other sources. Shearer gave these notes to Blumenthal and several other journalists. Blumenthal passed on the notes to Jonathan Winer at the State Department, who had a previous relationship with Christopher Steele. In September 2016 Blumenthal discussed Steele's report with Winer and told him that the information was similar to information he had received from Shearer. Winer then gave the notes to Steele, who then passed them on to the FBI in October and said it came from a friend of the Clintons. Political views Blumenthal was highly critical of George W. Bush and his administration for its use of enhanced interrogation techniques, for revealing the identity Valerie Plame as a CIA source, and the response to the Hurricane Katrina. Blumenthal praised Bill Clinton for his work on the Brady bill and North American Free Trade Agreement. According to an article by Carl M. Cannon Blumenthal is opposed to Capital punishment. Controversies Rumors allegedly spread by Blumenthal Blumenthal gained a reputation for attacking those whom he considered to be enemies of the Clinton administration. Some accused him of acting as Clinton's hatchet man. When Ken Starr was investigating Bill Clinton for his affair with Monica Lewinsky, Blumenthal was alleged to have spread false rumors to reporters including saying that a deputy to Starr had sexually abused boys at a Christian camp and that Lewinsky was a stalker. "In 1995, Mr. Blumenthal told reporters that Alma Powell, Colin Powell's wife, suffered from clinical depression and was thus unfit to be a first lady. At the time, there were rumors that Colin Powell would run in the Republican presidential primaries, a prospect that terrified the Clinton re-election campaign," The New York Observer reported. Birtherism conspiracy theory During the 2008 presidential primaries, Blumenthal, then informally working for Hillary Clinton, promulgated rumors and encouraged news organizations to investigate conspiracy theories that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, not the United States, and thus was not constitutionally eligible to serve as president per the natural-born-citizen clause. This conspiracy theory later became more widely known as birtherism. A former Washington D.C. bureau chief for McClatchy Newspapers, James Asher, said in a formal statement in the fall of 2016: "Mr. Blumenthal and I [once] met together in my office and he strongly urged me to investigate the exact place of President Obama’s birth, which he suggested was in Kenya. We assigned a reporter to go to Kenya,