Sidney Blumenthal: The Old Fake Villain

“Has Washington learned nothing from Whitewater?” asks National Memo editor-in-chief Joe Conason in Politico Friday. “The Clintons have spent their entire political lives in the capital dogged by one fake scandal after another.”

Although the charges are new, the villain of these manufactured scandals remains former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal, who has been newly written “into a sinister narrative of Libyan intrigue, encouraging dark suspicions about his work for the Clinton Foundation.”

Conason writes:

Having known Sid for nearly 40 years, I feel confident predicting that Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), the committee chair, will find nothing to substantiate the fantasies marketed by his staff to the Times, which set the stage for Blumenthal’s subpoena and deposition in a political show trial that will unfold sometime in the coming weeks. Sid passed along information that he thought might be useful to his friend, the Secretary of State—someone he has known for nearly 30 years and with whom he worked closely in the Clinton administration.

As the emails illegally purloined from his computer by the Romanian hacker called “Guccifer” indicate, he kept that role separate from discussions about a Libyan relief project, which was intended to provide hospital beds and medicine. That project never got beyond the concept phase and remained entirely distinct from Blumenthal’s job at the foundation, which involved several projects—mostly concerned with President Clinton’s legacy. Certainly it was no crime for the foundation to pay him for that work.

Read the full article at Politico.

Photo: Son of Broccoli via Flickr