Rival left-wing website Buzzfeed has revealed the secret role that Sidney Blumenthal played in the early stages of Tina Brown’s website, The Daily Beast.  A longtime political ally of Hillary Clinton, and sometime employee of the tax-exempt Clinton Foundation, Blumenthal commissioned stories attacking Caroline Kennedy, now U.S. ambassador to Japan but at the time a potential rival of Hillary Clinton for a New York Senate seat.

Rosie Gray writes:

Hillary Clinton’s confidant Sidney Blumenthal played a quiet role in shaping, and sometimes steering political coverage, in the early days of The Daily Beast.

Blumenthal’s role, early employees said, was touched with a bit of the conspiratorial haze that has emerged as a point of controversy in Clinton’s campaign. He wasn’t listed on the site’s masthead, and the site’s founder, Tina Brown, said she had “no idea” whether or not he was on Clinton’s payroll while helping to shape the site’s political coverage. In one case, he commissioned a hit piece on a potential Clinton rival, Caroline Kennedy, though his name appeared nowhere on the story.

Brown, who founded The Daily Beast, confirmed to BuzzFeed News that Blumenthal had been a “part time consultant” in 2008 and 2009 and had “assigned and connected us to some writers as asked.”

Other evidence comes from the Guccifer hack, widely believed to be the work of Romanian intelligence:

Leaked emails obtained in the Guccifer hack provide a glimpse into the Brown/Blumenthal relationship; in an email dated December 27, 2012, years after Blumenthal’s ambiguous role with the Beast had ended, Brown emailed him: “How are you, sid. Are u done with lincoln? [Blumenthal has been working on a biography of Abraham Lincoln.] So want your politics brain back!

So Hillary Clinton’s covert intel operative when she was secretary of state was also a covert force at the Daily Beast.  But you can trust both of them…