Sidney Blumenthal

Sidney Blumenthal Biography

Sidney Blumenthal (Sidney Stone Blumenthal) is an American journalist, activist, writer, and political aide. He is a former aide to President Bill Clinton; a long-time confidant of Hillary Clinton, formerly employed by the Clinton Foundation; and a journalist, especially on American politics and foreign policy.

Sidney Blumenthal Age

He was born 6 November 1948 in Chicago, Illinois, United States. He is currently 70 years old.

Sidney Blumenthal Wife

He married Jacqueline Blumenthal. The family has two children one of whom is author and journalist Max Blumenthal.

Sidney Blumenthal Children

The two children are Max Blumenthal who is an American author, journalist, and blogger. He was awarded the 2014 Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Notable Book Award for his book Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel. He was formerly a writer for AlterNet, The Daily Beast, Al Akhbar, and Media Matters for America, as well as a Fellow of the Nation Institute

Sidney Blumenthal Books

• The Clinton wars
• Wrestling With His Angel: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln Vol. II, 1849-1856
• The permanent campaign
• The rise of the counter-establishment Sidney Blumenthal
• A Self-Made Man: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln Vol. I, 1809–1849
• How Bush Rules Sidney Blumenthal
• The Strange Death of Republican America
• All the Powers of Earth: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln Vol. III, 1856-1863

Sidney Blumenthal Early Life

He was born in Chicago, to Jewish parents, Claire (née Stone) and Hyman V. Blumenthal. He started his career in Boston as a journalist who wrote for the Boston Phoenix and the Real Paper, Quad Monthly-issued publications. He earned a BA in Sociology from Brandeis University. He became a national political correspondent for the New Republic, covering the 1984 Presidential campaign.

Sidney Blumenthal Quotes

• Even on education, his one accomplishment, the Leave No Child Behind Act, and he has left it unfunded.
• The biggest mistakes, early on, involved foreign policy and involved the strategy for health care.
• On health care, virtually every political error that could be made was made.

Sidney Blumenthal Net Worth

He is an American journalist, activist, and political aide who has an estimated net worth of $4 million. He was an associate producer for the 2002 film Max and executive produced the 2007 documentary Taxi to the Dark Side. He won a News & Documentary Emmy Award in 2009 for Best Documentary for Taxi to the Dark Side.

Sidney Blumenthal Christopher Hitchens

Sidney Blumenthal Relationship to Hillary Clinton

He has joined the 2008 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign as a “senior advisor” in November 2007. He was arrested for driving while intoxicated in Nashua, New Hampshire, on January 7, 2008. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor DWI charge. He was appointed as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton wanted to hire Blumenthal.

However, Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, blocked his selection due to lingering anger among President Barack Obama’s aides over Blumenthal’s role in promoting negative stories about Obama during the Democratic primary.

He became a full-time employee of the Clinton Foundation from 2009 until 2013 and served as a consultant for the foundation from 2013 until 2015, earning about $10,000 per month. He blurred the lines between the foundation and Secretary Clinton’s role as Secretary of State.

The United States House Select Committee on Benghazi, headed by Representative Trey Gowdy, Republican of South Carolina, subpoenaed Blumenthal in May 2015. He gave testimony in a closed-door session the following month. During this hearing, Democratic members asked that Blumenthal’s deposition transcript be made public so that comments regarding his involvement could be placed in context. The motion was defeated by a party-line vote.

He currently serves as a consultant to the left-leaning watchdog group Media Matters for America, the pro-Democratic Super PAC American Bridge 21st Century and the pro-Clinton Super PAC Correct the Record.

Sidney Blumenthal Published works and memoirs

He wrote The Clinton Wars, which was published in 2003. Janet Maslin wrote, in a review of the book in the New York Times. after the Clinton presidency. He has more agendas barely mentioning others close to the Clintons, and illustrating this memoir with smiling, convivial photographs of himself in their company.

He later came across as more like “courtier” than the bright campaign reporter he once was, When it comes to the Clintons, there is not a single line of comparable acuity or detachment in the whole of The Clinton Wars. He was characterized by Andrew Sullivan as “the most pro-Clinton writer on the planet.

Sidney Blumenthal Twitter

He is not active on social media.

Gowdy Claims FBI Relied on Clinton Ally Blumenthal to Corroborate Steele Dossier

Former South Carolina Representative Trey Gowdy said Tuesday that the FBI relied on information provided by longtime Clinton-family ally him to corroborate some of the explosive allegations included in the controversial Steele dossier.

Gowdy told Fox News’s Martha McCallum that when he was serving in Congress he reviewed an FBI spreadsheet listing specific assertions included in the Steele dossier along with independent information investigators believed corroborated those unverified claims.

“I’ve seen the spreadsheet, Martha. I have seen each factual assertion listed in that dossier, and then I’ve seen the FBI’s justification. And when you’re citing newspaper articles as corroboration for a factual assertion that you have made, you don’t need an FBI agent to go do a Google search,” said Gowdy, a former member of the House Intelligence Committee who now serves as a Fox News contributor, in remarks first noted by the Daily Caller.

“When the name Sidney Blumenthal is included as part of your corroboration, and when you’re the world’s leading law enforcement agency, you have a problem.”

Congressional Republicans and administration allies have ceaselessly questioned the FBI’s use of the Steele dossier, which was initially commissioned by the Clinton campaign, to obtain a FISA warrant to surveil Carter Page. That criticism intensified last year after it was revealed that the FBI did not disclose the source of the dossier to the FISA judge who granted the warrant.

Blumenthal, a longtime Clinton confidant, and fixer helped to disseminate a separate opposition-research dossier on then-candidate Trump compiled by his aide Cody Shearer. Blumenthal gave Shearer’s dossier, which contained some of the same salacious details included in Steele’s report, to a State Department official who provided it to Steele, who then gave it to the FBI to corroborate his own investigation.

Shearer and Blumenthal previously ran a “secret spy network” during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, which she used as a back-channel to obtain information about the volatile events unfolding in Benghazi, Libya during the 2012 terror attack on U.S. government facilities there.