Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative is a 2002 book written by former conservative journalist David Brock detailing his departure from the conservative movement. It is also the story of his coming out as a gay man. In the book, he states that he visited gay bars with Matt Drudge and other conservatives. The title alludes to the Bruce Springsteen song Blinded By The Light, while the subtitle alludes to Barry Goldwater‘s The Conscience of a Conservative, which helped define the modern conservative movement in the United States.

Summary

Brock recalls his days at the University of California, Berkeley and how he was turned off by hecklers at a speech by then United States ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick. Brock’s main attraction to conservatism was his disdain for communism.

After college, Brock moved with his then-partner (called “Andrew” to conceal his identity) to Washington, D.C. In D.C., Brock worked for The Washington Times and The American Spectator. Brock claims while he was working for those publications he thought he was doing honest journalism, but later stated that he had never corroborated his facts.

While working for The American Spectator, he wrote an article on Anita Hill, which he later expanded into The Real Anita Hill, a book that made him popular in the conservative movement. Brock would later say that many of the details he used were false.

After Bill Clinton was elected, Brock was assigned to write a story, later dubbed Troopergate, about four Arkansas state troopers who held a grudge against Bill Clinton. He claims that the troopers made up stories about affairs that could never be corroborated. Brock was given assurances that the troopers would not get paid for telling their stories. He later discovered he was deceived and that the troopers had been paid by Richard Mellon Scaife, who bankrolled The American Spectator and the Arkansas Project, a secret project to discredit Clinton.

Brock made sure to conceal the identities of the women identified by the troopers, with the exception of one woman named “Paula”. Brock thought that by not revealing her last name, it would be enough to conceal her identity. Brock did not take into account that Little Rock is a small city. Eventually her identity would be revealed as Paula Jones, which led to her civil lawsuit against Bill Clinton.

Following the Troopergate story, Brock wrote a book about Hillary Clinton, The Seduction of Hillary Rodham. Unlike the Anita Hill book, Brock decided not to put anything in the book that he could not corroborate. The book was not as critical of Hillary Clinton as it was promised to be. Brock claims that conservatives planned on the book being so damning as to influence the outcome of the 1996 presidential election.

The Seduction of Hillary Rodham was the beginning of Brock’s falling out with the conservative movement. The issue that forced him to leave the conservative movement was the movement’s intolerance towards homosexuality. Brock had reluctantly come out of the closet prior to writing the Hillary Clinton book, and believes this contributed to his being shunned by many in the movement.

Brock voted for Al Gore in 2000, the first time he voted since he voted for Ronald Reagan in 1984. During the period in which he did not vote, he had two rationalizations for his non-voting: – He believed that his vote didn’t count in liberal Washington D.C. – He believed that not voting allowed him to stay neutral Brock proclaimed that the latter rationalization was bogus, as he was not neutral during that time period.

Reviews

James Kehl wrote on DemocraticUnderground.com:

Not since Michael Lind’s “Up From Conservatism” has there been a book that candidly expose the Republican Right for what they are. This is not only a story of one person’s journey from a wrong path to a correct path. It is also a story which details the moral bankruptcy of a movement that, unfortunately, is a major influence in American life….

Since September 11, 2001, Americans have been looking for leadership, moral strength and reassurance. David Brock’s book is a story of one man who looked for those things ” in all of the wrong places.” Americans may be making the same mistake. David Brock eventually discovered his mistake.^[1]

Christopher Hitchens wrote on TheNation.com:

The whole book is an exercise in self-love, disguised as an exercise in self-abnegation. How could he, asks the author of himself, have possibly gone on so long in telling lies, smearing reputations and inventing facts? The obvious answer–that he adored the easy money and the cheap fame that this brought him–was more than enough to still his doubts for several years. However, his publisher seems to have required a more high-toned explanation before furnishing him with a fresh tranche of money and renown. And Brock’s new story–that he was taken in by a vast right-wing conspiracy–is just as much of a lie as his earlier ones.^[2]

References

• Kehl, James M. (March 25, 2002). “A Review of David Brock’s Blinded By The Right”. Democratic Underground.

External links

Media Appearance

• CNN Crossfire April 26, 2002
• BBC documentary. (VIDEO) The Power of Nightmares -section starts at 3 mins 33 secs in and ends at 6 mins and 23 secs

Positive Reviews

• A review by James M. Kehl at Democratic Underground

Negative Reviews

• Blinded by the Fight – The miseducation of David Brock, snot-faced warrior for the right – LA Weekly review.
• David Brock, Liar: A lifelong habit proves hard to break. in slate.com by Timothy Noah; Brock’s response at the bottom of the page.

NPR All Things Considered   7/2/2001

July 2, 2001 — Journalist David Brock spoke with NPR’s Nina Totenberg. Here is the transcript of their conversation:

Totenberg: Mr. Brock, you’ve written this book called Blinded by the Right and it was excerpted in Talk magazine. In this excerpt you’re talking about your role in the Clarence Thomas / Anita Hill affair. You write that you consciously told a lie in your reporting….and you wrote, I quote, “To protect myself and my tribe from the truth and the consequences from our own smears, cover-ups and falsehoods, I consciously and actively chose an un-ethical path. I continued to malign Anita Hill and her liberal supporters. I trashed two reporters for reporting something I knew was correct. I coerced an unsteady source.” That’s a pretty brutal admission, but your detractors will say if you lied then why should we believe you now?

Brock: Yes, and I think that’s a valid point. Let me just discuss the lying issue for a moment. As you said there I consciously lied once. When I wrote the Anita Hill book I believed everything I wrote was accurate. I know now that that book was filled with falsehoods and smears. Those were fed to me by the Thomas camp. They lied to me. I accept responsibility for that because I put them in my book. The issue there was I didn’t know what a journalist does. There was no fact checking, it was basically propaganda which is why I’m disavowing it now. There were wrong things in there about you, Anita Hill and others.

I was told those things by Thomas supporters. I’m sorry I put those in my book. The issue of my training as a journalist is key. When I got out of college I went to the Washington Times and American Spectator and those are propaganda organs of the right, so the issue raised about my credibility in the past few days is legitimate. The Talk piece is an excerpt from a book, not an investigative piece. The book is a memoir, not an investigative piece. Now the second question is about the lying, forget the journalism… I’m coming forward to tell the truth now and that truth is I lied, and it was a terrible lie. So it’s perfectly understandable that many people may not know whether to believe me now. But there are ways of finding out whether I’m telling the truth or not. Good, credible journalists can look into what I’m saying, examine it and get to the bottom of this and they can find the truth. It’s very important to understand that the Talk piece was not an excerpt, it was an adaptation, which means I compressed different parts of the book and made a new piece. There is more in the book not yet publicly disclosed on the issues we’re discussing here today.

Totenberg: I have checked as much as I can some of the things you say in the Talk piece. Mark Paoletta, who you say passed on info about a witness named, Kaye Savage who substantiated the allegation that Clarence Thomas was very interested in pornography. She had told Jill Abramson and Jane Mayer that she had seen lots of pornography around his apartment. You describe in this article what happened when you discovered this information in the book Strange Justice and what you and other supporters did. What did you do? You tried to intimidate Kaye Savage?

Brock: I was doing a review for the American Spectator in which I trying to destroy the book Strange Justice because it was seen as extremely damaging. Kaye Savage, to my knowledge, was a new witness. So I called Mark Paoletta and I brought up Kaye Savage.

Totenberg: Now Mark Paoletta worked at the White House.

Brock: Sure.

Totenberg: And you knew him.

Brock: Sure. Mark Paoletta is a Washington lawyer who worked on the Thomas nomination in the Bush White House. He’s got close connections to the Federal Society, which is a powerful society of right wing lawyers, he was one of Justice Thomas’ trusted friends, and a close associate of mine. So I called Mark on this day and brought up Kaye Savage. How can I discredit Kaye Savage? I got a call back from Mark who told me that Justice Thomas told him a smear story about Kaye Savage. Shortly after that I located and I called Kaye. It was an intimidating call on my part and I pressed her to meet me, which she did at a Washington hotel. We met, midday, and my goal there was to get her to retract everything she said. I made clear that I had this damaging information about her. And we talked about what she could say to partly retract her story. We worked that out and she gave me what I needed. I reported back to Mark Paoletta about what happened.

Totenberg: Now, Mr. Paoletta has told a number of reporters, not me because he hasn’t returned my calls, but he’s quoted in the NY Times and in the Post as saying that Justice Thomas never told him to pass on any information. You’ve never talked to Justice Thomas have you?

Brock: No

Totenberg: So, even if he had said that to you, you have no way of knowing if that’s true.

Brock: Right.

Totenberg: Paoletta also says that he had no information that Justice Thomas was a frequenter of pornographic videos.

Brock: Instead of debating Mark Paoletta’s quotations with you here, let me just say this. I’m willing to be put under oath or have a discussion in some forum with you and Mark Paoletta about this.

Totenberg: He’s not the only person you mention in your article who disputes what you say. You say for example that you helped a woman by the name of Barbara Ledeen draft a script for the Rush Limbaugh show to discredit Strange Justice…she denies it. You paint a picture of getting a phone call from one of Justice Thomas’ most staunch supporters Ricki Silberman after the book came out and she said what?

Brock: The excerpts appeared from Strange Justice appeared one morning in the Wall Street Journal. I had read the paper early that day and I wanted to see what the authors had. Fairly early in the morning I got a call from Ricki Silberman — I got a call from Ricki and she says emphatically to me over the phone he did it, didn’t he!

