Opinion The Return of Sid Vicious

Rich Lowry is editor of National Review.

Charity Navigator should make this an informal rule: If your charity is employing Sidney Blumenthal, it automatically goes on the watch list.

The ethical controversies around Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation have often seemed 1990s redux, and never more so than this week, when a New York Times story resurfaced longtime Clinton loyalist Blumenthal.


According to the Times, from his perch at the Clinton Foundation, Blumenthal was sending Secretary of State Hillary Clinton memos on Libya that she forwarded around the State Department, even though they were occasion for eye-rolling by the professionals.

For those who don’t remember the 1990s, Sidney Blumenthal is the former writer for the New Republic, the Washington Post and the New Yorker whose devotion to the Clintons was too much even for his fellow journalists.

He had been writing “Letter from Washington” for The New Yorker but lost the gig because he wrote about the Clintons with the clear-eyed objectivity of an RT reporter covering one of Vladimir Putin’s bare-chested hunting adventures.

Soon enough, Blumenthal traded in his status as a quasi-Clinton apparatchik for official Clinton apparatchik, taking a job at the White House.

There is nothing new in human history about courtiers. If James I could have his Duke of Buckingham, Bill and Hillary could have their Sidney Blumenthal. But the whiff of venom attended much of what Blumenthal did. He was noted for his conspiratorial thinking and nasty, highly personalized, whisper-campaign politics. Much can be learned about his smash-mouth style by studying the social behavior of the spotted hyena.

Here we are in 2015, when everything old is not new again but as tiresome and toxic as it was 20 years ago. Ultimately, Blumenthal himself isn’t the issue. What’s interesting isn’t the suckerfish per se, but what it tells us about the shark.

When the Obama team went with Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, it undertook a high-stakes experiment never before attempted: Could it hire a Clinton, and with enough rules and constraints, force him or her to act in a manner above reproach? The Blumenthal affair is yet another indication that the answer is a resounding “no.”

Then-White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel reportedly had Blumenthal banned for — what else? — spreading harsh attacks about Barack Obama during the 2008 primaries. Emanuel’s edict would have seemed to bar Blumenthal from serving Clinton while she was secretary of state. Ah, but as the poet said, you can drive nature out with a pitchfork, she will nevertheless come back.

Blumenthal still advised the secretary of state and got hired by the foundation. According to the Times report, among Blumenthal’s duties at the foundation was “message guidance.” Can there be a more nebulous excuse for cutting someone a check?

Blumenthal happened to be sending Hillary memos about Libya at the same time that he was in league with people trying to make money in Libya.

Let’s think about this. One scenario is that Blumenthal’s would-be business associates got together and thought, “We need to find the best expert we can on North Africa, someone who understands the subtleties of Libyan political and tribal dynamics. Let’s get Sidney Blumenthal!”

Another is that they thought, “We need to find someone who is in tight with the Clintons and has a back channel to Hillary so, when the time comes, the State Department will give our venture the most favorable possible consideration. Let’s get Sidney Blumenthal!”

One of the principals in the prospective Libya venture, Bill White, told The New York Times, “We were thinking, ‘O.K., Qaddafi is dead, or about to be, and there’s opportunities. We thought, ‘Let’s try to see who we know there [emphasis added].”

It’s a telling statement about the nature of so many of the businesses that were drawn to the Clinton Foundation. They weren’t bringing new products to market so much as benefiting from political connections — from whom they knew — to get contracts and other advantages from government favor.

The Blumenthal story underlines what we already knew or suspected about Hillary’s tenure as secretary of state and at the Clinton Foundation.

She portrayed herself as a technological simpleton in her initial news conference about her emails, incapable of juggling multiple devices or email addresses. But here she is with another private email address that we might not know about but for the exertions of a Romanian hacker who first exposed the Blumenthal-Clinton correspondence.

She portrays herself as the picture of openness, explaining in a press availability in Iowa on Tuesday how she wants her emails public as soon as possible. But we wouldn’t know about the Clinton-Blumenthal correspondence but for the exertions of a Romanian hacker.

For all its good works, the Clinton Foundation was a political slush fund and holding tank for Clinton operatives. Presumably, the March of Dimes manages to get along without paying former government officials for vague work as they scheme to return to power.

The ethics of Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state were atrocious. In what world is it OK for the secretary of state to get and pass along back-channel advice from a friend about a country where he has business interests at stake? The Clintons have managed to make their own rule book according to which, if there isn’t hard evidence of a felony, there is no ethical breach. But the standard in government is supposed to be avoiding even the appearance of impropriety, which the Clintons have decades of experience failing to meet.

Finally, it’s impossible to credit “the new Hillary” so long as she is dependent on the same old cronies.

Asked about Blumenthal at that brief Iowa press availability, Hillary said his emails were her effort to make sure she wasn’t “caught in the bubble.” Because nothing keeps you intellectually fresh and on your toes like emails from a loyal hatchet man of some 20 years and counting.