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Sid Blumenthal Framed, Part 2When Chatterbox disproves a canard, he expects it to stay disproved.

By Timothy Noah
Posted Wednesday, May 21, 2003, at 5:14 PM ET

Michael Isikoff's Slate review of Sidney Blumenthal's The Clinton Wars repeats a canard that Chatterbox thought he put to rest five years ago. (See "Sid Blumenthal Framed!" To read Chatterbox's own review of the Blumenthal book, click here.) The false accusation—also leveled in a tendentious footnote to Isikoff's otherwise excellent 1999 book Uncovering Clinton—is that Blumenthal conned the press when, on emerging from his first appearance before Ken Starr's grand jury, he said the Monicagate prosecutors had pestered him about his conversations with reporters. Isikoff claims this was shown to be untrue when Blumenthal's testimony was later made public. Not so. Blumenthal told the truth.

"I never imagined that in America," Blumenthal told the press stakeout assembled that day on the courthouse steps, "I would be hauled before a federal grand jury to answer questions about my conversations with members of the media." Starr's prosecutors, he said, had "demanded to know what I had told reporters and what reporters had said to me about Ken Starr's prosecutors. If they think they have intimidated me, they have failed."

This peroration can be faulted for being melodramatic, but not for being inaccurate. In The Clinton Wars, Blumenthal provides a more detailed description, one Isikoff can't dispute because it matches the grand jury transcript:

The prosecutor said, "Did you distribute [talking points denigrating Kenneth Starr's prosecution team produced by the Democratic National Committee] to anyone outside the White House?" This question was aimed directly at my contacts with the media. I responded by listing the news organizations I had dealt with most recently. By grouping them together I hoped to avoid intrusive questions picking apart my relations with individual reporters: "If reporters called me or I spoke with reporters, I would tell them to call the DNC to get those talking points, and those included news organizations ranging from CNN, CBS, ABC, New York Times, New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, New York Observer, LA Times."

"Would you, though, distribute the talking points? Would you cause the talking points to be distributed to any of these news organizations?"

In order to break the pattern of these invasive questions, I went out of the room to consult my attorney.

Isikoff says that Blumenthal "wasn't asked about any news organizations at all" and speculates that he volunteered the names of the news organizations "so he could later claim that the questioning was more sinister than it really was." But whom does Isikoff suppose the prosecutors had in mind when they asked Blumenthal about distributing DNC talking points "outside the White House"? Blumenthal's cleaning lady? They meant, of course, the press. Indeed, "sources familiar with the testimony" cited in a Washington Post story that day confirm that Blumenthal was asked "questions about his contacts with the press." Since Blumenthal and his lawyers were speaking freely on the record, these "sources" familiar with a secret proceeding had to be either grand jurors or, more likely, prosecutors. (It's well-documented that Starr's office leaked like a sieve.) If Blumenthal said he was asked about press contacts, and the party questioning him said he was asked about press contacts, why should Isikoff dispute that?

Blumenthal's explanation for why he named particular news organizations—that he hoped it would pre-empt any attempt by the prosecutors to find out which particular reporters he'd spoken to—is extremely plausible. In any event, the question of whether Blumenthal had leaked DNC material to the press had no bearing on whether Clinton, Blumenthal, or anyone else had committed any crime. Blumenthal's dishing DNC dirt about Starr was none of Starr's business, and Blumenthal was right to be angry he was asked about it.

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Michael Isikoff Responds:

Chatterbox strains way too much. Blumenthal's grandiloquent statement on the courthouse steps proclaimed that he was "forced to answer questions about my conversations...with the New York Times, CNN, CBS, Time magazine, U.s. News, the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Observer and there may have been a few others." There was no way to listen to that and conclude anything but that the prosecutors had asked him about each of these news organizations and what he said to them. ("Tell us, Mr. Blumenthal, about your conversations with the New York Times? What did you say to them? And CNN? What conversations did you have with them?") The last part about "there may have been a few others" was an especially nice touch, suggesting he was peppered with the names of so many news organizations that he couldn't keep track of them.

But the grand jury transcript makes it clear that nothing like that happened. Blumenthal wasn't asked about any particular news organization at all. He was asked questions about whether he was leaking derogatory material on the prosecutors to the press. What he couldn't remember were the news organizations he interjected into the exchange; not any he was asked about. In fact, Blumenthal gives the game away in his book. Recounting his grand jury testimony, he quotes the question the prosecutor actually asked: "Did you distribute it (Democratic National Committee research reports on Starr's staff) to anyone outside the White House?"

He then responded with his laundry list of news organizations. "By grouping them together I hoped to avoid intrusive questions picking apart my relations with individual reporters," he writes in The Clinton Wars. This is the closest Blumenthal comes to trying to justify his statements on the courthouse steps. But the bottom line is those "intrusive questions" were never asked. At a minimum, Blumenthal's public statements about his testimony were misleading. It's not just me who thought so. It was also the grand jurors who chastised him, through the grand jury forewoman, for his "inaccurate representation" of what took place...

Chatterbox also doesn't address the more egregious distortions after the second grand jury appearance in which Blumenthal fed made up questions to Anthony Lewis. And more importantly, Blumenthal never addresses the discrepancies in The Clinton Wars - one of the many omissions in his very long, and yet very incomplete, book.

--Michael Isikoff

(To reply, click here)


Tim Noah Responds:

Isikoff says it was Blumenthal, not the prosecutor, who first uttered the words, "New York Times," "CNN," "CBS," "Time magazine," "U.S. News," "New York Daily News," "Chicago Tribune," and "New York Observer." I yield the point. But it's a petty point. As I noted in my original item about this, it's obvious that the prosecutor, having first asked if Blumenthal had distributed the material outside the White House, and having received an affirmative answer, was next going to ask to whom Blumenthal had distributed the material. It was a pattern well established in the earlier questioning, which had probed in some detail Blumenthal's interactions with White House colleagues.

Yes, but mightn't the prosecutor, bowing before the First Amendment, have hesitated to demand similar information from Blumenthal about interactions he'd with the press? Actually, no. We know this because of the following exchange from page 48 of the grand jury transcript (three pages before Blumenthal names the New York Times, CNN, et. al.):

Q: The information that you received from Mr. [Stanley] Sheinbaum [e.g., a Daily Journal clipping about Starr prosecutor Michael Emmick], did you relay that information to anyone else?
A: I did.
Q: To whom?

Blumenthal's answer is blocked out, but in The Clinton Wars he says he related the article's content "and some of the reporters and editors to whom I'd sent it."

Regarding the "more egregious distortions after the second grand jury appearance in which Blumenthal fed made up questions to Anthony Lewis," I claim no expertise. It seems to me, though, that before rendering judgment we'd have to know who in this telephone game botched the details.

--Tim Noah

(To reply, click here)

(5/22)

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