Totenberg: She says that’s a bold face lie, Mark Paoletta’s denials may be incomplete, but they are denials. Barbara Ledeen says she never wrote a script for the Rush Limbaugh show with you. Everyone I contact that you mention by name, either I have or other reporters have gotten denials, so we’re back to the question of how can we believe you? Did you keep any notes, credit card slips? We’re back to a he said, he said situation.

Brock: That is in the nature of what we’re going to see, because everyone who is denying these things is part of an orchestrated smear campaign to get Clarence Thomas confirmed. That smear campaign conducted by well connected conservatives in Washington around the first Bush campaign continued throughout the Clinton administration. In other words the same campaign of falsehoods and lies were spread by the right wing against the Clintons and essentially they essentially functioned as a government in exile during those 8 years and many of those people are in this current administration.

Totenberg: Well, some of them can’t have been lies, the president was forced to admit a relationship with Monica Lewinsky, he was forced to appear before a grand jury, you wrote the first Troopergate story, so we’re not talking about a government in exile as you say, basing what it has to say on nothing.

Brock: Sure, let me answer that this way…My book is proof, proof of the existence of a right wing conspiracy. And I can’t do the question about the Clinton’s that you just asked any justice today in this short forum.

Totenberg: Let me go back and get something personal about you straight. You say you started at the Spectator as an investigative reporter or, as you say, a cog in the right wing conspiracy, but either way you started there and you had a falling out with them. You started in what year with the Spectator?

Brock: I was freelancing with them in the late 80s, I was freelancing when I wrote the Anita Hill article in the spring of 1992, I then published The Real Anita Hill and went on their staff in 1993.

Totenberg: And you were fired from the Spectator when?

Brock: In November 1997.

Totenberg: And what was the reason you were fired?

Brock: I was told that Richard Mellon Scaife, who is the right wing billionaire in Pittsburgh who funded the American Spectator, I was told that after my Hillary Clinton book came out, which was seen as a sympathetic portrayal, that I didn’t do to Hillary Clinton what I did to Anita Hill — that he wanted me fired.

Totenberg: I confess that I haven’t read the Hillary Clinton book, do you think it was sympathetic?

Brock: You know, again, Nina, there’s an entire chapter in the book where I describe in detail the Hillary Clinton book, I can’t do that justice either.

Totenberg: At some point you came out of the closet as being gay. Now when did that happen?

Brock: That happened in early 1994. I had published the Troopergate article in December 1993. And shortly thereafter, because I had, as a closeted gay man, exposed the personal life of Bill Clinton, there was an issue raised about my sexuality. I was aware of calls coming in from the gay press, so as a way to disclose that on my own I gave an interview to Howard Kurtz around that time and said I was gay. The point I make about that now is that it upset me at the time, but I now think it was a valid point to raise by the gay press.

Totenberg: So, do you think your politics have changed?

Brock: Again Nina, I can’t discuss that today at all. There is a strong theme in the book about that.

Totenberg: Let me return to the lying question. You have boxes of material and reporters notebooks and things. Do you have contemporaneous notes at all of any conversations with Mr. Paoletta, Ms. Ledeen, with Ricki Silberman, with Boyden Gray, who’s White House counsel, which might substantiate your account?

Brock: I can’t comment on that today Nina, I’ve retained legal counsel.

Totenberg: That’s an odd answer even if you’ve retained counsel, I mean, either you’ve got them or not.

Brock: I can’t comment on that.

Totenberg: Let me ask you another question in that case. It has been suggested by Anita Hill’s lawyer, Charles Ogletree, that you waited a conveniently long time to make this revelation, that you’ve waited long enough that the statute of limitations has run out for any slander or libel action Ms. Hill might take. What’s you’re response to those? Why so long?

Brock: Let me give you two answers to that. The question of black mail, conspiracy, slander, I think you can understand now my previous answer and that’s all I can say about that. But let me address the broader issue that Professor Ogletree raises, and it’s very legitimate. Why wait seven years, and why put it in a book I’m selling. The answer is long, but let me try to summarize it. I was a bad journalist. But I’m a writer and the only way I know to redeem myself and to others that I hurt is to write it down. And that process has taken a long time.

Totenberg: You know, even as you talk with me here today, this is obviously a little emotional for you. This is not an easy thing you’ve done, and to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you are telling the truth for a moment, why not just go on with your life? You wrote to Anita Hill and apologized, you’ve gotten a decent advance for this book. You’ve had to anticipated this feeling of why should we believe you now?

Brock: Let me just answer the question about the advance and the mercenary aspect of this for a second. What you just said is correct and it’s been my intention for the last two years to give the money made on this book away… Why not just move on with my life? The alternative to writing this and moving on, was to write it down or have it eat away at me for the rest of my life.

Totenberg: I have to tell you, how did you live like that for this long?

Brock: The book starts with my childhood and provides insight.

Totenberg: I want to return to the question of contemporaneous notes for a minute. Whether you have a lawyer or not, the question I’m asking is is there something in those boxes that will help you substantiate that you had these conversations?

Brock: I just can’t answer that. I can tell you that there was a libel review and back up for the book.

Totenberg: Who is the publisher?

Brock: An imprint of Random House called Crown.

Totenberg: And did they go over this with you?

Brock: Sure.

Totenberg: Did Anita Hill ever respond?

Brock: That’s an interesting question. Yes, she did. I wrote to her sometime in early 1998 and my intention was to reach a private reconciliation. And that was a first step towards easing my conscience. Shortly thereafter, I wrote a letter to President Clinton apologizing for Troopergate. And that was published as a letter to the President in Esquire in the spring. I had no idea that would receive the kind of attention it did. It got major coverage and as the coverage was hitting, Anita Hill called me at home. She got my voicemail. And to tell you the truth, I didn’t have the guts to call her back at that time, because I felt I couldn’t handle telling the truth totally because I would be admitting that the two things I was most known for were wrong, and I just couldn’t handle that.

Totenberg: Was there a moment where you came face to face with something you thought you’d done terribly wrong?

Brock: I’m not sure I understand.

Totenberg: As you describe your voyage in the Talk piece you are quite successful at conning yourself for a long time, so I’m asking was there a moment when you couldn’t con yourself any longer?

Brock: Yes, that happened during the Hillary Clinton book. In the process there was quite a struggle, I knew it was expected that I would do to Hillary Clinton what I did to Anita Hill. I ended up doing what I believe what is the right thing which is writing the book I wrote. I’m still proud of that today.

http://www.npr.org/programs/atc/features/2001/jul/010702.brock.transcript.html

The New York Times   10/13/1996   By James B. Stewart

The Seduction of Hillary Rodham

By David Brock

Illustrated. 452 pp. New York:

The Free Press. $26.

If conflict lies at the heart of great drama, then surely Hillary Rodham Clinton is one of the great characters of our age. She is the embodiment of conflicts that all but define our time: marriage versus career; motherhood versus profession; truth versus expedience; power versus accountability; image versus reality. In her fateful decision to tether her fortunes to William Jefferson Clinton can be seen the origins of a plot that, as it accelerates into and beyond Nov. 5, has all the hallmarks of triumph and tragedy.

Recognizing this, David Brock places Hillary Clinton at the center of his investigative biography, ”The Seduction of Hillary Rodham.” Mr. Brock is best known for ”The Real Anita Hill,” his best-selling expose of Clarence Thomas’s accuser, and his lurid account of Bill Clinton’s sexual escapades in The American Spectator. He has been lionized by many conservatives as an antidote to the allegedly liberal national media, and his new book has been eagerly awaited by anti-Clinton zealots still looking for the elusive silver bullet that might halt the White House re-election juggernaut.

They are in for a shock. They will not only be disappointed; they will be infuriated. While almost perfunctorily placing his story within the lines of conservative politics, Mr. Brock seems to have found in ”St. Hillary” a means to attempt his own redemption as a journalist. In substance and style, he distances himself from the polemicist of ”The Real Anita Hill.” He has tried to do his subject justice in the broadest sense.

At times he goes too far. On the most controversial questions that swirl around the First Lady, Mr. Brock’s conclusions echo her apologists. Whitewater? Hillary Rodham Clinton was a mere passive investor, ”no different from many talented and ambitious people who have little interest in or aptitude for finance.” Castle Grande, the fraud-laced real estate deal linked to her by the billing records that surfaced mysteriously in the White House? Hillary’s was a mere ”cameo role,” and ”nothing in Hillary’s past indicates that she would knowingly participate in a sham deal.” And what about those billing records? Despite the presence of the First Lady’s fingerprints, Mr. Brock says the possibility that Carolyn Huber, the White House aide who discovered them, actually left them in the family’s private quarters ”cannot be ruled out” — a claim that lacks any supporting evidence and unfairly impugns Ms. Huber, who testified to the contrary.

Perhaps most startling of all, Mr. Brock dismisses or rationalizes the sometimes powerful evidence that Hillary Rodham Clinton has lied — about everything from her successful commodities trading to her role in the travel office firings — by invoking a relativism rooted in Republican precedents. ”Why should she be judged so much more harshly than anyone else in similar circumstances?” he asks. ”What about President Bush’s suspicious Iran-Contra notes? . . . Or the stock deal that earned Senator Alfonse D’Amato $37,000 in one day?” Complaining that ”serious wrongdoing is confused with trivial oversight,” he goes so far as to call for the abolition of the independent counsel to ”scale back the rampant and overgrown ethics machinery.” Almost reluctantly, it seems, Mr. Brock reminds us that ”even moral or historical imperatives cannot place one above the law.” All of this would be far more persuasive if he revealed any significant new information. But in virtually every case he relies on the published record, which, while voluminous, leaves numerous questions unanswered. (This problem pervades the book, given the evident and not surprising unwillingness of people close to his subject to speak to someone with Mr. Brock’s reputation.) This isn’t to say that Hillary Clinton is guilty of any crime, simply that with Kenneth Starr’s investigation still under way, it seems prudent to keep an open mind. At this juncture, it takes a large leap of faith to exonerate her.

