Hillary Clinton tied to lobbying on behalf of billionaire from Georgia

Gawker:

Hillary Clinton says there is nothing to hide in her scandalous personal email account, now apparently half-deleted. But leaked emails from her longtime confidant Sidney Blumenthal show that he and another former official from Bill Clinton's administration were secretly lobbying the secretary of state on behalf of a billionaire in the former Soviet state of Georgia who was seeking closer ties with Putin's Russia—seemingly in violation of a federal law designed to prevent foreign powers from covertly wielding influence within the United States.

As Gawker reported last week in collaboration with ProPublica, emails from Blumenthal's hacked account revealed that he was running what amounts to a private, off-the-books intelligence operation for Clinton, sending her detailed reports on goings-on in Libya, Europe, and elsewhere. Among these memos is one urging Clinton to consider re-examining the State Department's posture toward the opposition in Georgia.

In 2012, Georgia was gearing up to elect a new prime minister. Oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili led the opposition Georgian Dream party, which called for closer relations with Russia—a state that had invaded Georgia only four years earlier. He was opposing the incumbent President Mikheil Saakashvili, who had enjoyed U.S. support.

Ivanishvili was eager to meet with then-Secretary of State Clinton, but found himself snubbed during a state visit in June 2012. In September 2012, Blumenthal prepared a long, official-looking memo for Clinton on the subject of the Georgian election. It passed along a note from John Kornblum, an international lawyer who had served as ambassador to Germany under Bill Clinton. According to Blumenthal's memo, Kornblum was "working with the political party in Georgia opposing Saakashvili"; contemporaneous press accounts corroborate the fact that Kornblum was formally acting as an adviser to Georgian Dream.

Blumenthal's preamble to the memo warned that Georgia "could be a potential hot spot a month before the U.S. election" if Saakashvili decided to "ratchet up tensions with Russia" as a political maneuver. Though he wrote that he was passing on Kornblum's memo "without comment," it is clear that Blumenthal thought the ideas should be taken seriously.
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It appears to be a lobbying effort to get the US to interfere in the Georgian election.  While Obama has expressed reluctance on that point in the recent Israeli elections, behind the scenes his operatives were very active.  The Blumenthal emails appear to be a rich vein for exploration in what Clinton was doing "off the record."