by David Brock
Back when we first met in 1997 and became friends, we were an unlikely pair, to say the least. Blumenthal was a trusted advisor to President Clinton, well known for his political and personal commitments to the first couple, and also for having unusual insight into the right wing in his long career as a journalist. As such, he was scorned in some anti-Clinton media circles in Washington and despised by some in the conservative movement, which at that time had been engaged in a five-year campaign to destroy the Clinton presidency.
And me? Well, as you know, for most of those five years, I had been a leader in the far right’s anti-Clinton operations. And after learning the hard way that I was complicit in campaigns of smears and lies under the guise of conservative journalism, I had just publicly broken with my political bedfellows in a confessional article in Esquire. “David Brock, the road warrior of the right, is dead,” I declared.
However, my relationships and associations with my fellow partisan warriors did not end overnight. I remained employed at the American Spectator magazine, which was running the Arkansas Project, the reckless dirt-digging operation against the Clintons. I was friendly with lawyers working on Paula Jones’s sexual harassment suit against President Clinton. That suit had come about in response to a deeply flawed Spectator article I had written in 1993 and by now was the vehicle through which the right was aiming to set up a perjury trap for the president by probing his sex life.
I still had sources in the office of Kenneth Starr, the former right-wing judge whose special counsel investigation of the Clintons’ money-losing Arkansas land deal known as Whitewater had come a cropper. I knew that Starr, casting about desperately for a new angle to nail the Clintons, had been colluding with the Paula Jones lawyers to get personal dirt on Clinton. And I remained close with anti-Clinton agitators in the right-wing media like Matt Drudge, Laura Ingraham, and Ann Coulter.
In part through my talks with Blumenthal, who reached out to me, I came to see that I had been fighting on the wrong side of the Clinton wars, and for a time I became an informant for the pro-Clinton side. Throughout the fall of 1997, I relayed the goals, contours, and details of this secretive anti-Clinton movement to Blumenthal at the White House.
Then, in one critical conversation on the day the Monica Lewinsky story broke in January 1998, I laid out for Blumenthal very specifically all I knew about the right-wing scheme to use Lewinsky to criminalize a private consensual affair and impeach the president for it. And I knew plenty.
If the Republicans had looked it up, they would have found the mystery of our relationship dispelled in several passages in Blumenthal’s The Clinton Wars, including this one:
I related to Hillary my conversation with Brock. I had been telling her about him all along. His revelations filled in the details of what was driving this new “acute” scandal phase. Having knowledge restored a sense of normality, even amid the storm. We could see the lines of influence underlying the scandal, the cause and effect, intent and action—and they were political and familiar. Thus, on the first day, both Hillary and I knew about what she would soon call the vast right-wing conspiracy.
As I similarly recounted the experience in Blinded by the Right:
In the coming days, I decided to tell Sidney everything I knew that could help the Clinton White House defend itself against the effort to drive the president from office… The information helped the White House pull back the curtain and reveal the machinery behind the Lewinsky scandal. It enabled the Clinton defense team to identify the opposing players and connect the political and financial dots among them more swiftly than they otherwise would have. And in an odd—one might even say surreal—historical footnote, given Sidney’s proximity to the First Lady, it may have been the germ of the first line of defense: that Clinton was targeted, as Hillary Clinton soon charged on the Today show, by a “vast right-wing conspiracy.”
Clinton, of course, defeated the unconstitutional impeachment crusade and remained in office for the remainder of his term, ending it with high approval ratings and a sterling list of accomplishments for the country. And Blumenthal and I would maintain a professional relationship and friendship for the next fifteen years.
Blumenthal became a target of the Benghazi investigators by a fluke. In 2013, a set of Blumenthal’s e-mails addressed to then Secretary Clinton, Blumenthal’s friend for more than thirty years, was stolen illegally through wire fraud by a hacker in Romania who went by the code name “Guccifer” and was working from a Russian server. He is now serving a seven-year sentence in a Romanian prison and was charged in a U.S. indictment last year. The hacker, who also purloined the e-mails of former president George W. Bush through his sister Dorothy’s account and former secretary of state Colin Powell, was probably part of a Russian intelligence operation, according to the FBI. In the federal indictment, Blumenthal is listed as a “victim” along with Powell and Dorothy Bush.
At the time, the online gossip sheet Gawker posted the illegally obtained Blumenthal e-mails online, which, among other things, included private reports Blumenthal sent to Hillary on political events and security issues in Libya. Gawker also ran a story on them. It was hardly a surprise that the other media organization that posted the stolen e-mails simultaneously with Gawker was Russia Today, the official outlet for the Russian government. But there the story died.
Two years later, however, during the controversy this past spring over Hillary’s exclusive use of a private e-mail account while she served in the State Department, Blumenthal’s now-public e-mails were resurrected and recycled by the right-wing media, which promoted the fantasy that their bête noire Blumenthal had been the central figure in Hillary’s “secret spy network,” operating outside government channels.
