement.

Max Blumenthal was memorably confronted by the late Andrew Breitbart and Larry O’Connor at CPAC for smearing conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe as a racist. Breitbart accused Blumenthal of “fighting your father’s battles.”

Max Blumenthal’s highly-private email address was not located by press time. He did not return a request for comment on social media.

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