# Richard Blumenthal Democratic senator from Connecticut since 2011 (b. 1946), the state's attorney general for the twenty years before that, and in the vault the Senate's most persistent oversight litigator against second-term self-dealing. As Connecticut AG he was the model of the activist state attorney general — tobacco, Microsoft, the 2009 subprime suits — and he brought that method to the Senate: the letter with a deadline, the whistleblower channel, the suit. He was the lead plaintiff in *Blumenthal v. Trump* (2017), the congressional emoluments suit under the [[Emoluments Clauses]], which the D.C. Circuit dismissed for lack of standing in 2020 — the precedent that means the second term's emoluments questions are pursued by oversight rather than litigation. His 2010 campaign was nearly sunk by the revelation that he had described himself as having served "in" Vietnam when he had served in the Marine Reserve at home; he won anyway, and the episode is the standard Republican rejoinder to his credibility. ## The oversight portfolio He is ranking member of the [[Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations]] — the Senate's oldest investigative body — under the [[Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee]], and it is from that seat that most of his file comes. He opened the inquiry into the [[Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool Renovation]] no-bid contract and the [[National Park Service Funds Diversion]] behind it; with [[Elizabeth Warren]] and Adam Schiff he pressed the $TRUMP memecoin and the foreign purchases of it ([[Trump Corruption News Log]]); with Warren he wrote to the [[Office of Strategic Capital]] about the [[1789 Capital]] and Vulcan loan book; and on **August 29, 2026** he received the whistleblower disclosure about the [[USPS Federal Ballot Mail Portal]] — the system built to implement [[Executive Order 14399]]'s mail-voting restrictions — which he sent to Postmaster General [[David Steiner]] on August 31 and published September 1. His framing: "the Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions of Americans." The disclosure's sharpest allegation is that USPS resumed building the portal around July 29 while injunctions (including Judge [[Indira Talwani]]'s) were in force. He had co-sponsored the Absentee and Mail Voter Protection Act in April 2026 to block the order outright. ## Reading him Blumenthal is what oversight looks like from the minority: no subpoena power, so the tools are the letter, the leak and the press conference, and the results are a public record rather than a remedy. That is also why he appears in the file so often — the [[Trump Family Corruption Ecosystem]] page's documentary trail runs substantially through his correspondence. He sits on Judiciary and Armed Services as well, and the [[Lindsey Graham]] page records the odd-couple legislative partnership on Russia sanctions and Ukraine. That partnership produced the one durable statute with Blumenthal's fingerprints on it: the bill the two introduced on April 1, 2025 became the **[[Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026]]**, signed into law on September 18, 2026 — fourteen months after it had a veto-proof 84 cosponsors and could not get a vote, and two months after Graham's death. ## See Also - [[Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations]] · [[Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee]] · [[Elizabeth Warren]] · [[Lindsey Graham]] - [[USPS Federal Ballot Mail Portal]] · [[Executive Order 14399]] · [[USPS]] · [[David Steiner]] · [[Indira Talwani]] - [[Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool Renovation]] · [[National Park Service Funds Diversion]] · [[1789 Capital]] · [[Office of Strategic Capital]] - [[Trump Corruption News Log]] · [[Trump Family Corruption Ecosystem]] · [[Emoluments Clauses]] - [[Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026]] — the Graham-Blumenthal sanctions bill, enacted September 18, 2026