Joe Conason:

May. 02, 2008 | First let me confess that I am now and have for many years considered myself a friend of Sidney Blumenthal’s, the senior advisor to Sen. Hillary Clinton and former Salon columnist. I should also acknowledge here for the record that, like a number of his other friends, I receive daily e-mails from him on a wide variety of topics. Those e-mails, which have included everything from Doonesbury cartoons to YouTube videos, screen captures, poll results, right-wing screeds and the occasional scholarly article, must number in the thousands by now because sending those blasts has been a Blumenthal habit since long before he joined the Clinton campaign earlier this year.

If this were a more sane campaign, those mundane messages would be of little interest to anyone else. But now Peter Dreier, blogging on the Huffington Post, has suggested that Blumenthal crossed a line by sending out negative articles about Sen. Barack Obama that have appeared in the right-wing media. And Dreier, along with several other bloggers, also seems to believe that the recipients of those e-mails, especially the journalists, ought to have “exposed” Blumenthal for “spreading” the calumnies and criticisms that appeared in those articles — which included some far-fetched smears of Obama and his associates.

Dreier cannot cite any specific instance that shows Blumenthal’s e-mails influenced the coverage of Obama by anyone, let alone the writers who received them or the publications where they work. In fact, at least one of the regular recipients of those messages was an outspoken Obama supporter, and others were at least sympathetic to Obama. For my part, Blumenthal certainly knows that I have sharply criticized both Clintons and the Clinton campaign and haven’t endorsed any primary candidate.

No doubt Sid assumed that his friends would keep his correspondence private, but he is also far too experienced to imagine that something sent out to a dozen people or more will remain “secret” for long. I cannot claim to know why he sent any particular article to any reporter he happens to know, but I can say that he never pushed or pressured me to write about any of that material. Although Dreier attempted to make a couple of tenuous connections between Blumenthal and material published by Joe Klein and Jake Tapper, the truth is that neither Tapper nor Klein was on his e-mail list, neither of them could be considered his friend, and neither of them communicates with him on any regular basis.

The clear assumption behind Dreier’s blog post is that Blumenthal somehow endorsed the specific content of every negative story he sent out. But that assumption is logically flawed because among the items he has regularly sent out is a daily blogosphere roundup authored by Clinton staffer Peter Daou — which invariably included negative posts about Clinton herself, her husband, her staff, her campaign, her finances and so on, as well as upbeat posts.

Aside from the fact that I considered Blumenthal’s e-mails to be private communications from a friend, I never thought it newsworthy that he sent out material supporting his view of Obama as an untested candidate with vulnerabilities in his background. He didn’t have to agree with what the right-wing media was saying in order to think those potential problems were worthy of attention. Whether that is a legitimate argument — and how far to go in making it — can be debated. It is certainly an argument that the Obama campaign and its supporters have used to warn against the polarizing Clintons on many occasions.

[...] It is worth noting that Blumenthal’s list includes Thomas Edsall, a distinguished journalist and author who has known him since they worked together at the Washington Post. Apparently Edsall, who now serves as political editor of the Huffington Post, where the Dreier article screams across the front page, never considered Sid’s e-mails to be worthy of news coverage.