Hillary Clinton did not “start” birtherism, as Donald Trump says. But we now know that her 2008 campaign actively fanned the flames of the toxic rumor, and she needs to take responsibility for that.
Junior volunteers were fired from her campaign for passing the rumor around. But it turns out that a very senior lieutenant and personal friend did a lot more than that to sow doubts about Obama’s origins than anyone had realized before this week. And she didn’t fire him for it, but rewarded him.
Former McClatchy Washington Bureau Chief James Asher came forward on Friday amid a resurgence in coverage of “birtherism” as it’s known, to reveal that Sidney Blumenthal, Clinton’s closest friend, adviser and confidante, explicitly urged him to cover the story that Obama had really been born in Kenya, pressing him hard enough that he actually made the decision to send a reporter there.
Blumenthal denied this in a terse statement but, given his history, we’ll believe the bureau chief, not the unreconstructed dirt slinger. In the Clintons’ heyday, Blumenthal was known to chat up journalists and steer them away from Clinton controversies by any means necessary. He notoriously earned his reputation as an unscrupulous hatchet-man when it was revealed that he shopped around the idea that the young intern, Monica Lewinsky, was a vindictive stalker seeking to harm Bill Clinton.
Unlike the low-level Clinton volunteers, in Iowa, who were fired, Blumenthal is as high-level as one can get when it comes to the Clintons. One wonders how many other journalists are not coming forward yet to confirm Asher’s story with similar experiences of their own.
Blumenthal failed in his 2008 attempt to make the Obama-birther story metastasize into something greater than just the buzz of fever swamps on the Right, and in his larger mission of making Clinton president.
But Clinton rewarded him for his efforts all the same, and in so doing assumed the guilt for this scandal that Blumenthal incurred. After she lost that race and was given the State Department as consolation, she still tried to reward him with a top job there. Obama intervened to prevent this, barring him from any position in his administration. Perhaps now we know the real reason why. So instead she put him on the payroll of the Clinton Foundation, that great slush fund for keeping Clinton campaigners on retainer.
To say she knew nothing about this at all, even after the White House intervened to prevent Blumenthal’s hire, is to insult everyone’s intelligence.
Moreover, it is clear from Clinton’s trove of now-public emails that Blumenthal remains a very close and special friend. Even as he was busy trying to make money from foreign policy in Libya, he always had Clinton’s ear. She took his advice seriously, no matter how bad it was, going so far as to share it with skeptical State Department staff. Bear in mind, Clinton was the one in the Obama administration pushing hardest for the disastrous American intervention in Libya. How long had the two been talking over the phone before that happened?
No one can or should defend Trump for peddling birther conspiracism during the early stages of the 2012 campaign, nor his willingness to play coy on the issue since.
But Clinton’s hypocrisy in this matter is just as indefensible. Her frothing outrage over Trump’s behavior is, if anything, even more disgusting when you know how she cynically participated in exactly the same smear when she had something to gain from it.