The merit in Mr. Brock’s book is to be found elsewhere. His own faith in the First Lady seems rooted both in the many exemplary qualities he perceives in her and in the degree to which he empathizes with her as a victim of her husband. Clearly the President is the seducer of the title — Mr. Brock quotes a former White House aide, David Watkins, calling Bill Clinton ”the greatest seducer who ever lived” — and to the degree Hillary Clinton has been forced to compromise the high moral and ethical standards she brought both to their political partnership and their marriage, Mr. Brock blames Bill Clinton. Indeed, his characterization of the President is consistently scathing, at times approaching an ad hominem attack. He quotes John Robert Starr, the conservative columnist and managing editor of The Arkansas Democrat: ”The difference between Bill and Hillary is that deep down Hillary is a good person.”

This sentiment finds its fullest expression in Mr. Brock’s detailed account of Bill Clinton’s marital infidelities, which, if true, suggests that he is promiscuous to a degree unrivaled even by the libidinous J.F.K. In a passage sure to excite tabloid interest, Mr. Brock passes on that in 1981 Mrs. Clinton went so far as to hire a private investigator to report to her on her husband’s extramarital affairs. The investigator, Ivan Duda, found about eight possibilities, including one with a woman who worked with Mrs. Clinton at the Rose law firm. ”That one really hurt and made her furious,” Mr. Duda tells Mr. Brock.

Like many such anecdotes about Bill Clinton (and there are plenty in this book), it’s hard to know if it’s true. Mr. Brock discloses that Mr. Duda’s license was revoked by a board appointed by Mr. Clinton, potentially giving him a bias. Many such sources, from the state troopers who protected the Governor to various women themselves, like Paula Jones, have questionable credibility, a fact that, as Mr. Brock notes, has often been invoked by Clinton supporters. Why Mr. Brock believes some sources but not others (such as Jim and Susan McDougal) is never clear. But the sheer accumulation of such incidents reported by Mr. Brock, at least some supported by multiple witnesses, suggests that Hillary Clinton at some point had to accommodate herself to a humiliating fact of life that would have sent many, if not most, women to divorce court — a step that she herself contemplated on more than one occasion, Mr. Brock reports.

In this accommodation, according to Mr. Brock’s thesis, can be seen the essential ”seduction” of Hillary Rodham: not only did she compromise the integrity of her marriage, and by implication show a willingness to compromise all else that she once held inviolate; she was drawn into her husband’s extramarital affairs as a virtual co-conspirator. She not only defended and protected him in the wake of Gennifer Flowers’s tabloid allegations of a 12-year affair, but helped mount a campaign to threaten other women who might come forward. Mr. Brock reports that the Clinton campaign paid the noted San Francisco private investigator Jack Palladino about $100,000 to investigate and intimidate women linked to the Governor, including a former Miss Arkansas.

Mr. Brock concludes that ”the aggressively defensive strategy Hillary used to contain the womanizing allegations would necessarily pervade campaign responses to every other scandal that was to follow, including Whitewater. . . . It is easy to see why Hillary could not accept the advice of aides who urged a policy of openness and full disclosure. . . . Hillary did not know where such a policy of openness would lead. Her years of consciously avoiding the facts would now paralyze her.”

In absorbing detail, Mr. Brock recounts Hillary Rodham’s transformation from campus radical to Watergate investigator, legal services activist, Rose law firm partner, Governor’s wife and, ultimately, co-Presidential candidate and First Lady. In her early years Mr. Brock uncovers numerous ties to left-wing, even Communist causes, that will no doubt prove grist for the conservative mill. But he rightly seems more interested in how such youthful leanings and idealism were ground down by what he calls the ”mob culture” of one-party Arkansas. In any event, he shows scant evidence that any truly radical ideas have accompanied her into the White House, despite the faith in big government inherent in her grandiose health care plan and her largely successful effort to staff the Federal Government not with her husband’s ”new Democrats,” but her own like-minded appointees. What does seem to have survived in the First Lady, Mr. Brock argues, is the social activism of liberal Methodism, an activism safely rooted within the Establishment, and the ends-justify-the-means rationalizations of Saul Alinsky, a radical political organizer and author of ”Reveille for Radicals,” whom she met in Chicago during the tumultuous summer of 1968, before her senior year at Wellesley. It is the latter, he suggests, that underlies her otherwise puzzling handling of matters like Whitewater and the travel office.

One can only imagine how she feels today, having attained the White House, the goal that always lay at the heart of the Faustian bargain she seems to have forged when she committed herself, on more than one occasion, to Bill Clinton. For as Mr. Brock tells her story, it has always been Hillary, not Bill, who was motivated by a ”pristine vision of a good society anchored in profound moral conviction.” For Bill, lacking any such compass or vision, it was enough simply to be elected President. But being First Lady cannot have been enough for Hillary, who, as reported in The New Yorker by Connie Bruck, may have contemplated succeeding her husband as President. As she ponders the emotional toll of her marriage, surveys the wreckage of her health care plan, contemplates the effect of the welfare bill on the children she so clearly cares for, compares the abruptly halted ascendancy of the philandering, amoral Dick Morris to her own banishment to distant women’s conferences, and watches her former Whitewater partner Susan McDougal led to prison in shackles, one can only marvel at her fortitude. When all is said and done, can it possibly have been worth it?

Stripped of its conservative political baggage, premature attempts to exonerate her in matters that remain under investigation, and unsupported slurs against the President, much of what Mr. Brock says in ”The Seduction of Hillary Rodham” rings true. Given his own constituency, it has no doubt taken courage for him to reach the conclusions he does. While it might seem ironic coming from the writer who once called Anita Hill ”a bit nutty, and a bit slutty,” Mr. Brock is right that Hillary Clinton has been demonized at times by misogynists and right-wing fanatics. No doubt the liberal press has at times held her to impossibly high ideals. She has often been a lightning rod for criticism that, Mr. Brock makes clear, would more appropriately be leveled at her husband. Conversely, Bill’s achievements are in many cases Hillary’s. Seeing her at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, eloquently defending her husband and gazing lovingly at their daughter Chelsea, it isn’t hard to see why Mr. Brock’s heart went out to her. In contrast to her flaws — he cites intellectual rigidity, elitism, moral vanity and poor judgment — it is her noble ambitions, her manifest virtues and her suffering that make her story so achingly poignant.

http://www.nytimes.com/1996/10/13/books/innocence-betrayed.html?pagewanted=1

The Washington Post   11/4/1996   By Howard Kurtz

For several years now, conservatives have hailed David Brock as a hero for his scathing portraits of a lying Anita Hill and a sexually voracious Bill Clinton.

But in the wake of his relatively favorable book on Hillary Rodham Clinton, Brock is being savaged by his former fans on the right. He is no longer welcomed by conservative radio hosts such as G. Gordon Liddy and Oliver North. The American Spectator is under pressure from some conservative donors to dump him. He has been pilloried for trying to ingratiate himself with the liberal press.

“As long as you’re reaching the conclusions they agree with, you’re a great journalist,” Brock says of his conservative detractors. “When you don’t come up with the caricature they want, you’re no good anymore, or you’ve got bad motives.”

He adds: “The natural tendency is to think I’m selling out and couldn’t take the heat anymore. . . . At this point I’m sort of a pariah.”

To be sure, Brock may simply be displaying an unerring instinct for publicity. Having failed to uncover any startling new revelations about the first lady to justify his big advance, he may have concluded that simply trashing her would be too predictable. A conservative attack dog who finds admirable qualities in Hillary Clinton — now that’s news.

Brock insists his reporting for “The Seduction of Hillary Rodham” simply led him to a more sympathetic view of the first lady. But many conservatives feel betrayed.

Carol Innerst of the Washington Times called the book “hard to swallow” and “practically a love feast,” saying: “It would appear that Mr. Brock, rather than Mrs. Clinton, is the one who has been seduced. . . . The bewitched Mr. Brock has written an apologia.”

A front-page piece in the Washington Times (where Brock once wrote editorials) said the book “enrages conservatives” who accuse Brock “of seeking to rehabilitate himself with the dominant media that has so far scorned him.”

Another conservative, the New York Post’s Hilton Kramer, also invoked the seduction metaphor, accusing Brock of “wanting to be liked.” And the Weekly Standard’s headline: “Brock Hillary.”

“This is sort of what the left did to me on The Real Anita Hill,’ ” Brock says, recalling his book that depicted Hill as “a bit nutty and a bit slutty.” “People who haven’t read the book are trashing the book and trashing the author’s motives. It’s definitely disturbing.”

Some (but certainly not all) liberals have accorded Brock grudging respect. “Mr. Brock seems to have found in St. Hillary’ a means to attempt his own redemption as a journalist,” wrote James Stewart in the New York Times Book Review. ” . . . It has no doubt taken courage for him to reach the conclusions he does.”

The practice of ideologues embracing an apparent defector from the other side works in both directions. When Richard Cohen, the liberal Washington Post columnist, wrote recently that Hillary Clinton’s explanations on Whitewater were “simply not convincing,” he was praised by Rush Limbaugh and the Spectator, among others. Suddenly Cohen was a font of wisdom.

Brock dismisses suggestions that he is trying to “reposition” himself in the mainstream media. “That would be a fool’s errand,” he says. “There are too many people in liberal circles who will never get over Anita Hill or Troopergate,” the story he broke about Arkansas state troopers allegedly arranging liaisons for then-Gov. Clinton.

Despite calls for his head, Spectator Managing Editor Wladyslaw Pleszczynski said Brock’s job is “absolutely, totally, completely” secure.

