I.

In his new book, A Self-Made Man, a sharply executed and well received first installment of a four-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln, the journalist-provocateur Sidney Blumenthal introduces us to William Herndon, Lincoln’s “worshipful, dreamy, and often strangely effective” young law partner in Springfield, Illinois. He was “garrulous and sociable” and “served as Lincoln’s precinct captain, press secretary, editorial co-writer, and all-purpose aide,” as well as acting as Lincoln’s “pulse on public opinion.” Herndon was nothing less than Lincoln’s “tuning fork.” Reading the book in the middle of the current presidential campaign, longtime Blumenthal-watchers will be struck by an analogy that is never stated but leaps off the page: that Blumenthal may be a latter-day Herndon, with Hillary Clinton cast in the role of Lincoln.

In the past year, Blumenthal has been much in the public eye because hundreds of his private e-mails to Clinton—by turns gossipy, fawning, and conspiratorial—turn out to be among the material on the private server Clinton used when she was secretary of state, material now dumped into the open for all to see. He was in the news again in late June, when House Democrats released their own version of a report on the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, and included what were supposed to be redacted transcripts of Blumenthal's testimony before the Benghazi committee. As the Los Angeles Times showed, the redactions turned out to be unredactable by means of a relatively simple technological intervention that removed the black overlays.

Judging from his e-mails, Blumenthal has been a sort of 24-7 mini-mart of ideas for Clinton. He has been a two-legged LexisNexis who plies her with articles she must read. He also provided her with background information from private sources on the turmoil in Libya—intelligence of dubious reliability and provenance, and possibly tainted by the commercial ambitions of American businessmen. In his more wide-ranging moments, Blumenthal forwarded a memo from David Brock, a former conservative polemicist who had done an about-face and now runs several pro-Clinton groups, which argued that there might be grounds to impeach Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas; derided former House Speaker John Boehner as “louche, alcoholic, lazy, and without any commitment to any principle,”; and labeled The New Republic a shill for “the highest level Likud/neocon propaganda.” When Clinton stumbled early in the presidential campaign—first in the Iowa caucuses (barely eking out a victory over Senator Bernie Sanders), then in the New Hampshire primary (losing to Sanders badly)—Blumenthal told her privately that she was being ill-served by her campaign advisers. Understandably, the message was not appreciated by some of those advisers (“He’s a terrorist,” one of them told me). None of those advisers were willing to speak about the matter for attribution. Blumenthal himself, whom I had known since his early Washington days, was also unwilling to speak on the record (though we spoke cordially when I caught up with him at a book fair). He answered some factual questions by e-mail and sent some links to articles and reviews, but did not wish to engage in an interview about his recent activities.

Blumenthal meets with President Bill Clinton in the Oval Office, 1997. Courtesy of the William J. Clinton Presidential Library, National Archives and Records Administration.

Blumenthal has known the Clintons since their Arkansas days. He has long served them as an all-purpose adviser and defender, on and off the books. During the Clinton presidency, when he worked in the White House, he was accused of spreading lies to protect his boss (which he denies). He certainly played the role of “whisperer”—a conduit between the White House and elements of the press disposed to receive and perhaps to amplify the information he provided as the administration counterattacked against its foes. Blumenthal does not look like a man who would have been given the sobriquet “Sid Vicious.” He dresses sharply in starched collars and in suits that display a British flair. At age 67, he maintains his preternaturally dark hair in a boyish flop. An unreconstructed liberal of Third Way bent, he is cerebral and combative – traits at the heart of a distinct image that has only grown more prominent in recent years with profiles in The New York Times, Vox, and elsewhere. At times heedless of seeming conflict of interest, he for years played both sides of the street as a journalist and a committed partisan. He can write with insightful audacity: he was prescient in anticipating the rise of a media-fueled right-wing hydra, with its many factions, donors, and outposts—all of them an unrelenting bête noire for the Clintons and for politicians on the left more generally. The rise of Rush Limbaugh and, more recently, of politicians such as Ted Cruz and even Donald Trump, would have come as no surprise to Blumenthal. He is a true believer in the “vast right-wing conspiracy” that Hillary Clinton once spoke of. The juggling act that he has tried to pull off is complicated: on the one hand, an ink-stained philosopher, like Seneca, bringing wisdom to the halls of power; on the other, a practitioner of the down-and-dirty politics he observed growing up in Chicago during the autocratic Democratic heyday of Mayor Richard J. Daley.

Hillary Clinton wanted Blumenthal to join her at the State Department as a top aide after she was appointed secretary, in 2009. President Obama would not allow it: key White House staffers had grown to detest the man. Two of them—Press Secretary Robert Gibbs and Senior Adviser David Axelrod—threatened to quit if Blumenthal was hired. They believed that he had been involved in spreading unsubstantiated allegations against the Obamas during the 2008 Democratic primary, as detailed in the campaign chronicle Game Change, by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. Blumenthal was “obsessed,” they wrote, about the possible existence of a so-called “whitey tape,” supposedly made at a Chicago church, in which Michelle Obama could be heard ranting against “whitey”—a tape that could have changed Clinton’s political fortunes during her primary fight, but that did not in fact exist. (“They’ve got a tape, they’ve got a tape,” Clinton told aides.) According to the Huffington Post, Blumenthal also raised questions about Barack Obama’s relationship with former Weather Underground militant William Ayres, and with controversial Chicago developer Tony Rezko. One Blumenthal e-mail to opinion-makers derided Obama’s “fabled ‘judgement’ ” and wondered how he would “conduct himself in those promised summits without preconditions” with people such as then Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il. “Let’s look at how he did with Tony Rezko,” Blumenthal wrote.