The e-mails actually showed a friend and former colleague of decades forwarding on potentially useful information to a top U.S. policy maker about critical issues of national security. Certainly, Hillary wouldn’t be the first public official to hear competing perspectives from outside official government sources. As James Fallows put in the Atlantic, “It is usually a sign of canniness in a public official, rather than the reverse, to keep channels open to friends who predate the official’s time in office. This is something we celebrate in leaders from Lincoln to FDR.”
Judging by her e-mail exchanges with Blumenthal, who sent them on his own, Hillary seemed happy to have the additional data points, and she sometimes forwarded them to senior aides for their consideration. That was all. Would that George W. Bush had shown such intellectual curiosity in collecting differing opinions and consulting varied sources of information on security policy as he took the nation to war in Iraq under false pretenses.
But no matter. The right wing, entering a presidential contest divided, disoriented, and bereft of any positive ideas for the country, was determined to conjure up a scandal where none existed. In a column for the right-wing Washington Times, Monica Crowley, a former aide to the disgraced Richard Nixon, set down the conservative line: “Was Hillary Clinton running her own rogue intel operation?”
The right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial page went further, demanding a Justice Department investigation into the e-mails from one friend to another, which it posited was somehow “in violation of State rules.”
But the right couldn’t successfully scandalize the Clinton-Blumenthal e-mails without the complicity of others in the media, outside of its ranks.
Enter Jeff Gerth, the New York Times reporter who wrote the first Whitewater story. Gerth has since left the Times, but not, apparently, the anti-Clinton beat. In a March 2015 article for ProPublica, done, oddly, in collaboration with Gawker, Gerth sought to validate the Blumenthal conspiracy theory for mainstream reporters, writing, “The contents of the memos, which have recently become the subject of speculation in the right-wing media, raise new questions about how Clinton used her private email account and whether she tapped into an undisclosed back channel for information on Libya’s crisis and other foreign policy matters.”
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br /> In fact, there was a far-reaching and ongoing federal investigation into those e-mails, but not what the breathless Gerth reported. Those stolen e-mails were at the heart of the criminal federal indictment of the foreign hacker operating from a Russian server. And the FBI also was conducting an investigation of the involvement of the media organizations—Gawker and Russia Today—that had posted the illegally obtained e-mails.
As if on cue, Gerth, in a feedback loop with the right wing, soon delighted conservatives with an appearance on the far-right Breitbart News Sunday show, where he took his rhetoric up several notches, comparing the Blumenthal e-mails to the Iran-Contra scandal in the Reagan administration, for which officials “either went to jail or were convicted and got pardoned,” he added, helpfully—or was it hopefully? He quickly passed from merely distorting the facts into partisan advocacy.
Like his bogus Whitewater reporting, the Gerth piece on Blumenthal fell flat as journalism, but it had a political effect because it was read closely by his former colleagues at the Times. And they soon got on the case to chase it.
To close observers of the paper’s Clinton coverage, what came next was no surprise. Rather, it was part and parcel of a now predictable pattern of anti-Clinton scandalmongering, now being directed by the paper’s Washington bureau chief and politics editor, Carolyn Ryan.
The Blumenthal assignment was the latest in a series of Times investigative pieces, all touted on the front page, aimed squarely at Hillary’s presidential candidacy. As we’ve seen, there already had been Ryan-backed hit jobs on the Clinton Foundation and on Hillary’s use of a private e-mail account while in government. Up at bat once more with the Blumenthal story, the Times swung furiously but whiffed again, publishing an innuendo-laden piece based on selectively leaked e-mail correspondence between Hillary and Blumenthal that had been turned over to the House Benghazi committee as part of its investigation.
“According to that story, the former journalist and Clinton confidant wrote a series of ‘intelligence’ memos about Libya that he sent to Hillary Clinton while she was Secretary of State—supposedly in the hope of advancing the interests of ‘business associates’ who wanted to undertake humanitarian enterprises in the country,” as Joe Conason summarized the Times piece in the National Memo.
Yet according to Blumenthal’s testimony to the House committee, the Libya memos the Times had attributed to him, and that he had forwarded to Hillary, had actually been written by his friend Tyler Drumheller, the highly regarded former CIA European chief now working in the private sector. The business “venture” repeatedly referred to by the Times never happened—it was nothing more than an inchoate idea to provide hospital beds and medicine in war-torn Libya that never got off the ground. And despite the Times huffing and puffing about imaginary conflicts of interest, no money ever changed hands with Blumenthal, he never made a nickel, and he had sought no favors from Hillary or anyone in the U.S. government for his mythical Libyan “business venture.”
Who stated that the New York Times got it all wrong about Blumenthal? None other than Trey Gowdy, the Republican chairman of the Benghazi Committee. Of course, it was his Republican staff that had a hand in the story in the Times. But a week after Blumenthal testified under subpoena in a closed deposition with the public and press excluded, Gowdy wrote in a letter on June 22, 2015, to Congressman Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the committee, “It is… important that I correct certain misapprehensions that have, inadvertently I am sure, made their way into media accounts quoting Democrat sources.” His feigned cluelessness of how those false stories with their “Democrat sources” appeared was rich. He went on to debunk the premises of the story the Times had published as fact—acknowledging that Blumenthal didn’t write the reports he passed on to Hillary, and he didn’t have a financial interest in Libya. Gowdy also conceded that subpoenaing Blumenthal was plainly absurd: “The Committee never expected Witness Blumenthal to be able to answer questions about the attacks in Benghazi.”
