House Benghazi Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy appears to have accidentally released the name of a CIA source in the midst of a back-and-forth with Democrats about how sensitive the information was and whether its presence in former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email account constituted a security breach.
Gowdy’s aides blamed the State Department for the disclosure, and the agency acknowledged Monday a “human error” led to a failure to delete a name from the email in question.
The email posted Sunday on the panel’s website included in one instance the name of “Mousa Kousa,” an alternative spelling of Moussa Koussa, a former Libyan government spy chief and foreign minister. The name appeared to have been redacted in several other instances but was included in a subject line of a forwarded email.
The redacted email was released at Gowdy’s direction “so the American people could decide for themselves regarding concerns about sources and methods,” the Benghazi Committee said in a statement. By Monday morning, the committee had replaced the document online with another version in which Koussa’s name does not appear.
Asked about the change, Benghazi Committee spokesman Jamal Ware said the State Department had cleared the email for release in the form it initially appeared Sunday.
“The State Department failed to redact a name in a subject line, so the committee took steps to remove this information so it was consistent with State Department’s redaction of it in another subject line,” Ware said Monday. “The committee will not confirm the name in question is the alleged source.”
State Department spokesman Mark Toner confirmed Monday afternoon that State officials had missed one occurrence of Koussa’s name it had intended to delete from the email in question.
“There was one case — I think it was just human error in our desire to get these documents to the Benghazi Committee as quickly as possible,” Toner told reporters at a regular news briefing.
Toner said the CIA had not objected to the release of the name, but State wanted it withheld for privacy reasons.
CIA “assessed that the information in question was not classified and suggested no redactions to the documents in question,” Toner said. “We have asked the Benghazi Committee not to use the individual’s name publicly to protect that individual’s privacy. … That was our rationale behind redacting his name.”
While it’s unclear how much information Koussa was giving to Western officials at the time the email was sent, the former spy chief’s role was being bandied about publicly at that time. A mention of Koussa in former CIA director George Tenet’s memoir was referenced in a New York Times story the day before Blumenthal sent the email in question to Clinton.
In addition to Koussa, the CIA has declassified some details of its relationship with at least two Libyan officials in the lead-up to the 2011 revolution and the NATO intervention. In a book published in May and cleared for released by his former agency, former acting CIA Director Mike Morell stated that he had a good relationship with Libyan domestic intelligence chief Abdullah Senussi and a meeting in late 2010 with the external intelligence chief, Abuzed Omar Dorda.
The CIA declined to comment on the information on the email or the spy agency’s relationship with the Libyan officials mentioned in the two former CIA leaders’ books.
The message thread Gowdy released Sunday was stamped by the State Department: "Reviewed for sensitive information pursuant to MOU [Memorandum of Understanding]."
However, a spokesman for Cummings said the episode underscored why Gowdy should not have released the email until the State Department completed reviewing the records for public release under the FOIA process.
”As Ranking Member Cummings stated very clearly in his letter on Sunday, even though the CIA said this information is not classified, the State Department asked Chairman Gowdy not to release this email publicly," the spokesman said.
The disclosure of Koussa’s name in the email the Benghazi panel made public appears to have been
first reported Monday by Yahoo News.
Witch hunts are hard. Remember in 2012 when the Republicans also outed the CIA's covert role in Libya?
