“When Hillary Clinton arrived at the State Department in 2009, she wanted to bring along Sidney Blumenthal, a former Clinton White House aide and one of her closest advisers. His job didn’t materialize, blocked by the Obama White House, but Mr. Blumenthal seems to have come along anyway,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“New records from Mrs. Clinton’s time as secretary of state show that Mr. Blumenthal, 66 years old, sought an outsize role in advising her, especially for someone with no formal job at the department. He served as political wise man, occasional gate keeper and one-man intelligence service—feeding Mrs. Clinton a steady diet of political advice, foreign-intelligence information, capital gossip and electoral insight in quick email blasts, long memorandums and late-night phone calls.”

“In her early months in office, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in contact with unofficial adviser Sidney Blumenthal more often and on a wider range of topics than was previously known, a set of about 3,000 Clinton emails released Tuesday night by the State Department revealed,” Politico reports.

Wall Street Journal: “A new batch of emails released by a congressional committee Monday offers a rare window into the unique and complicated role that Sidney Blumenthal has played in the life of Mrs. Clinton, now the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination.”

“He is part of a far-flung coterie of confidantes who appear and reappear in the Clintons’ lives. Loyal to former aides, the Clintons seldom jettison those who enter the inner circle and often find new ways to put them to work.”

“Emails that a longtime confidant to Hillary Clinton recently handed over to the House committee investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, raise new questions about whether the State Department and Mrs. Clinton have complied with a series of requests from the panel,” the New York Times reports.

“It is not clear whether the State Department possesses the emails between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Blumenthal and did not hand them over. It is also possible that Mrs. Clinton never provided them to the department and deleted them off the server that housed the personal account she used exclusively when she was secretary of state.”