Brock is not entirely shocked by the conservative hostility. “There was a certain point I realized I couldn’t have a book party because most of the people I’d normally invite might not come,” he says. Footnote: Gary Aldrich, the former FBI agent who wrote a book about the Clinton White House, was none too pleased when Brock announced that he had passed along the book’s discredited rumor about Clinton having late-night trysts at the Marriott. Aldrich recently dashed off a score-settling letter to Brock:

“Sorry for all the bad press on your book, David. I guess some of it — nah, probably a lot of it is coming from the stink that’s left over from what you did to me. But actually, it’s really a crummy book. . . . David, you can only dream of what it might be like to be an FBI agent, working at the White House. . . . I’ll make it my personal business to see to it that you are never accepted there. . . .

“You are a liar, David . . . You were used by the mainstream press, the same press that now says your book is D.O.A.” Grudge Match?

When The Washington Post took a look at “Jacqueline Bouvier: An Intimate Memoir,” reviewer Stephen Birmingham was less than flattering.

The author, John H. Davis, “has made something of a profession out of being Jackie’s cousin. . . . {The book} recycles and retreads bits and pieces of his previous work,” Birmingham wrote in late September.

Book World Editor Nina King says she didn’t know until the author complained that Birmingham had been sued for plagiarism by Davis in 1978. She says The Post will run a correction “apologizing to Davis and our readers.”

Had she known of the conflict, first reported by the New York Post, “we would not have assigned him the book,” King said. “Book reviews are not supposed to be the vehicle for paying back or getting even.” She said Birmingham, like all reviewers, signed a form saying he had no previous dealings with the author.

In settling the suit, Birmingham paid Davis $75,000 and acknowledged using portions of his book in Birmingham’s own Jackie O book. “I was appalled at the unethical bad taste of Mr. Birmingham accepting to do a review of my book . . . in view of the terrible and vitriolic dispute we had,” Davis said.

Birmingham says that since the review included two other books and “since it was all so long ago, I didn’t think that altercation of nearly 20 years ago would affect my judgment of his latest work, and I don’t think it did. I don’t have any grudge against John Davis, and certainly wouldn’t settle scores in the pages of Book World.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1996/11/04/david-brocks-trip-from-darling-to-demon/6ef8b109-4e6f-47c9-b754-653987585d1a/

3/1/1995   By Steve Rendall

The New York Times   9/12/2014   By AMY CHOZICK

She is building stamina through tough new workouts with a personal trainer and yoga. She is talking about how to address income inequality without alienating corporate America. And she is reviewing who’s who in the Democratic Party in Iowa, a crucial early voting state in the presidential cycle.

Hillary Rodham Clinton has said publicly that she will decide early next year whether she will undertake a second campaign for the presidency. But inside the Clinton operation, the groundwork is already quietly being laid for a candidacy.

On Sunday, Mrs. Clinton will appear at the 37th annual Iowa steak fry hosted by Senator Tom Harkin; it will be her most overtly political appearance since resigning as secretary of state in February of last year.

Meanwhile, the largest Democratic fund-raising group, Priorities USA, which helped get President Obama elected, recently rebranded itself as a vehicle to help Mrs. Clinton. Publicly, the group says it is focused on raising money for Democrats for this fall’s congressional elections, but privately, Priorities has already started reaching out to donors to secure 2016 commitments for Mrs. Clinton.

“It’s very obvious what’s she going to do,” said Sue Dvorsky, a former chairwoman of the Iowa Democratic Party. “Clearly she’s going to run.”

Of course, the former first lady can always decide to take a pass on a campaign. Before the 2004 presidential election, former Vice President Al Gore crisscrossed the country to promote his books, delivered speeches and even poked fun at himself on “Saturday Night Live,” leading to assumptions that he would seek to unseat President George W. Bush. But in December 2002, Mr. Gore declared that he would not run.

But Mr. Gore did not have a groundswell of support within the Democratic Party and had run into potential problems raising money. (There was no “Ready for Al” group signing up supporters.) And, back then, the Democratic Party had a larger field of other viable candidates including Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts and Senator John Edwards of North Carolina.

The signs pointing to Mrs. Clinton running are big and small.

Lately, when supporters wish her good luck in the 2016 presidential campaign, she responds with a simple “Thank you,” rather than explain that there is no campaign and that she has not yet decided whether she will run, as she did previously.

Priorities has held informational meetings with donors like Bernard L. Schwartz, a New York investor, and J. B. Pritzker, a Chicago-based philanthropist, to discuss a 2016 strategy and how much money will be needed to take on Republican super PACs.

At the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation, an intense period of fund-raising is underway, which is widely seen as an effort to build up the family’s charitable operation now, because a presidential campaign would soon interfere with philanthropic activities. A foundation fund-raiser the Clintons threw in the Hamptons in August cost as much as $50,000 per couple to attend.

Last month, Chelsea Clinton resigned from NBC News after less than three years as a special correspondent. In a Facebook message, Ms. Clinton said she stepped down “to continue focusing on my work at the Clinton Foundation” and as she and her husband, Marc Mezvinsky, expect their first child. But she would have likely had to step back from that job should her mother embark on a presidential campaign.

These days Mrs. Clinton’s mind seems to drift to Iowa, as she has been casually asking friends about who’s who in the state’s Democratic Party, said two people who could discuss private conversations only anonymously.

On Sunday, Mrs. Clinton will make her first trip back to Iowa since early 2008, when she came in third in the heated Democratic caucus behind Mr. Obama, then a senator from Illinois, and Mr. Edwards. Mr. and Mrs. Clinton will both attend the steak fry, a fund-raiser in Indianola known as a must-stop for potential presidential candidates.

It has long been an opportunity for presidential candidates “to get out there and dip your toe in the water and introduce yourself to a lot of active Democrats,” said Scott M. Brennan, chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party. (He added that the Clintons were attending to help Democrats in 2014 and to pay tribute to Mr. Harkin, who is retiring from the Senate.)

Back in New York and Washington, Mrs. Clinton has a packed schedule this month to raise money for Democratic candidates; she headlined a reception Friday to benefit the Democratic Governors Association that cost $10,000 to attend. Mr. and Mrs. Clinton are not slowing down on delivering paid speeches, at around $200,000 each. A presidential campaign would limit those opportunities to make money.

Mrs. Clinton is getting in better physical shape, a necessity for any potential candidate who faces the rigors of the campaign trail. Friends said she has more energy and has also been practicing yoga.

A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton dismissed any suggestion that the former secretary of state is preparing to run. “You caught us,” said Nick Merrill, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton. “These are all definitive signs of a person” who is “simply living their life.”

Mrs. Clinton spent August in the Hamptons, a working vacation that gave her plenty of time to interact with donors without the glare of the news media. Liz Robbins, a Washington lobbyist with a home in East Hampton; the investor Dan Neidich and his wife, Brooke Garber Neidich, an arts executive; the hedge fund manager Richard C. Perry and his wife, Lisa Perry, a fashion designer; and Susie Tompkins Buell, a San Francisco-based entrepreneur, are among the friends and donors who hosted events for the Clintons.

Amid the small talk, Mrs. Clinton would offer telltale signs that she intends to run, said several people who crossed paths with the former first lady on the shores of Long Island.

She would pose political questions and field thoughts on policy, asking, for example, Wall Street executives and business leaders what they thought of Mr. Obama’s efforts to eliminate inversions.

Mrs. Clinton has a small personal staff that she recently relocated to New York to be closer to her office at the Clinton Foundation. Several aides who worked on Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 campaign, and hope to work for her again, often discuss logistics like where a campaign headquarters would be located, with New York State and Little Rock, Ark., floated as options.

Fledgling efforts to develop a message are quietly taking place, said the people close to Mrs. Clinton. Without discussing her 2016 plans, she has talked to friends and donors in business about how to tackle income inequality without alienating businesses or castigating the wealthy.

That message would likely be less populist and more pro-growth, less about inversions and more about corporate tax reform, less about raising the minimum wage and more long-term job creation, said two people with firsthand knowledge of the discussions. (A person close to Mrs. Clinton said that she often seeks advice from people in various fields, and that those conversations have nothing to do with planning a campaign.)

Until Mrs. Clinton officially declares, she is having some fun with the breathless speculation. In an online birthday message to Mr. Clinton, she discusses a possible birthday gift with Kevin Spacey, in character as the scheming President Francis Underwood on the Netflix drama “House of Cards.”

Mr. Spacey proposes an elephant, like the ones Mrs. Clinton works to save at the Clinton Foundation. “I told you,” she responds, “this is a very personal decision that I will make when I’m ready.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/13/us/clinton-silent-on-2016-bid-as-campaign-style-actions-begin-to-speak-volumes.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share

The Washington Post   7/7/2015   By Philip Rucker

One day in May, operatives from a Washington-based super PAC gathered New Hampshire mayors, state representatives and local politicos at Saint Anselm College for a day of training.

They rehearsed their personal tales of how they met Hillary Rodham Clinton and why they support her for president. They sharpened their defenses of her record as secretary of state. They scripted their arguments for why the Democratic front-runner has been “a lifetime champion of income opportunity.” And they polished their on-camera presentations in a series of mock interviews.

The objective of the sessions: to nurture a seemingly grass-roots echo chamber of Clinton supporters reading from the same script across the communities that dot New Hampshire, a critical state that holds the nation’s first presidential primary.

The super PAC, called Correct the Record, convened similar talking-point tutorials and ­media-training classes in May and June in three other early-voting states — Iowa, Nevada and South Carolina — as well as sessions earlier this spring in California.

Presidential campaigns have for decades fed talking points to surrogates who appear on national television or introduce candidates on the stump. But the effort to script and train local supporters is unusually ambitious and illustrates the extent to which the Clinton campaign and its web of sanctioned, allied super PACs are leaving nothing to chance.

