Hillary Co-Chair Billy Shaheen Floated Obama Drug Use Story in 2007 - Granite Grok

Hillary Co-Chair Billy Shaheen Floated Obama Drug Use Story in 2007

Trial ballonsAs we listen to the chickens fighting over who birthed the birther movement let us not forget. Hillary’s 2008 Presidential Campaign Co-Chair and NH state campaign Chairman Billy Shaheen, lawyer, and husband of now US Senator Jeanne Shaheen, both of them longtime Clinton meat-puppets, floated the “past drug use will bite Obama in the ass” story to the Washington Post.

From Salon.com Nov. 2007

Bill Shaheen, who raised the issue of Obama’s past drug use today, may not work at Clinton’s campaign headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. But Shaheen, the husband of former New Hampshire Gov. Jeanne Shaheen, is a co-chair of Clinton’s New Hampshire campaign and her national campaign. While the job of a campaign “co-chair” can be a largely ceremonial one, Bill Shaheen and his wife aren’t exactly strangers to Hillary Clinton. They were important enough to her that she put in a personal phone call to them on the day she announced her candidacy for the presidency in January. And when Bill Shaheen announced that he was endorsing Clinton and would be serving as her New Hampshire co-chair, Clinton said: “My campaign in New Hampshire is in exactly the right hands. Bill Shaheen brings so much with him, and I am absolutely thrilled to have his guidance and leadership.”

Bill volunteered to fall on the sword to get the story out there to slow Obama’s momentum, but he wasn’t the first. A pair of Clinton campaign ‘volunteer coordinators’ in Iowa left the campaign after emailing concerns about Obama being Muslim.

Take that into consideration as you debate whom to believe about the birthing of the birther movement.

McClatchy’s former bureau chief James Asher says that Sidney Blumenthal (a Clinton insider to this day) spread the story to him that Obama was born in Kenya. Asher says he asked a reporter to look at Obama’s family in Kenya, but everyone suffers memory loss over where it went from there. But none of that matters, nor does Blumenthal’s denials.

The Clinton campaign, desperate to slow Obama’s momentum, was actively farming out a string of rumors to derail the Obama hopey-changey freight train in early caucus and primary states.

Someone within the Clinton camp launched the birther trial balloon, and it looks like it was Blumenthal’s job to see that it happened.

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