Though Hillary Clinton has sought to downplay her working relationship with Sidney Blumenthal, the massive trove of emails released Tuesday by the State Department show that Clinton’s top aides used her longtime friend’s ideas to craft a speech for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
“The speechwriting crew is taking Sid’s points below and massaging them into a set of remarks,” one of Clinton’s aides, Jake Sullivan, wrote in a Nov. 5, 2009, email to Clinton.
“I hope we can achieve both power and poetry. Who is doing the short Monday remarks?” she responded.
The exchange was included in about 3,000 pages of emails that the State Department published to its Freedom of Information Act website. Clinton turned over about 55,000 pages of work-related records she sent on her personal email account in December.
“The themes I stress are these,” Blumenthal wrote in his memo to Clinton. “The importance of Berlin and the Brandenburg Gate as symbols of freedom; the weight of history (always felt by Germans); the contribution of the US and the salience of the Western alliance; the meaning of 1989 to today and especially the continuity of the Western alliance; and segue from past to future.”
Clinton gave two speeches in Berlin — one on Nov. 8 at an event held by the Atlantic Council, and another the next day at Brandenburg Gate.
Infusing Blumenthal’s ideas into her Berlin remarks indicates a closer working relationship between the two than Clinton has let on in public. Responding to questions last month about her exchanges with Blumenthal, Clinton said: “He sent me unsolicited emails which I passed on in some instances.”
But numerous emails in the tranche of Benghazi- and Libya-related documents, as well as records released on Tuesday, show that Clinton actively sought information from Blumenthal.