When, say, a Londonderry Times reporter calls Rockingham County Democratic Committee members for a comment about the candidate, they are likely to parrot Correct the Record’s talking points about Clinton having been a fighter for the middle class — including improving rural health care as first lady of Arkansas to raising the minimum wage as a senator from New York.

[The making of Hillary 5.0: Marketing wizards re-imagine the Clinton brand]

“We are holding sessions with top communicators across the country where we talk about the best ways to discuss Secretary Clinton’s strong record of accomplishments, how to articulate Secretary Clinton’s positions most effectively and how to correct Republican operatives’ distortions of the facts,” said Adrienne Watson, communications director at Correct the Record.

But asking local supporters to use talking points could undermine the organic nature of grass-roots political interactions. No longer can a journalist call state representatives in Iowa and expect to hear their personal, candid takes on Clinton — nor can a Rotary Club member listen to fellow small-business owners talk about the candidate at the group’s monthly luncheon — without suspecting that they are reading from a script.

The super PAC’s effort comes as Clinton struggles on the campaign trail to appear accessible and genuine. Some Democrats have long thought that she sounds too scripted on the stump, especially compared with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), her insurgent primary rival whose authenticity and liberal message are drawing thousands of Democrats to his rallies.

New Hampshire state Sen. Lou D’Allesandro, a local elected official for decades and a longtime Clinton supporter, said he did not attend Correct the Record’s session, which was held May 18 at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm.

“I’ve known Hillary for a long time,” he said. “I’ve known her husband for a long time. She’s been at our home. I’ve visited her in Washington. I believe that I can articulate where she is on issues and I really don’t need anybody to tell me what to say. I believe that you stand for people because you believe what they stand for and you articulate it.”

David Brock runs Correct the Record, a super PAC training Clinton supporters on talking points. (Danny Johnston/AP)

Kathy Sullivan, a Democratic National Committee member from New Hampshire who attended the training, said it helped her “talk about the Hillary Clinton we know.” The session included a workshop in which supporters turned to the supporters sitting next to them and practiced sharing anecdotes about Clinton that help humanize her.

“We would each tell a personal story about Hillary Clinton that is an example of the qualities about her that make her attractive as a candidate. as opposed to listing a lot of policy positions,” Sullivan said.

[In Bernie Sanders, an unlikely — but real — threat to Hillary Clinton]

Correct the Record — one of several super PACs run by Clinton ally David Brock — coordinates some of its activities with Clinton’s campaign, but officials said the campaign played no role in the training sessions.

The Clinton team has its own surrogate operation that distributes talking points to supporters to ensure that its messages in local and national media are consistent.

For example, the campaign distributed an eight-page guide for volunteers with instructions for how to hold a house party. It encourages hosts to visit the campaign’s YouTube page to play videos of Clinton and tells them to invite guests “to share their story — everyone will get excited to talk about why they support Hillary,” according to the guide, which was made public Tuesday by the Sunlight Foundation.

The super PAC’s on-camera media training was conducted by the Franklin Forum and led by the group’s president, John Neffinger, a Democratic strategist who specializes in coaching people for television interviews.

Correct the Record held a series of similar media sessions in the spring of 2014 to prepare Clinton backers for interviews surrounding her national book tour for “Hard Choices,” a memoir of her State Department years.

Watson said the super PAC plans to hold additional training sessions later this year.

To supporters such as Eleni Kounalakis, who served as ambassador to Hungary in Clinton’s State Department, the program is welcome. In March, she and about 20 other supporters participated in a Correct the Record session in San Francisco. She said it helped refine the case she and others make for Clinton’s candidacy in public.

“Many people who are very vocal in supporting Secretary Clinton are very comfortable talking about why among their friends and in small groups — but when it comes to talking to the media, that can be very intimidating,” Kounalakis said. “Some people feel like, ‘I know Hillary has been there for the working person in her life, in her career, but I want someone to help me prepare those arguments so that I have that confidence to speak in a broader context.’ ”

Nick Sottile, 21, president of the College Democrats of South Carolina, said he felt “lucky” to attend a May 7 Correct the Record session in Columbia, S.C.

“It got right to the heart of things — how to cut through the noise and talk about Secretary Clinton’s record,” he said. “And not just what to say, but how to talk about her as a young person in South Carolina. It was good training in how to be an effective talker.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/the-making-of-a-hillary-clinton-echo-chamber/2015/07/07/01625c5e-24ae-11e5-b72c-2b7d516e1e0e_story.html?tid=sm_fb

Slate   7/1/2015   By Amy X. Wang

Politico   6/29/2015   By HADAS GOLD

Longtime Hillary Clinton ally and adviser Sidney Blumenthal advised and helped shape political coverage in the early days of The Daily Beast, BuzzFeed‘s Rosie Gray reports.

Though Blumenthal was never on the site’s masthead, he helped direct political coverage including critical pieces on Caroline Kennedy and about Democrats who were unhappy with President Barack Obama in 2008 and 2009.

Tina Brown, The Daily Beast’s founding editor who left the company in 2013, told BuzzFeed that Blumenthal’s role was as a part-time consultant who helped connect the site to writers.

What’s not entirely clear is whether Blumenthal was also being paid by the Clinton Foundation at the same time as his work with the Daily Beast. Our colleague Ken Vogel reported last month that Blumenthal was added to the foundation’s payroll in 2009. Brown told BuzzFeed she was not aware of whether Blumenthal was also being paid by the foundation while he worked for The Daily Beast, and a Clinton Foundation spokesperson told BuzzFeed that their dates were “incorrect” but did not respond to their follow up questions about whether the dates overlapped.

We’ve reached out to The Daily Beast for further comment and will update here accordingly.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2015/06/clinton-confidant-blumenthal-influenced-early-daily-209676.html

Read more from BuzzFeed:

Sidney Blumenthal Played Under-The-Radar Role At Young Daily Beast

Blumenthal quietly helped steer politics coverage at the fledgling publication. Including a pair of Caroline Kennedy hit pieces.

BuzzFeed   6/28/2015   by Rosie Gray

WASHINGTON — Hillary Clinton’s confidant Sidney Blumenthal played a quiet role in shaping, and sometimes steering political coverage, in the early days of The Daily Beast.

Blumenthal’s role, early employees said, was touched with a bit of the conspiratorial haze that has emerged as a point of controversy in Clinton’s campaign. He wasn’t listed on the site’s masthead, and the site’s founder, Tina Brown, said she had “no idea” whether or not he was on Clinton’s payroll while helping to shape the site’s political coverage. In one case, he commissioned a hit piece on a potential Clinton rival, Caroline Kennedy, though his name appeared nowhere on the story.

Brown, who founded The Daily Beast, confirmed to BuzzFeed News that Blumenthal had been a “part time consultant” in 2008 and 2009 and had “assigned and connected us to some writers as asked.”

“He was supposed to find writers for ideas and stuff like that,” said one former Beast writer who recalled Blumenthal shaping coverage that tended to be “stuff from Democrat-(or ‘Democrat-‘)-in-exile people who were skeptical of and/or outright didn’t like Obama” — work like this piece by Michael Lind about the “Democratic suicide” under Obama. The employee suggested Blumenthal was responsible for bringing in Democratic political strategist Doug Schoen, who has written semi-regularly for the Beast since 2009. Contacted by BuzzFeed News, Schoen said Blumenthal had “never edited me” at the Beast or anywhere else.

In the winter of 2008-2009, the Daily Beast ran two pieces that were critical of Caroline Kennedy, one referring to her as a “puppet” and the other describing her candidacy as an “insult.” Kennedy was seeking at the time to replace Hillary Clinton in the Senate — the scion of a rival dynasty who, if she had she had been appointed to the Senate, would immediately have been seen as a likely national Democratic figure of a new generation. The author of the pieces, current New York Daily News columnist Harry Siegel, who was at Politico at that time, confirmed to BuzzFeed News that Blumenthal had commissioned and edited them. (He also said that Blumenthal’s editing had been “intelligent and incisive.”)

One former Daily Beast employee described Blumenthal as having been a “recruiter.” Blumenthal, the employee said, had a preferred group of writers from whom he would draw submissions, including Scott Horton, the attorney who won a National Magazine Award in 2011 for a Harper’s story about Guantanamo. Horton didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Blumenthal could be somewhat of a headache for the Beast staffers. Though not officially on staff as an editor, he would send in pieces that he said had been edited, expecting them to be published as-is.

Blumenthal’s involvement with the Beast didn’t last for a long time; one former staffer estimated it as being around six to nine months. It appears to have been a result of his longtime friendship with Brown, for whom he worked at The New Yorker in the 1990s.

Leaked emails obtained in the Guccifer hack provide a glimpse into the Brown/Blumenthal relationship; in an email dated December 27, 2012, years after Blumenthal’s ambiguous role with the Beast had ended, Brown emailed him: “How are you, sid. Are u done with lincoln? [Blumenthal has been working on a biography of Abraham Lincoln.] So want your politics brain back! Is there an aspect of BUSH you might want to do for when he goes ?the Bush clinton relationship?” The email was sent during a health scare in which George H.W. Bush was hospitalized; news organizations routinely plan out obituaries and other coverage before an aging subject has died.

“Even if Bush does get through this crisis, mark me for the piece,” Blumenthal writes.

The emails also show Blumenthal reaching out to Brown for David Petraeus’ contact information in 2013; she gives it to him, but says “u must never ever say came from me.”

But they weren’t that close: When the deal to combine Newsweek and The Daily Beast closed, Brown, a source said, had a congratulatory call with a man she thought was her new owner, Sidney Harman. “Get me Sidney,” she told one of her assistants. When she learned she had actually been put on the line with Blumenthal, not Harman, she hung up.

