Sidney Blumenthal is in line for a top State Department position, should Hillary Clinton get the nod, according to this item in The American Spectator:
NOT HIM AGAIN!According to The Nashua (NH) Telegraph, Blumenthal is a convicted criminal and alcohol abuser, who pled guilty to a misdemeanor DWI charge in New Hampshire in March of this year:
Late last week, as stories swirled around Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's possible jump to the job of Secretary of State, another longtime Clinton aide's name began to crop up: former journalist and Clinton back-room consigliere, Sidney Blumenthal.
Should Clinton accept the Secretary of State job, Blumenthal, it is believed, will move to Foggy Bottom as a counsel to the secretary, a post that will not require Senate confirmation, but will require an extensive security and background check.
According to Obama transition team sources, Clinton aides presented them with a list of potential senior staff for the Secretary of State office, and Blumenthal's name -- without a title or role described -- was on it.
Also on the list were the names of most of Clinton's senior Senate aides, including several who had left her office in the past two years for the private sector. All have been contacted about possibly returning to public service should Clinton accept the cabinet position.
Blumenthal pleaded guilty March 28 to a standard, misdemeanor DWI charge. He was fined $900, and his driver's license revoked for 10 months. Blumenthal can seek to get his license restored after 120 days, however, if he completes and alcohol education program in Washington, D.C., court records show.During the Democratic primaries, Peter Drier blasted Blumenthal in the Huffington Post for spreading anti-Obama propaganda:
Blumenthal also agreed not to contest a six-month administrative license suspension, which was already in effect, police have said previously.
Though there is no standard disposition to fit all cases, the terms of Blumenthal's plea are stiffer than a standard DWI charge, and typical of an aggravated DWI plea bargain for a first-time offender, Capt. Peter Segal said. Blumenthal has no prior DWI convictions, he said.
Police negotiated a plea bargain in part because the arresting officer, Christopher Ditullio, was called up for service in Iraq, and would not have been available to testify, Segal said.
Blumenthal is an unpaid adviser to Clinton, actively involved in her presidential campaign, according to his lawyer. Blumenthal also was an adviser to former President Clinton. He was in southern New Hampshire on the eve of the primaries but got lost on the way from dinner to his hotel, he told police.
Sgt. Michael Masella spotted Blumenthal's rented Buick heading north on Concord Street in the area of Greeley Park at about 70 mph on the night before the New Hampshire primaries, police reported. Masella and Ditullio stopped Blumenthal near the Henri Burque Highway and arrested him after performing a field sobriety test.
Former journalist Sidney Blumenthal has been widely credited with coining the term "vast right-wing conspiracy" used by Hillary Clinton in 1998 to describe the alliance of conservative media, think tanks, and political operatives that sought to destroy the Clinton White House where he worked as a high-level aide. A decade later, and now acting as a senior campaign advisor to Senator Clinton, Blumenthal is exploiting that same right-wing network to attack and discredit Barack Obama. And he's not hesitating to use the same sort of guilt-by-association tactics that have been the hallmark of the political right dating back to the McCarthy era.According to Jude Wanniski, before he trashed Obama, Blumenthal trashed Monica Lewinsky as a "stalker":
Almost every day over the past six months, I have been the recipient of an email that attacks Obama's character, political views, electability, and real or manufactured associations. The original source of many of these hit pieces are virulent and sometimes extreme right-wing websites, bloggers, and publications. But they aren't being emailed out from some fringe right-wing group that somehow managed to get my email address. Instead, it is Sidney Blumenthal who, on a regular basis, methodically dispatches these email mudballs to an influential list of opinion shapers -- including journalists, former Clinton administration officials, academics, policy entrepreneurs, and think tankers -- in what is an obvious attempt to create an echo chamber that reverberates among talk shows, columnists, and Democratic Party funders and activists. One of the recipients of the Blumenthal email blast, himself a Clinton supporter, forwards the material to me and perhaps to others.
These attacks sent out by Blumenthal, long known for his fierce and combative loyalty to the Clintons, draw on a wide variety of sources to spread his Obama-bashing. Some of the pieces are culled from the mainstream media and include some reasoned swipes at Obama's policy and political positions.
Liberals are troubled by what you have developed to date about Clinton trashing Lewinsky in his conversation with Blumenthal, but they still insist that we can't tell for sure if Clinton would have used the "stalker" excuse to defend himself if the blue dress had not messed him up. Your case is hypothetical. And Charles RufF thus far has been successful in keeping it hypothetical, insisting that there was no "coordinated effort" to trash Lewinsky, to "malign her." When Rep. Asa Hutchison [R-AR] expressed disbelief that Ruff could make such a statement, he read from an AP dispatch about how Ann Lewis and the White House press secretary both announced at the time that there was no such conspiracy to say anything bad about Lewinsky. I believed them at the time, thinking it was James Carville doing it. Ruff did not wish your team to point out that it was Clinton who was already trashing Lewinsky! (I still wonder why Hutchison was doing the answer when it was your initiative, but perhaps in the long run it was best that he did.)How about Richard Holbrooke, for Secretary of State?
The one thing you can be sure of with Blumenthal is that he will not lie under oath. He is one of the best wordsmiths I've ever known, so you must bear in mind that he is extremely clever with words and will not give you one scrap of assistance if you do not ask the right questions in the right way.
I think you should ask him how the conversation happened to occur, where it took place, what time of day, whether it was a regularly scheduled meeting, or if the President summoned him or if he asked for a meeting.
The guts of the deposition will come in developing any kind of inference that the President meant Blumenthal to leave his office with the stalker story in order to have him disseminate it. Of course he did, because Blumenthal was his most loyal counselor on political communications. Sidney was one of the best political writers of his generation, an indefatigable reporter who did not resist moving where the facts would take him. His profile of Bob Dole for the WashPost "Style" section in the 1988 campaign is still the best ever on Dole. I met him in 1980 when he came to my home and spent 3 1/2 hours filling his tape recorder with material for a Boston Globe magazine piece on Reagan's brain trust. That's when we became friends, in a way mutual political admirers — although he has refused to talk to me since I criticized his work in the New Yorker in 1993 for being too fawning on the Clintons.
Blumenthal certainly was the source of the stalker story, but it is important that you get him to say that the President did NOT tell him to keep that between them. Blumenthal has to recall that the President told him what Blumenthal later told the grand jury with no restrictions on how he should use it. If the President told him to "Keep this between us, Sid," and Blumenthal did not, then he was betraying his word to the President. So you can be sure that did not happen. Blumenthal had to come away from the meeting knowing the President wanted him to broadcast it. You can ask him about each of the people who wrote stories about the stalker, including the AP dispatch, and if he personally knew them, and if he called them or they called him for reaction to the Matt Drudge story.
The key point cannot be made strongly enough that the President insisted to Blumenthal that Monica Lewinsky threatened him and THAT HE RESISTED, which is why Lewinsky now could be expected to tell false stories about him. Liberal journalists tell me that of course it is true that Lewinsky came on to him, she batted eyes and flashed her thongs. That's true enough, but the President's evil act was in broadcasting the news that after he had his way with her over those many months, he would cast her as the sinister sex predator, the blackmailer, in those moments. It would be nice to know what Lewinsky thought when she heard about the Blumenthal testimony, as she surely believed it was coming from Carville. She now must be aware that Clinton had set in motion, as he did, the story that she threatened him with charges of sexual harassment unless he had sex with her. This story disappeared from the public prints when the story of the blue dress surfaced.