When journalist-turned-Clinton-shill Sidney Blumenthal was blocked by the Obama White House from a full-time job in Hillary Clinton’s State Department, he settled for the next best thing: Constantly spamming Clinton’s secret, private email account.

The most recent 7,000-page court-ordered divulgence from Hillary Clinton’s giant boxed collection of printed-out emails, which the State Department published online last night at 9 p.m., tells us two things: First, as is the case with previous dumps, the fact that Clinton was permitted to unilaterally delete large portions of her private email account without any scrutiny or oversight means what the public is left with is pretty dull. Secondly, when her off-the-books global intel lackey Sid Blumenthal wasn’t sending her long, inaccurate memos on foreign affairs, he was peppering her with updates about his sons’ careers. Clinton’s responses to Blumenthal’s missives—she repeatedly forwarded them to aides with requests to print out multiple copies, and explicitly told Blumenthal to keep the advice coming—show conclusively that she actually relied on his unofficial counsel.

These newly unearthed Blumenthal emails span the total spectrum of what’s possibly worth the Secretary of State’s attention span. On the one hand, we see Blumenthal relaying a “confidential report” out of Kyrgyzstan by Harper’s Magazine contributor Scott Horton—it’s no small feat to make sure a lowly writer has the ear of a cabinet-level official (she asks for three copies to be made).

But much of the Blumenthal/Clinton correspondence is just unsolicited noise, like updates on his son Max’s latest articles on “opendemocracy.net.”

He also took the time to update Clinton on the fact Max had been awarded the Annenberg Online Journalism Award—which described as “the equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize—eight years after the fact.

Not to favor one kid over the other, Sid also took the time to promote the viral web success of his other son Paul: He emailed Clinton to inform her that one recent Huffington Post article had “more hits and comments than any other piece, and is the number one story on blogs across the web right now.”

Hillary’s polite response: “Good for Paul!”

There’s also a relentless needling in Blumenthal’s emails, a constant pressure of opinions, unvetted facts, and third-hand rumors informing the daily judgments of one of the U.S. government’s most powerful figures.

He chimed in on how to spin Wikileaks:

He suggested meetings with foreign dignitaries:

And even made their dinner reservations:

Offered insight on Iran:

On Israel:

On who to ring, and when:

Timestamps on the State Department’s release suggest that Blumenthal was in touch with Clinton at least once per week (sometimes much more) in 2010—and again, that is just a partial record of those emails that Clinton didn’t unilaterally destroy because she judged them to be unrelated to her job.

For now we’re left to wonder why exactly Sid Blumenthal took it on himself to act as a policy counsel and social secretary to Hillary Clinton—did he just want to feel like he was part of it all? Or was he being compensated to act as an off-the-books spook, filling Clinton’s inbox with paternal pride and memos on Israel? Clinton claims her secret email server was hiding nothing more than “yoga routines” and other personal mundanities. But it’s also keeping us from ever knowing why the hell she cared so much what Sid Blumenthal had to say, or who was paying him to say it.

Photo: Getty

Contact the author at biddle@gawker.com.
Public PGP key
PGP fingerprint: E93A 40D1 FA38 4B2B 1477 C855 3DEA F030 F340 E2C7