It’s unclear to what extent Blumenthal was involved with the Clinton Foundation during his quasi-employment at The Daily Beast. It has recently come to light that Blumenthal was being paid $10,000 a month by the Clinton Foundation while he was advising Hillary Clinton on Libya during her tenure as Secretary of State. He is also a paid adviser to two organizations run by Clinton ally David Brock: American Bridge and Media Matters. (Politico reported that Blumenthal was added to the Clinton Foundation payroll in 2009. It’s unclear if that overlapped with his time at the Beast.)

Brown told BuzzFeed News she had “no idea” if Blumenthal was working for the Clinton Foundation or CGI at the time. Asked if he was on the Clinton Foundation payroll during 2008 and 2009, a Clinton Foundation spokesperson said “The dates you have are not accurate.”

A spokesperson for the Clinton Foundation didn’t respond to follow-up questions about whether Blumenthal was on the payroll there during his time at the Beast. Blumenthal didn’t respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for Blumenthal said “we are not making any further statements.”

update

Vox   6/16/2015   by Dylan Matthews

The journalist Sidney Blumenthal is scheduled to testify today before the House Benghazi Committee. Blumenthal wasn’t serving in the US government on September 11, 2012, when Islamist militants killed four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens. But the committee’s investigation into Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s response to the attack has revealed that Blumenthal was sending her dozens of emails passing along private intelligence on the ground in Libya during her time at State, including in the aftermath of the events in Benghazi.

To his detractors, this all feels familiar. Blumenthal’s time in the White House in the late 1990s earned him a reputation on the American right as something like the first family’s Rasputin, a vicious, mudslinging partisan who’d stop at nothing to defend Bill and Hillary Clinton. “Sid Vicious” was one common nickname; his own White House colleague Rahm Emanuel gave him the nickname “grassy knoll,” owing to his penchant for identifying and decrying various conservative conspiracies against the president. Of course that guy would be involved in what was, from the right’s vantage point, Hillary’s greatest screw-up as secretary of state.

But Blumenthal is far more fascinating than this caricature makes him out to be. The one key thread running through all his work — his career as a journalist at the New Republic and the New Yorker, his time at the Clinton White House, his work on the Hillary campaign and as an outside correspondent during her time at State — is a desire to rebuild American liberalism in such a way that it could take on the post-Reagan right and win. Blumenthal is someone who saw the country’s politics fundamentally transform in the 1980s and yearned for a liberal movement and a Democratic Party that was capable of adapting and defeating the New Right. He eventually concluded that the Clintons were the best hope for achieving that kind of transformation. His Clinton loyalism isn’t a form of personal fealty. It’s an allegiance born of perceived ideological and moral necessity.

Who, exactly, is Sidney Blumenthal?

Sidney Blumenthal is a journalist and political adviser. Blumenthal is probably best known for his time as assistant and senior adviser to President Bill Clinton from August 1997 to January 2001, during which time he was deeply involved in Clinton’s defense against impeachment charges brought by Republicans in Congress. He also served as an adviser on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign.

Before joining the administration, he worked for decades as a political journalist, starting in Boston area alt weeklies before moving to Washington, DC, to work for, at various points, the New Republic, the Washington Post, and the New Yorker. After the Clinton administration ended he returned to writing, spending years as the Washington editor of Salon and then becoming a columnist for the Guardian.

Blumenthal is the author of several books, including The Clinton Wars — a mammoth, 853-page memoir of his time in the White House — The Permanent Campaign, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment, and most recently A Self-Made Man: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, 1809 – 1849, the first volume in a planned four-volume biography of Lincoln, which is scheduled to be released next April.

He’s also had a small side career in show business, serving as a consultant for the Robert Altman-directed, Garry Trudeau-penned HBO series Tanner ’88, which tracked a fictional congressman’s bid for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination, and producing the films Max and Taxi to the Dark Side, the latter of which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

What was Blumenthal’s writing like before he joined the White House?

Blumenthal was a prolific writer in his first decades as a journalist, with two books standing out as particularly illustrative of his interests and of where his career was headed.

The Permanent Campaign, released in 1980, argued that regional party bosses were being supplanted by a cadre of professional campaign consultants, using as examples the crop of then-new Massachusetts politicians (Barney Frank, Ed Markey, John Kerry) who won despite their lack of ties to the Irish Democratic machine.

A consequence of the increased power of campaign consultants was a blurring of the line between campaigning and governing, creating the titular “permanent campaign” dynamic. The decline of industrial-era bosses and rise of poll-driven consultants, he argued, mirrored the broader transition in the economy from manufacturing to computing and information technology, “where white-collar workers outnumber blue-collar, computers are the archetypal machines, knowledge is a vital form of capital, much heavy industry is exported to the more dynamic Third World countries, and America becomes the home office of the world.”

The book’s predictions hold up remarkably well, both on politics and on the economy at large. Crucially, Blumenthal didn’t view the permanent campaign dynamic as necessarily a bad thing. “While many bemoaned the emptiness of image making and the lack of principle in polling, I saw these techniques as inevitable and neutral,” Blumenthal writes in The Clinton Wars. Blumenthal would go on to engage heavily in this variety of politics in his time at the White House, where image making was a key part of his portfolio.

The Rise of the Counter-Establishment, first published in 1986, is a history of the conservative movement, written at the height of its ascendancy. It was released when Blumenthal was writing for the style section of the Washington Post on the “conservative beat”; he had originally been hired for the national reporting team, but was moved to a more analytical part of the paper when it was revealed that he had worked as a speechwriter for Gary Hart’s 1984 Democratic presidential campaign, while simultaneously giving Hart glowing coverage in the New Republic. Hart was, in many ways, the proto-Clinton, a modernizer who wanted the Democratic party to embrace the new information economy and discard some of its liberal orthodoxies. Unsurprisingly, Blumenthal took a shine to both.

The basic argument of Rise of the Counter-Establishment is that the conservative movement emulated what it perceived as a loose but effective conspiracy of elite institutions — the Brookings Institution, the Ford Foundation, the New York Times editorial page — and so created a much more cohesive and effective counter-establishment — the American Enterprise Institute, the Olin Foundation, the Wall Street Journal editorial page — to combat it. “They imitated something they had imagined,” Blumenthal wrote, “but what they created was not imaginary.” The book, the conservative writer Tevi Troy notes, “provided a blueprint for what would be called the vast right-wing conspiracy” during Blumenthal’s time in the White House. It laid out who, exactly, the enemy was that a new generation of Democratic politicians had to defeat.

How did Blumenthal get to know the Clintons?

Blumenthal first met Bill Clinton in 1987 at Renaissance Weekend, an annual convening of various luminaries in Hilton Head, South Carolina. The Democratic presidential primaries were mere weeks away, and after much consideration Clinton had opted not to run that cycle. In the Clinton Wars, Blumenthal remembers the then-governor being remarkably candid about his ambition for the office, but Blumenthal recalls being won over by the fact that Clinton was reading William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged, a then-new, now-classic sociological work on deindustrialization’s effect on inner cities, particularly isolated poor black communities. “After a few days’ exposure to him,” Blumenthal writes, “my initial impression of a young man in a hurry was evolving and deepening … He was a charismatic if loquacious speaker who had an easy facility with the arcana of public policy.”

Blumenthal wound up touting Michael Dukakis heavily in that election cycle, leading Christopher Hitchens to write with a mixture of amazement and disdain of his “ability to put a radical shine on the most wretched Democratic nominees.” But in 1992, he was sympathetic to Clinton, writing a cover story in the New Republic (to which he’d returned from the Post) titled “The Anointed,” which touted him as the frontrunner, a visionary beloved of party elites capable of reviving liberalism in the post-Reagan era.

Clinton, Blumenthal writes, was part of a group of Democrats interested in “rethinking … the future of liberalism and the Democratic Party”; Blumenthal calls this project “the Conversation.” He favorably compares Clinton to Dukakis (a “mere technocrat”) and his 1992 rival Bob Kerrey (“bereft of much of a rationale beyond his biography”), who were both, Blumenthal is eager to note, not part of the Conversation. They weren’t in the in-crowd, they didn’t know the right people, and they weren’t policy savants like Clinton. They weren’t trying to remake liberalism the way Blumenthal thought it needed to be remade. But Clinton — like Hart before him — was.

Critics alleged that the distinction was more personal than it was ideological or substantive. “Blumenthal has yet to analyze, however, his own role in ‘The Conversation,'” Jacob Weisberg wrote in the New Republic a year later. “Most of those quoted in his story are not just sources but long-standing personal friends. And he sees his advocacy journalism as an extension of that friendship.”

By Blumenthal’s telling, he hadn’t fully been won over when “The Anointed” was released. His “road to Damascus” moment, according to Clinton Wars, came after the story went to press, when the Gennifer Flowers scandal broke just before the New Hampshire primary. Clinton was slipping once the allegations of an affair emerged, and former Massachusetts Sen. Paul Tsongas was looking like the frontrunner. “But then in Dover,” Blumenthal writes, “in a bandbox of an Elks lodge, I watched Clinton lift himself back to political life … His performance, upon which the fate of his entire campaign depended, was the most electrifying political moment I had witnessed since I was a boy in the Chicago Stadium,” where Blumenthal had seen John F. Kennedy speak in 1960.

How did Blumenthal write about Clinton in his first term?

