Sidney Blumenthal Blasts Bibi for ‘Relentless Disparagement’ of Hillary Clinton

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By JTA March 1, 2016

An email from a longtime Hillary Clinton adviser reported the “relentless disparagement” by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of the then-U.S. secretary of state at a closed-door meeting of AIPAC in 2010.

The email from journalist Sidney Blumenthal was among a batch of emails from Clinton’s computer released Monday by the State Department. They are part of a trove sent and received by Clinton, the leading contender among Democrats for the 2016 presidential nomination, on a personal account while serving as secretary of state.

Carrying the subject line “RE: Netanyahu,” the Blumenthal email allegedly quoted Netanyahu as saying that “if we can’t sleep, hillary is not going to sleep” while asking those at the meeting to pressure the U.S. to be more aggressive toward Iran — information he got third-hand, according to Ynet.

Another email was purportedly of a message left between the stones of the Western Wall in Jerusalem with an attachment addressed to Hashem, the Hebrew word for God. While the message from 2012 appeared to be a classified email from then-National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, it actually was a joke sent by an aide, The Associated Press reported.

“This document, and the email chain to which it was attached, are unclassified,” an unnamed State Department official told the news agency. “This document is not a real note. It is a joke written by Secretary Clinton’s communications adviser, Philippe Reines, and was attached to an email chain discussing senior officials’ travel to Israel in July 2012.”

The emails were released in response to Freedom of Information Act requests made by Politico and the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, which filed a lawsuit in federal court in May 2013 over the emails. More than 52,000 emails were released, with about 2,000 censored after it was determined they contained classified information.

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