The Wall Street Journal posted an article today about the latest batch of Hillary Clinton’s emails released by the State Department. While there is no ‘smoking gun’ in the emails as such, the emails reveal a State Department that was not run according to the usual chain of command.

The article reports:

In the pre-Memorial Day weekend news dump, long-time Clinton plumber Sidney Blumenthal plays Maxwell Smart, passing along intel on Benghazi from half a world away. Secret Agent Blumenthal apparently derived this wisdom from his new business associates who were attempting to win contracts from Libyan nationals. Mrs. Clinton often circulates the memos among her top diplomats with comments like “useful insight” and “very interesting,” and they would often then push them down the chain of command, without identifying the source.

Mrs. Clinton was the Secretary of State, for heaven’s sake, one of the five most powerful national security positions in the U.S. government. She had the entire State Department intelligence division at her disposal, known as the Bureau of Intelligence and Research or INR, and presumably had access to the 16 other U.S. agencies that make up the intelligence community.

Yet she’s consuming and taking seriously information from an “analyst” who knows nothing about the subject. Mr. Blumenthal’s expertise is in political wet work and monetizing his connections to the Clintons. The imprimatur that Mrs. Clinton’s office put on Mr. Blumenthal’s outside improv offered him a way to influence policy even after the Obama White House had barred Mrs. Clinton from formally hiring him.

It is becoming very obvious that Mrs. Clinton ignored the advice of the White House and played by her own rules.

It is also interesting that the emails the State Department released had certain items redacted that were not redacted in the emails that the New York Times obtained. It is interesting to see what the State Department chose to redact. I strongly suggest following the link above to read the entire article in the Wall Street Journal.

It is obvious to me (and I suspect to any thinking person) that the Clinton emails had been well scrubbed before they were released. It is also obvious that they were released just before Memorial Day when the American public would be least likely to pay attention to them. This is typical of the past behavior of the Clintons and could be expected to be typical of any future behavior should Mrs. Clinton be successful in her bid for the presidency.

The article concludes:

The larger question isn’t Mr. Blumenthal’s faux life of danger. It’s why a potential Commander in Chief invested so much trust in such a figure. The Southern Gothic novel that is Clinton family political history—with its melodrama, betrayals and paranoia—has left them dependent on insular loyalists like Mr. Blumenthal whose opinions are never second-guessed. Voters should know they’d not only be electing Hillary, and Bill, and Chelsea, but this entire menagerie.