Early in Clinton’s first term, Blumenthal, by then at the New Yorker, was often deeply critical of the president, who clearly, in Blumenthal’s eyes, was not living up to the promise he had identified in “The Anointed.” A piece in January 1993 described a chaotic transition process with “the sort of murderous atmosphere that had led to the assassination of James Garfield by a disgruntled job seeker.” A May piece lambasted Clinton’s unwillingness to take military action to stop the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, declaring, “There are few things more dangerous to a President’s and a nation’s credibility than the suggestion of commitment without putting force behind it.”

As the term progressed, Blumenthal’s coverage grew ever more positive. Clinton was, in Blumenthal’s view, growing into the effective liberal modernizer Blumenthal always thought he could be. In January 1994, Blumenthal published a piece evaluating Clinton’s first year, based on a long interview with the president. While Blumenthal wrote that Clinton “had the worst first week of any President since William Henry Harrison,” he overall paints a glowing portrait of the leader who pushed through a controversial budget plan, the Brady Bill gun control measure, and NAFTA. Clinton, Blumenthal reported, “feels he has gained a grasp of his office and its powers.”

A piece in June on Paula Jones’s sexual harassment suit against the president dismissed it as an unsubstantiated far-right witch hunt. Scandals like Jones’s, he argued, were “destructive of all partisanship — partisanship in the sense of vigorous public combat about competing visions of society … In the tabloid haze, public life evaporates.”

Behind the scenes, Blumenthal introduced Clinton to Tony Blair, then an up-and-coming British politician whom Blumenthal profiled for the New Yorker before his election as prime minister. Blair, like Clinton, faced the challenge of modernizing his nation’s left party in the wake of an iconic and transformative conservative national leader (in his case, Margaret Thatcher), a challenge that Blumenthal found intellectually invigorating. Later, in the White House, Blumenthal would take a keen interest in developing the pair’s trans-Atlantic “Third Way” model as a coherent ideology and approach to left politics.

Blumenthal gained a reputation as the most pro-Clinton member of the Washington press corps. To his fans, this was perfectly normal, a continuation of a long tradition of DC journalists developing close relationships with the White House. “George Will consorted with Ronald Reagan, to no detriment to his career,” Rutgers historian David Greenberg wrote in his review of Clinton Wars. “David Frum cashiered his service as a speechwriter to the incumbent into a best-selling book, The Right Man — only to return to writing pro-Bush pieces.” But to his critics, Blumenthal was doing the administration’s job for them. When he finally joined the White House in 1997, his former employer, the New Republic, asked whether he’d “get his back pay.”

This is a lot of ’90s history to take in. Can we lighten the mood by delving into a ridiculous DC feud to which Blumenthal was party?

Of course. In addition to his journalistic, political, and film production careers, Blumenthal is a playwright, authoring, most notably, This Town, which was set in the White House press room — where, per Blumenthal’s summary in The Clinton Wars, “a small pack of archetypal, frustrated journalists compare their respective speaking agents and fees while projecting their anxieties onto the president and his staff, who are being unhelpful in advancing their careers.” The reporters then go on to invent a sex scandal involving the White House dog. Blumenthal brags in his memoir that the play was staged at the LA Theatre Works and the National Press Club in DC.

The play caused a minor bit of trouble for New York Times reporter Mark Leibovich when his 2011 book on DC political culture, This Town, was in progress. Leibovich writes in the book that when Blumenthal caught wind of the project, he sent Leibovich’s editors an email with the subject line “Re: Mark Leibovich: Potential Plagiarism Problem.” Here’s Leibovich’s account of the correspondence:

Blumenthal, whom I think I have met once, began the email by demanding that I acknowledge that he “wrote a widely produced and reviewed satirical play, entitled ‘This Town,” on the Washington press corps … and that is the origin of the phrase and concept.” He boasted that his play had been “prominently staged at the Washington Press Club.” He concluded that “of course, titles, unlike trademarks, can’t be copyrighted, but they shouldn’t be plagiarized. Perhaps Leibovich is unaware of the problem. Perhaps he was born yesterday. But he should not open himself up to a silly plagiarism problem.”

The key word here is “silly,” though admittedly my credentials are suspect because I have never had anything “prominently staged at the Washington Press Club.” Still, I feel bad to have inflicted hurt unto Blumenthal by overlooking a play that’s been forgotten by nearly everyone, in “this” or any town. And by Sidney’s own Wikipedia page too. So, in good faith, I will acknowledge that Blumenthal apparently wrote a play in the nineties called This Town, and future editions of this book will hereby be known as the New Testament.”

What was Blumenthal’s involvement in the Clinton impeachment?

Blumenthal had a wide portfolio in the West Wing, working on “matters as varied as the State of the Union speech, press freedom in Argentina and Turkey, the recent US visit of British Prime Minister Tony Blair and a presidential bid to highlight the coming millennium,” according to a 1998 LA Times profile. But he is best remembered for his role in helping Clinton weather the Monica Lewinsky scandal and subsequent impeachment proceedings.

Blumenthal’s most notable public role in the proceedings was as a witness, first at a federal grand jury for independent counsel Kenneth Starr and then at the actual impeachment trial in the US Senate. He was first called to testify by Starr in February 1998, one month after the Lewinsky scandal went public. He agreed to answer any and all questions about his contacts with the press, but declined to answer questions about his private conversations in the White House, as the Clinton administration was claiming that executive privilege exempted aides from having to testify on such matters.

Blumenthal was asked if he had been digging up or disseminating dirt on members of Starr’s staff so as to discredit his investigation into the scandal, and if Clinton had asked him to do so; he vehemently denied the accusations. “Ken Starr’s prosecutors demanded to know what I had told reporters and what reporters had told me about Ken Starr’s prosecutors,” he told members of the media upon exiting the court house. “If they think they have intimidated me, they have failed.”

Starr called him back in June after a federal judge ruled that executive privilege could not prevent Blumenthal from testifying. Blumenthal recounts in The Clinton Wars being asked specific questions about the president’s sex life in this appearance:

[The prosecutor] asked me, “Did you specifically ask the President whether he had received oral sex from Monica Lewinsky?” “No.” “Did the President state anything to you about receiving oral sex from Monica Lewinsky?” “No.” “Did you prepare the President and/or First Lady for responding to any questions that might arise because of the nature of the Lewinsky case about sexual addiction?” “No.”

He also was asked about when he first discussed the Lewinsky story with the president and first lady. Blumenthal testified that Hillary had told him that “the President was being attacked, in her view, for political motives, for his ministry of a troubled person.”

[President Clinton] said, “Monica Lewinsky came at me and made a sexual demand on me.” He rebuffed her. He said, “I’ve gone down that road before. I’ve caused pain for a lot of people and I’m not going to do that again.” She threatened him. She said that she would tell people they’d had an affair, that she was known as the stalker among her peers, and that she hated it and if she had an affair or said she had an affair then she wouldn’t be the stalker any more.

In his book, Blumenthal writes that he believed Clinton really hadn’t been involved with Lewinsky until shortly before the president admitted it publicly. He was disappointed in his friend, but felt that “If Clinton’s presidency were destroyed as a result of Starr’s work — a partisan investigation targeting Clinton for alleged crimes, having failed for years to discover any wrongdoing and now invading his private life — the effect on the Constitution and American politics would be poisonous. The presidency would be shattered as an institution and the devastation to democracy would be irreparable.” It wasn’t a matter of defending Bill. It was a matter of defending the republic itself.

Even when he spoke to Hillary, the two “dispensed with the extraordinarily difficult personal problem at the start. As her friend, I wanted to respect her privacy. I said that whatever ‘issues’ anyone had, and hers was worse than anyone’s, we had to think about the politics. That was her reasoning as well.”

Blumenthal wound up being one of only three people deposed as part of the US Senate’s trial of Clinton. The other two were Lewinsky and Vernon Jordan, a friend of Clinton’s who helped her find a job after her White House internship ended. The deposition was lengthy and included a few bizarre tangents, such as a portion when House prosecutor Rep. James Rogan (R-CA) asked Blumenthal to explain the plot of Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon.

But the crux came when Blumenthal was questioned about whether he had been tasked by the White House with spreading rumors about Lewinsky being a “stalker.” He had already told the grand jury that Clinton told him Lewinsky was known as a stalker among her peers and resented the label. The question was whether Blumenthal spread this further in the press.

House prosecutor Lindsey Graham (R-SC), now a senator and presidential candidate, asked Blumenthal about a January 30, 1998, AP article by Karen Gullo, which wrote, “Little by little, ever since the allegations of an affair between President Clinton and Ms. Lewinsky surfaced 10 days ago, White House sources have waged a behind-the-scenes campaign to portray her as an untrustworthy climber obsessed with the President.”

Graham asked, “Do you have any direct knowledge or indirect knowledge that such a campaign by White House aides or junior staff members ever existed?” Blumenthal said no, and that senior White House staff “felt very firmly that nobody should ever be a source to a reporter about a story about Monica Lewinsky’s personal life, and I strongly agreed with that and that’s what we decided.” Graham pressed him again on stories suggesting that Lewinsky was a stalker, and Blumenthal insisted, “I don’t know about any White House sources on these stories.”

Blumenthal’s testimony didn’t wind up having much bearing on the Senate’s verdict, but it did create a side issue for him personally after his friend, the journalist Christopher Hitchens, signed a sworn affidavit saying that Blumenthal had called Lewinsky a stalker repeatedly in a March 19, 1998, lunch with Hitchens and his wife, seemingly contradicting the claim that he’d never called her a stalker in conversations with reporters.

Blumenthal pushed back immediately, issuing a statement saying, “My wife and I are saddened that Christopher chose to end our long friendship in this meaningless way.” Blumenthal’s friend and supporter Joe Conason, then at the New York Observer, contested Hitchens’s statement by noting that the term “stalker” had appeared in press stories about Lewinsky at least 430 times before the lunch occurred, suggesting that Blumenthal wasn’t a source and was simply discussing information in the public domain.

