A congressional committee’s decision to subpoena a top Clinton aide who has been at the center of multiple controversies involving the former president and first lady has reinvigorated questions about Hillary Clinton’s ties to divisive political operatives and foreign entities.
Sidney Blumenthal’s informal Libyan intelligence memos to then-Secretary Clinton sparked controversy Monday after the New York Times revealed Blumenthal had advised Clinton using information he gathered through his involvement with a group of businessmen looking to capitalize on the fragile economic situation in Libya.
The House Select Committee on Benghazi subpoenaed Blumenthal Tuesday in an effort to uncover his role in preparing reports leading up to and following the 2012 terror attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. Democrats have said the committee’s protracted probe is merely an effort to keep the Benghazi incident fresh in voters’ memories as the presidential election approaches.
A Washington-based watchdog group had already pressed the attorney general to investigate whether Blumenthal leveraged his personal ties to Clinton on behalf of foreign agents.
Matthew Whitaker, executive director of the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, wrote to then-Attorney General Eric Holder in April asking the Justice Department to look into Blumenthal’s potential violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which prevents lobbying on behalf of foreign entities without registering with the government.
“Mr. Blumenthal lobbied Secretary Clinton on behalf of a political party in the country of Georgia,” Whitaker wrote in his letter. “In a communication dated September 3, 2012, Mr. Blumenthal relayed a message from John Kornblum, who was working with a political group in Georgia named Georgian Dream.”
Blumenthal suggested “a change in the administration’s position would be helpful politically” and “included a memo from Mr. Kornblum and a letter to Secretary Clinton from the Georgian Dream leader,” Whitaker wrote.
The Justice Department responded several weeks later by saying the agency would not investigate the allegations because the Foreign Agents Registration Act applied only to individuals who had an “agency relationship” with a foreign entity.
Clinton stood by Blumenthal Tuesday when pressed by reporters to explain the memos, many of which had been debunked by the high-level State Department officials who read them.
“I always think it’s important, when you get into politics, to have friends you had before you were in politics,” Clinton said after wrapping up a campaign event in Cedar Falls, Iowa. “He’s been a friend of mine for a long time.”
The presidential candidate said Blumenthal had sent her “unsolicited emails” which she then “passed on, in some instances.”
Blumenthal worked as an adviser to the Clinton Foundation and to Media Matters and American Bridge, a pair of left-wing groups allied with Clinton’s presidential campaign, at the same time he was mining information about the situation in Libya for Clinton.
Clinton attempted to hire Blumenthal as she transitioned into the State Department before President Obama’s staff nixed the idea.
Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s then-chief of staff, reportedly led the administration’s opposition to Blumenthal when Hillary Clinton raised the possibility of bringing him on in 2009.
Media reports at the time suggested Blumenthal had circulated damaging talking points about Obama to right-leaning reporters during the 2008 primary, when he worked on Clinton’s first presidential campaign.
Blumenthal harvested conservative blogs for stories that cast Obama in a negative light. A Huffington Post contributor suggested in May 2008 that Blumenthal was partly responsible for pushing the narrative of Obama’s ties to former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers, which quickly became a dominant GOP attack.
But at a meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative in 2010, Blumenthal lashed out at such attempts to “drag down” the president.
“I personally find the smearing of President Obama as an issue of national discussion,” he told Politico at the event. “It is repulsive and ought to be discussed. I think it ought to discredit the Republican Party from consideration.”
The Democratic operative and fierce Clinton loyalist began his career as a journalist, writing for Vanity Fair, the New Republic and the Washington Post, among others. He penned the “Letters from Washington” column for the New Yorker in the early 1990s.
Bill Clinton plucked Blumenthal from the journalism world in 1997 and made him “assistant to the president.” In that role, Blumenthal quickly set to work across a variety of policy areas, working with the media and even writing major speeches for the president.
The top aide was drawn into the public firestorm over Bill Clinton’s relations with White House intern Monica Lewinsky after Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel investigating allegations that the president had perjured himself, subpoenaed Blumenthal to appear before a grand jury.
Blumenthal testified that nearly a dozen Clinton insiders began meeting twice daily after the Lewinsky scandal broke to discuss how they would handle the press fallout. Cheryl Mills, John Podesta, Rahm Emanuel, Paul Begala, Bruce Lindsey and several other perennial Clinton staffers attended the meetings, according to transcripts of Blumenthal’s deposition.
Podesta now chairs Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Mills sits on the board of the Clinton Foundation, of which Lindsey is chairman.
Blumenthal also testified that Hillary Clinton had told him her husband had merely attempted to “minister” Lewinsky because she was “troubled” and that the perjury and obstruction of justice investigation was motivated by his political adversaries.
“Independent counsel Kenneth Starr is known to loathe Blumenthal,” Salon Magazine wrote in 1999.
Among the investigation’s reasons for subpoenaing Blumenthal was an allegation that he had referred to Lewinsky as a “stalker.” Blumenthal denied ever commenting on the former White House intern’s personal life to the press.
In August 1997, Blumenthal sparred with conservative blogger Matt Drudge after the Drudge Report was forced to retract a story alleging Blumenthal “has a spousal abuse past that has been effectively covered up.”
The story became the subject of a $30 million libel lawsuit against Matt Drudge in 1998 that Blumenthal eventually dropped before paying Drudge’s attorneys a small fee.
Blumenthal claimed in his 2003 book, The Clinton Wars, that he dropped the controversial Drudge suit because he could no longer afford the legal fees.
In a review of Blumenthal’s 822-page book reflecting on his time in the administration, Slate Magazine noted, “Blumenthal seems utterly incapable of understanding how his own uncompromising, take-no-prisoners defense of the Clintons contributed to the poisonous political atmosphere that he bemoans.”
The operative’s tendency to retaliate against unfriendly reporters earned him the nickname “Sid Vicious.”
Blumenthal reportedly worked with Hillary Clinton’s campaign to be a New York senator in 2000.
He rejoined national politics in 2007 when he signed on as a senior adviser to Hillary Clinton’s first presidential campaign.
Blumenthal briefly made headlines when he was convicted of speeding while intoxicated in New Hampshire in April 2008, when he was working on the campaign, the Nashua Telegraph reported.
It was his aggressive messaging during the primary campaign that kept him out of the State Department when Hillary Clinton began her work for the agency.
But that didn’t stop him from wielding his influence over the secretary of state while working for her husband’s foundation.
Romanian hacker Marcel-Lehel Lazar’s acquisition in 2013 of the sensitive emails between Blumenthal and Hillary Clinton that have become the focus of an emerging controversy showed the Clinton Foundation official had a direct line to his former boss.
Among the Benghazi committee’s concerns is whether a Blumenthal-authored memo to Hillary Clinton, which blamed the attack on a reaction to an anti-Muslim video clip, was the source of the administration’s discredited initial reports claiming the same thing.
