A new report suggests that Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s longtime confidant Sidney Blumenthal pushed the media to look into President Barack Obama’s “Kenyan Ties.”
Politico reports that former McClatchy editor James Asher claimed that Blumenthal suggested to him that he should investigate if President Barack Obama’s birthplace was in Kenya. Asher said they sent a reporter, Shasank Bengali, to Kenya and found nothing to suggest that Obama was born there.
Here’s what Bengali said:
Bengali, who is now a Los Angeles Times correspondent based in Mumbai, said he had been asked to investigate “Obama’s Kenya ties” at Blumenthal’s behest, but couldn’t remember whether anyone had asked him “to check out the birther angle specifically. No one in Kenya took that seriously.”
“What I remember is that you told me to look into everything about Obama’s family in Kenya. I can’t recall if we specifically discussed the birther claim, but I’m sure that was part of what I researched,” Bengali said in an email to Asher that was shared with POLITICO.
Asher also assigned the following angles for Bengali to investigate, at Blumenthal’s request:
The email, which was dated March 17, 2008, and shared with POLITICO, reads: “Jim, on Kenya your person in the field might look into the impact there of Obama’s public comments about his father. I’m told by State Dept officials that Obama publicly derided his father on his visit there and that was regarded as embarrassing and crossing the line by Kenyans for whom respect for elders (especially the father, especially a Muslim father, in a patrilineal society) is considered sacrosanct. Sidney”
Asher says he also asked Bengali, after discussing the matter with Blumenthal, to look into “any connections between Obama and Raila Odinga, who had described himself as Obama’s cousin and would run for president of Kenya; and, second, possible relationships between Odinga and unspecified controversial Muslim groups.”
Blumenthal did not deny this, as he told Politico that “what you sent has nothing to do with birtherism at all. It is untrue I had anything to do with birtherism. Obama’s relationship with his father is at the heart of his memoir, ‘Dreams of My Father,’ and has been a commonplace subject of interest for everyone.”
But actually, they are related to birtherism. As John Nolte has explained, “Birtherism is the act of raising false questions about Obama’s overall American and Christian identity,” which Blumenthal certainly did by suggesting that McClatchy should look into Obama’s cousin and potential ties to Muslim groups. And what else could Blumenthal be insinuating when he told McClatchy to look at “Obama’s Kenya Ties?”
Blumenthal’s denial about not pushing the idea that Obama was possibly born in Kenya has no merit. As Mark Hemingway writes in The Weekly Standard, Blumenthal has “lied to the media and publicly smeared Monica Lewinsky and other Bill Clinton accusers when he worked in the White House. Christopher Hitchens, no card-carrying member of the vast right-wing conspiracy, testified before Congress to Blumenthal’s lies and wrote a book about it.”
Blumenthal has also been employed at the Clinton Foundation and reportedly profited from the use of a private military company in Libya; it was from there he fed Clinton with terrible intelligence about the country.
There is no question at this point that, despite the media’s attempts to say otherwise, Clinton’s campaign is the source of birtherism, and this latest report about Blumenthal confirms this.