Guess what? The New York Times never reported Trey Gowdy’s public letter undermining its story point by point on Blumenthal. Apparently, it was not news fit to print.
What’s the matter with the New York Times? Is it really that bad? It is. As it concerns Clinton coverage, the Times will have a special place in journalism hell.
As we’ve seen, the House committee that the New York Times is so cozy with—the House Select Committee on Benghazi—is the tenth congressional committee to investigate the events surrounding the terrorist attack. None of them—including the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee—have found significant wrongdoing by the Obama administration or Secretary Clinton. Yet as of mid-June 2015, Gowdy’s committee had been investigating the same issue for 409 days, longer than U.S. inquiries into Pearl Harbor or the Kennedy assassination or Iran-Contra, according to a statement by the committee’s Democrats. They calculated the cost to U.S. taxpayers at $3.5 million—and counting.
If there was a scandal for the Times to investigate, this redundant waste of public money was it, but the paper was too busy running the committee’s political errands to notice.
Even though the Benghazi inquiry had been under way for more than a year, on the day the New York Times published its piece about his e-mails to Hillary, Blumenthal became the very first witness subpoenaed by the committee. His wife, Jackie, was served by U.S. marshals at their Washington home.
In the past, Gowdy had said he would not subpoena a cooperative witness, and he also stated that “serious investigations do not leak information or make selective releases of information without full and proper context.”
Yet the Select Committee’s ranking Democrat, Representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland, blasted Gowdy for issuing the subpoena without first speaking to Blumenthal, with no committee debate or vote, and also for leaking news of the subpoena to the Times before it was even served. “The latest abuses by the Committee are just one more example of a partisan, taxpayer-funded attack against Secretary Clinton and her bid for president,” Cummings charged.
But Gowdy was just getting started. Blumenthal was grilled in a closed deposition by the Benghazi committee for nine hours. And in all that time he was asked virtually nothing about… Benghazi.
That’s right. Republicans asked him fewer than twenty questions about the terrorist attack in Benghazi, only four questions about U.S. security there, and zero questions about the U.S. presence in Benghazi, according to a fact sheet later circulated by Democratic committee staff.
Rather than asking about the ostensible subject of their investigation, the committee instead went on an odious fishing expedition into Blumenthal’s professional and personal relationships.
Republicans asked questions about Blumenthal’s political and personal history with Bill and Hillary Clinton. They asked questions about his work for the Clinton Foundation, a global charity, which Blumenthal advises. And they asked forty-five questions about Blumenthal’s relationship with me, Media Matters, and a pair of SuperPACs I also founded, American Bridge and Correct the Record—a trio of groups that Blumenthal also advises.
“Gowdy was obsessed with Media Matters,” Blumenthal told me on the night the ordeal ended. “They seemed more interested in my relationship with you than with Hillary.”
Trey Gowdy had been elected to the House in the Koch-funded Republican wave of 2010. He had successfully challenged a Republican, Bob Inglis, for the seat in a primary. Inglis had a 93 percent rating of his voting record from the American Conservative Union, but he had angered the right with a factual statement that global warming is man-made, providing Gowdy with an opening.
Gowdy asked Blumenthal about his role in the production and promotion of four Media Matters research posts that were sharply critical of various false claims made by conservative media on Benghazi. Another Republican asked if Blumenthal had written or edited a recent statement from Correct the Record, a SuperPAC that defends Hillary against false attacks, that pointed out the p
artisan underpinnings behind the committee’s ongoing investigation.
Blumenthal testified, accurately, that he had no role in any of it, though even if he had, what did that have to do with the avowed purpose of the committee?
This line of questioning led to a dead end. As it happens, Media Matters and Correct the Record source all of their research to publicly available information and verified reporting, and the groups make their work product public on their websites. If the Republicans want to figure out what we’re up to, the answer is just a click away.
Nothing is amiss much less scandalous in the work of these groups; indeed, we’re proud of what we publish.
I wish the same could be said for the Select Committee, which refused requests from committee Democrats and from Blumenthal to release publicly the transcript of his deposition. Clearly, Gowdy wants to suppress the evidence of his handiwork.
To be sure, the Republicans are sitting on the deposition—while leaking select parts to their friends in the media—to save themselves from political embarrassment. Sources who were in the room that day say the goings-on would be gold for the late night comics.
For instance, Blumenthal signed off one e-mail to Hillary with a joking reference to “Clio.”
This led GOP Representative Mike Pompeo of California to demand to know, “Who is Clio?”
Blumenthal’s answer? Clio is the Greek goddess of history. Nothing nefarious there.
At another point during the proceedings, California Republican Darrell Issa, who had chaired a prior failed Benghazi investigation, inexplicably tried to barge his way into the room where Blumenthal was being deposed before being turned away. “He isn’t right,” Gowdy said to a colleague, referring to Issa.
Blumenthal told me that the lead Republican lawyer for the committee told him and his lawyers at the end of a long day of questioning that “maybe we got five minutes’ worth of something.”