But the incident led to calls for Blumenthal’s prosecution by the Justice Department on perjury charges, as well as a motion from Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), who would vote against Clinton’s conviction, to have the Senate investigate “possible fraud on the Senate by alleged perjury in the deposition testimony of Mr. Sidney Blumenthal.” Nothing came of the matter, and Hitchens eventually promised to withdraw his affidavit if Blumenthal were ever put on trial. The two remained distant for years, but reportedly reestablished contact shortly before Hitchens’s death from cancer in 2011.

What other disputes with conservatives did Blumenthal engage in at the White House?

While the impeachment was taking place, it was discovered that Rep. Henry Hyde (R-IL), one of the leading social conservatives in the House and the lead House manager for the impeachment hearings, had engaged in an extramarital affair in the 1960s. Many Republicans claimed Blumenthal was behind the story:

Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.) blamed the Hyde story on White House assistant Sidney Blumenthal. “I think this is Sidney Blumenthal’s MO,” LaHood said. “Blumenthal is a sneak. He’s out to destroy people’s careers, and he ought to be fired.” Asked what proof he had, LaHood cited the “process of elimination.”

…Blumenthal said in a statement last night that he “was not the source or in any way involved with this story on Henry Hyde.” He said that he did not “urge or encourage any reporter to investigate the private life of any member of Congress” and that when asked in the past by reporters about any rumors, he told them “this was wrong, they shouldn’t publish it.”

At the very beginning of his tenure at the White House, Blumenthal had to deal with a nasty smear from the Drudge Report (which had not yet helped break the Lewinsky story). The site claimed that he had abused his wife and covered it up — an accusation that, by all accounts, is patently false. It retracted the claim the next day, but Blumenthal filed a $30 million defamation suit. Eventually, four years later, the suit was settled with Blumenthal paying Drudge $2,500.

During his time in the administration, Blumenthal was also a central figure in recruiting the unlikeliest Clinton loyalist to date: David Brock, the former American Spectator reporter and anti-Clinton muckraker who has since become a liberal stalwart, founding the media watchdog group Media Matters and the Democratic Super PAC American Bridge. After the Drudge story, Blumenthal called Brock to ask if he knew anything about who planted it.

“Without hesitation,” Blumenthal writes, “he told me of conversations he had had with Drudge and others in which he had learned how Drudge had been prompted by a small group of right-wingers to post the libel about me on his website.” They became friends, and Blumenthal became a counselor to Brock as he broke from the right, a move announced in a 1997 Esquire article titled “Confessions of a Right-Wing Hit Man.” Politico’s Thrush calls Brock’s conversion “Blumenthal’s greatest coup — and the one that cemented his standing as a Clinton loyalist.” Blumenthal had helped flip a key member of the counter-establishment he had chronicled a decade prior. He was putting his analysis of the right into practice, and getting major results.

What was Blumenthal’s role in Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign?

Blumenthal stayed close to the Clintons through the 2000s, when he wrote the Clinton Wars and served as Washington correspondent for Salon. In November 2007, he officially joined Hillary Clinton’s primary campaign as a senior adviser. Publicly, his service on the campaign is best remembered for an incident in which he was caught driving 70 miles an hour, drunk, in a 30 mph zone in Nashua, New Hampshire. The serious charge — “aggravated drunken driving” — was pleaded down after the arresting officer was called up for service in Iraq, rendering a trial impossible. But more consequential were allegations by Obama campaign officials (confirmed by some journalists’ accounts) that he was involved in spreading among the most vicious, race-baiting attacks of the primaries.

In Game Change, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann report that Blumenthal was “obsessed” with the “whitey tape”: a hoax originated by ex-CIA officer and ardent Hillary supporter Larry Johnson claiming there was a videotape of Michelle Obama railing against “whitey” at Trinity Church, which the Obama family attended in Chicago. (Johnson later added for good measure that Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan was present at the event.) It was a ridiculous rumor. “I mean, ‘whitey’?” Michelle later commented. “That’s something that George Jefferson would say.”

But according to Halperin and Heilemann, Blumenthal and Hillary alike were convinced the tape was real. Blumenthal also, according to Occidental College political scientist Peter Dreier, sent around emails to “an influential list of opinion shapers” hyping links between Obama and Chicago developer Tony Rezko, Weather Underground militant turned education researcher Bill Ayers, and Frank Marshall Davis, a black left-wing poet whom Obama knew a bit when he was a teenager. One email read:

The record on Obama’s fabled “judgement”? So how would he conduct himself in those promised summits without preconditions with Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong Il, Chavez, Castro, and Assad? Let’s look at how he did with Tony Rezko.

While the Clinton camp obviously disputes these reports, Blumenthal was nicknamed “Sulfur-Breathing Spawn of Hell” in the Obama campaign headquarters.

What was Blumenthal’s role while Clinton was secretary of state?

Blumenthal’s purported role in the anti-Obama attacks wound up costing him a job at the State Department under Hillary. After reports surfaced that she was planning to bring him on as a counselor, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, “Hell no. If she hires him, I’m out of here.” Senior adviser David Axelrod added, “Me too.” Emanuel was left to deliver the bad news to Clinton, who accepted the verdict.

However, Blumenthal and Clinton stayed in contact during her time in office. Most controversially, he passed along intelligence on the situation on the ground in Libya in 2011 and 2012, as the US was intervening in the country’s civil war. He emailed her at least 25 memos on the country, many of which she passed along to her aide Jake Sullivan.

“From time to time, as a private citizen and friend, I provided Secretary Clinton with material on a variety of topics that I thought she might find interesting or helpful,” Blumenthal wrote to Politico in a statement provided by his attorney. “The reports I sent her came from sources I considered reliable.” Clinton characterized his correspondence as “unsolicited” but welcome. “He sent me unsolicited emails which I passed on in some instances and I say that that’s just part of the give and take,” Clinton said, adding that she sometimes passed them along to “make sure [she wasn’t] caught in a bubble” and only getting information “from a certain small group of people.”

The source for most of Blumenthal’s emails was a man named Tyler Drumheller, who was the CIA’s division chief for clandestine operations in Europe. Drumheller was a vocal critic of the Bush administration, claiming that it ignored intelligence casting doubt on its claims concerning Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. Blumenthal had championed Drumheller’s story in his role as a journalist at Salon.

The Washington Post’s David Ignatius reports that “A principal of Alphom” — the consulting firm where Drumheller now works — “told me that Blumenthal had approached Drumheller and said his friend Clinton was ‘looking for information’ about Libya.” Leaked emails between Drumheller and Blumenthal suggest that the two worked closely on gathering intelligence in Libya. “A May 14, 2011 email exchange between Blumenthal and Shearer shows that they were negotiating with Drumheller to contract with someone referred to as ‘Grange’ and ‘the general’ to place send four operatives on a week-long mission to Tunis, Tunisia, and ‘to the border and back,'” ProPublica’s Jeff Gerth and Gawker’s Sam Biddle report.

According to the New York Times’s Nicholas Confessore and Michael Schmidt, the emails to Clinton often contained information others in the State Department knew to be false. For example, the late Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens disputed a memo arguing that the Libyan branch of the Muslim Brotherhood was about to make gains in parliamentary elections, when it in fact fared quite poorly. Another diplomat noted that the memo “confused Libyan politicians with the same surname.”

Blumenthal also passed along information related to the Benghazi attack, sending Clinton an email the day after the attack blaming it on protesters angry about a vehemently anti-Islam YouTube video titled “The Innocence of Muslims,” which was sparking worldwide protests around that time. Clinton passed the email on to Sullivan. But while this was the initial theory of the intelligence community, it proved to be false, as militants actually showed up specifically to attack the US mission in Libya. A day later, Blumenthal followed up with an email stating that Ansar al-Sharia, a jihadist group, had pre-planned the attack and used the protest as a cover, which contradicted the administration’s public statements at the time. That’s mostly right; Ansar al-Sharia members were involved but they weren’t the only attackers, and the attack was one of opportunity, rather than being preplanned.

Blumenthal occasionally veered into American domestic politics in his correspondences, warning that the Romney campaign was planning on using the Benghazi attack to show Obama was weak on national security. He described this as the “Jimmy Carter strategy,” an illusion to the Reagan campaign’s usage of the Iranian hostage crisis as an attack line against Carter in the 1980 race.

The Confessore and Schmidt article also reported that Blumenthal was working as a consultant for the Constellations Group, which was pursuing business leads in Libya at the time. This was fervently denied by Blumenthal’s friend Conason, who claimed in a Politico piece that “he was never paid a penny.”

Adding to the controversy was the fact that Blumenthal was for several years earning $10,000 a month from the Clinton Foundation, including the years he was passing along these memos (he was also, and continues to be, affiliated with Brock’s Clinton-aligned group American Bridge). Conason claims that Blumenthal’s work for the foundation “chiefly involved conferences, speeches, and books relevant to the former president’s legacy” and did not “have any bearing on Libya matters.” Blumenthal was also, in the period at question, working hard on his soon-to-be-released series of Lincoln biographies.

The House Benghazi Committee first got access to his emails to Clinton in February — they were made public in May — and chairman Trey Gowdy (R-SC) subpoenaed Blumenthal on Tuesday, May 19, to testify about their contents. He is scheduled to appear before the committee on Tuesday, June 16. “It is incumbent on our committee to learn … what his role was in U.S. Libya policy and how it impacted decisions related to security,” committee member Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS) told Politico’s Rachael Bade. Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA) suggested a few questions the panel wanted answered: “Did somebody ask him for this information? Did he just start volunteering this information? Why was he even given the information?”

http://www.vox.com/2015/6/16/8786567/sidney-blumenthal