Sidney Blumenthal

Sidney Stone Blumenthal (born November 6, 1948) is an American journalist, political operative, and Lincoln scholar. A former aide to President Bill Clinton, he is a long-time confidant of Hillary Clinton and was formerly employed by the Clinton Foundation. As a journalist, Blumenthal wrote about American politics and foreign policy. He is also the author of a multivolume biography of Abraham Lincoln, The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln. Three books of the planned five-volume series have already been published: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel, and All the Powers of Earth. Subsequent volumes were planned for later.

Blumenthal has written for publications such as The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker, for whom he served for a time as the magazine's Washington correspondent, and, was, briefly, the Washington, D.C., bureau chief for Salon. He is a regular contributor to the openDemocracy website and is a regular columnist for The Guardian. After 2000, he wrote several essays critical of the administration of George W. Bush.

Over time, Blumenthal began to be viewed as an archetype of a new type of journalist who has eroded the divide between the fading boundaries between independent journalism and partisan journalism: "As the connection between journalists and politicians is umbilical in Washington, Blumenthal's political problem, in part, is journalistic," reporter Michael Powell wrote of him in a profile in The Washington Post: "His is a type found far more often on the right in Washington, a partisan warrior who takes a critically sympathetic stance not just toward his issues but his chosen political party as well. Even as a writer at The Washington Post, where Blumenthal passed some time in the 1980s, he placed a porous membrane between his political views and his writing. It is the sort of partisan, if also intellectual, engagement that makes mainstream journalists, even those of liberal politics, deeply uncomfortable."