When the question of who cooked up the gross, repulsive contents of the Steele Dossier is asked, is anyone surprised the name of Hillary Clinton's consigliere, Sid Blumenthal, comes up?

Blumenthal has that kind of mind, and sure enough we read of him again. This time, there's a new memo, created by Senate Republicans Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham about the creation of the Steele dossier, and apparently one of the contributors was Sid Blumenthal. According to Fox News:

Last month, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., made a criminal referral regarding Steele to the FBI. The referral, parts of which were declassified Monday, included a reference to "a foreign source [who] gave information to an unnamed associate of Hillary and Bill Clinton, who then gave information to an unnamed official in the Obama State Department, who then gave the information to Steele."

In another section, the referral stated that Steele received information from "a foreign sub-source who is in touch with (redacted), a contact of (redacted), a friend of the Clintons, who passed it to (redacted).'"

Rep. Trey Gowdy, who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, strongly hinted to Fox News that the "friend of Hillary Clinton" was Blumenthal:

When host Martha MacCallum asked if he was referring to Blumenthal, Gowdy answered, "That'd be really warm. You're warm, yeah."

Sidney Blumenthal / Wikicommons

If it wasn't Blumenthal, it was his right-hand man, Cody Shearer, according to documents cited by RedState in a very good report about how Clinton associates, probably more than Blumenthal, fed information to Steele for the creation of his dossier. Up until now, the story has been that creepy little Kremlin operatives cooked up the lascivious stories about Trump and his supposed kinky behavior with Moscow hookers and somehow got these phony stories to Christopher Steele, the former U.K. intelligence agent, who assembled the dossiers on behalf of Washington opposition research firm, Fusion GPS. Now it looks like a more circuitous path was used in the dossier's creation, not just with Steele's Kremlin sources but with Blumenthal's. With the foreign source likely in Moscow or with Moscow connections, it quite possibly means that Blumenthal egged the Russians to produce the contents the way he wanted.

Seems everyone on the Democrat side was pitching in in the creation of the Steele dossier and Blumenthal wanted to do his part.

Assuming the Grassley-Graham allegations are correct, here's a rough map I scrawled to show what's the above-described winding passage looked like with Blumenthal now in the picture:
 

With Sid in the picture, it certainly made a winding passage. Obviously, it would mean that Sid has some creepy sources, Russia's dodgiest characters in the Kremlin, the gangster types with color of state over there, and feel pretty comfortable about telling such 'clients' or contacts or whoever it was, that what he wanted from them. After he got it, he passed it forward to the State Department, who then passed it to Steele.

What came of the whole thing was fiction, ultimately created by Kremlin operatives, commissioned and paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign, with a little help from Clinton's consigliere and slimemaster, Sid Blumenthal. And as RedState notes, it was unsolicited. Sid just passed it along to fill the dossier like an ever-bigger diaper in need of changing.

Blumenthal, you recall, was an assistant senior advisor to President Clinton from 1997 to 2001, the prime Clinton scandal years, following a career as a writer for the New Yorker. He was a prime witness in the grand jury testimonies over the Monica Lewinsky scandal and famous for leaking creepy stories about the Ken Starr special prosecutor investigation to the press, and came to be known as a man who would do anything for the Clintons. He got a reputation so slimey that even Rahm Emmanuel, who became President Obama's chief of staff, wouldn't allow him near the Obama White House. Hillary kept him, however, at a $10,000 a month sinecure at the Clinton Foundation where he went on to be instrumental in creating the Benghazi scandal from his "Libyan sources." These days, he's affiliated with David Brock's Media Matters, the slime machine featured by Sharyl Attkisson in her bestseller, The Smear: How Shady Politcal Operatives Control What You See, What You Think and How You Vote.

Since then, he's got Clinton in this Steele dossier mess. You'd think Hillary would not want to have anything to do with him after Benghazi, but they're birds of a feather. Blumenthal is to Clinton as Ben Rhodes is to Obama.

Best thing now is to get all the redacted memos out, and let Blumenthal sit on the hot seat he's so familiar with.

It