Over the last few days, the Clinton campaign’s been on the defensive. The reason is James Asher, the former Washington bureau chief of McClatchy, has publicly claimed that Clinton aide and confidant was spreading the rumor that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and therefore not eligible to be president. Blumenthal actually admits he was pressuring McClatchy to investigate rumors related to Obama’s family in Kenya but claims he never went so far as to push the dreaded birther rumor. A second McClatchy reporter in Kenya, however, confirms he was asked to look into the birther issue, and everyone concedes Asher and Blumenthal were in contact. Ultimately there’s no paper trail that establishes Blumenthal was pushing the birther rumor explicitly. It’s Asher’s word against Blumenthal’s.
Except that Blumenthal’s word is worthless, and there are absolutely no comparable reasons to doubt Asher. Blumenthal is an entirely discreditable political operative. In 2008, other Democrats reported that Blumenthal was spreading rumors of similar dubiousness as the birther accusations regularly. “They aren’t being emailed out from some fringe right-wing group that somehow managed to get my email address,” wrote Occidental professor Peter Dreier in 2008. “Instead, it is Sidney Blumenthal who, on a regular basis, methodically dispatches these email mudballs to an influential list of opinion shapers — including journalists, former Clinton administration officials, academics, policy entrepreneurs, and think tankers.”
And yet, the media have been awfully quick to ride to Blumenthal’s defense, as well as buy the Clinton campaign spin. According to this remarkably defensive report from CNN, Blumenthal’s smears of Obama can’t be pinned on Clinton because “some 2008 staffers told CNN that Blumenthal was not officially part of the Clinton campaign, and a CNN check of Federal Election Commission records shows no payment to Blumenthal from the campaign.” The Los Angeles Times says, “There is no evidence that Clinton or her campaign ever raised that question, and her campaign fired one aide in Iowa who did circulate an email raising the issue.” According to McClatchy, “The Clinton campaign has denied any role in the birther conspiracy.” Politico inches toward something more definitive, reporting Blumenthal was “playing an informal advisory role during the 2008 campaign.”
The problem here is that Blumenthal seemed to think his own role with the campaign was something more definitive. According to Blumenthal, it even came with the title “senior adviser.” That doesn’t seem terribly informal. At the time liberal pundits commented that it was “no surprise” Blumenthal would be joining the Clinton campaign. Blumenthal was on the payroll at the Clinton White House, so the Clintons didn’t have any apparent issues associating with him and had stayed close to him even after—or perhaps because of—his tenacious but dishonest defense of Bill Clinton during the Lewinsky affair.
So why are journalists repeating the claim that Blumenthal was not an official part of the Clinton campaign? As far as I can tell, Blumenthal’s claim to have become a “senior adviser” were not refuted by the Clinton campaign at the time.
And if it wasn’t denied that Blumenthal was playing a “senior” role with the campaign, and yet he was never officially put on the payroll, it seems obvious that something fishy was going on. Deniability for his dirty tricks is, in fact, a logical reason, given his relationship with the Clintons. In fact, Blumenthal has a history of obscuring the particular nature of his employment with the Clintons to help them out. When Blumenthal was ostensibly employed at the New Yorker in 1996, he was really working on the Clinton campaign:
Unsurprisingly, after the 1996 campaign, Blumenthal was rewarded with a job at the White House.
So let’s recap. Blumenthal has a specific history of dishonestly representing his actual relationship to the Clintons when subterfuge is advantageous. He was employed formally in the Clinton White House, where he attracted quite a lot of attention specifically for lying to the media. (Christopher Hitchens wrote a book about it.) In 2007, he publicly quit his job at Salon and announced he was joining the Clinton campaign as a “senior adviser”—not that he had a problem with journalistic conflict of interest and working with the Clintons previously. Contemporaneous records show he proceeded to smear Obama a lot, including getting reporters to investigate Obama’s family in Kenya.
At the same time Blumenthal was smearing Obama, the campaign produced official memos about the need to attack Obama’s “lack of American roots,” a more-than-suspicious bit of synergy considering the specific nature of the accusations Blumenthal was pushing. After losing the primary in 2008, Clinton tried to hire him in a formal capacity at the State Department, something that the Obama White House—undoubtedly aware of Blumenthal’s efforts to smear Obama—nixed. She then put him on a $10,000 a month salary at the Clinton Foundation, and fielded his emails at State Department regarding his attempt to enrich himself in Libya as part of scheme with a dodgy Blackwater-esque private military company.
Throughout all of this, we are now being asked to believe that Blumenthal had no formal role on the Clinton campaign in 2008, despite contradicting Blumenthal’s own public statements about having a title and the fact she employed him directly before and after. Further, we’re supposed to believe that while Blumenthal made all manner of unproven accusations against Obama and did ask reporters to investigate his family in Kenya, he never would have suggested he was born in Kenya. Suffice to say, these are very self-serving excuses in the face of credible accusations that he was telling reporters Obama was ineligible to be president.
Normally such a suspicious set of facts would set off klaxons warning journalists that the politician in question is not telling the truth about everything that happened. Yet news outlets like CNN look at these facts and write tendentious headlines such as “No, Hillary Clinton did not start the ‘birther’ movement.” While it would be hard to reach such a leading conclusion as to blame her for starting the entire birther conspiracy, it’s not unreasonable to say the possibility one of her top aides gave the birther rumors legitimacy and currency at a crucial time is very real and should be investigated. Further, Clinton’s association with this repugnant figure is longstanding and very close, and such such an association raises lots of relevant questions about her own judgment, honesty, and fitness for office.
Absolutely none of this is to say that Trump should not be held accountable for spreading the birther rumors for years. His own role in in the birther scandal is likely even more repugnant than Blumenthal’s, and certainly his own judgment, honesty, and fitness for office are a series of question marks.
But it should be noted that part of the reason why Trump is frustrating the media and often gets away with his own untruthfulness is media’s blinkered partisanship. The media were squandering vast amounts of credibility cavalierly writing off the Clinton’s shameless dishonesty in the face accusations that should be taken seriously long before Trump ever arrived on the political scene.
If journalists were looking to advance the cause of truth, they would have to acknowledge Clinton and Blumenthal’s misdeeds. And ironically, because they are unwilling to do this, much of the country has written off their outrage against Trump’s role in the birther scandal—even though it’s warranted.
