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Before there was George, there was Sid.

George Stephanopoulos is, of course, the ABC news anchor whose $75,000 in donations to the Clinton Foundation have reminded the world of his longtime ties to Bill Clinton, for whom he worked from 1991 to 1997.

But before Stephanopoulos had entered the picture, another journalist with an activist history, Sidney Blumenthal, had already established himself as an admirer of Bill Clinton and as a confidant of both the future president and his wife, Hillary. That relationship, begun in the 1980s, would last for decades and continues to make news today.

In 2007, Blumenthal advised Hillary Clinton's campaign for president, using his rhetorical razor on her rival, the future President Obama. When she became secretary of state she reportedly wanted to offer a job to Blumenthal but was blocked by the White House. Nonetheless, he remained an informal advisor and worked for the Clinton Foundation. In those roles, he sent her 25 emails relevant to U.S. policy in Libya and that country's political and economic future.

Those emails have now been subpoenaed by the special House committee investigating events in Libya in September 2012 that led to the death of the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans.

Hillary Clinton weighed in on her relationship with Blumenthal Tuesday, saying that he had sent her "unsolicited" emails when she was secretary of state that she had, in some instances, "passed on."

"I have many, many old friends, and I always think it's important, when you get into politics to have friends you had before you were in politics. ... I'm going to keep talking to my old friends whoever they are," she said.

To say Blumenthal has been no stranger to controversy is to understate the case. As a writer and advocate, Blumenthal could tap into the dreams and fears of the left while triggering the deepest dread and loathing imaginable on the right. Both reactions seemed to nourish his closeness with the Clintons. And that is a closeness that stretches back nearly three decades.

In 1988, when Bill Clinton was still governor of Arkansas, Sidney Blumenthal was already writing flattering pieces about him in The Washington Post. He had already met both Bill and Hillary Clinton at one of their Renaissance Weekend gatherings.

It would be another three years before Stephanopoulos would join Clinton's first presidential campaign. There he would find a ready ally in Blumenthal, who had moved from the Post to his previous employer, The New Republic. Blumenthal had generated controversy at that magazine in 1984 with his enthusiastic coverage of another youthful Democratic presidential hopeful, Colorado Sen. Gary Hart.

The Hart flirtation was soon surpassed by Blumenthal's infatuation with Clinton, whose 1992 campaign he praised for its potential to bring "epochal change." He also found ample opportunity to lay waste to Clinton's rivals — President George H.W. Bush and the billionaire independent H. Ross Perot.

After Clinton became president, Blumenthal became the Washington correspondent for The New Yorker, a prestigious position that gave him wide latitude to report on the new era and the new administration. He did not see it as his job to report on various controversies that emerged early on, such as the White House Travel Office firings and then the Whitewater investigation. That fell to other New Yorker reporters, of whom Blumenthal was subsequently critical.

Even as the Clintons' health care bill collapsed and the Republicans took over both the House and Senate in the elections of 1994, Blumenthal remained ardently supportive, touting his access and long interviews with the president. This dovetailed with his tendency to self-assurance and dismissal of other points of view. His relations with other reporters on the beat deteriorated as he criticized their work and, it became clear, discussed it with the Clintons in private.

Although Blumenthal continued to write for The New Yorker, Michael Kelly took over as the principal voice of the magazine's Washington coverage as the administration turned toward the 1996 campaign. Blumenthal wrote a play lampooning the White House press corps that was performed at the National Press Club. Wherever one draws the line between "roasting" and expressing contempt, Blumenthal did not seem reluctant to cross it.

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Blumenthal was one of just four witnesses deposed by the U.S. Senate when it tried (and acquitted) Clinton on the impeachment charges early in 1999. AP hide caption

itoggle caption AP

Blumenthal was one of just four witnesses deposed by the U.S. Senate when it tried (and acquitted) Clinton on the impeachment charges early in 1999.

AP

But if his connection to his professional colleagues was strained, his relations with the Clintons remained robust — enough so that in the summer of 1997 he was hired as Special Assistant and Advisor to the President. In February 1998 he received a subpoena from the special prosecutor who was probing the Monica Lewinsky case that would lead to Clinton's impeachment. He testified to the grand jury twice that year, and was one of just four witnesses deposed by the U.S. Senate when it tried (and acquitted) Clinton on the impeachment charges early in 1999.

In 2003, Blumenthal published his own version of the stormy 1990s, entitled The Clinton Wars. The book features photographs of himself with both Bill and Hillary Clinton. Conservative journalist Andrew Sullivan described Blumenthal as "the most pro-Clinton writer on the planet."

Blumenthal, 66, was raised in Chicago and graduated from Brandeis University in Boston in 1969. He worked for the alternative Real Paper there. In 1980 he published a prescient analytical book called The Permanent Campaign, describing how fixation on electoral politics had begun to paralyze governing in the U.S. He has subsequently written four other books, including Pledging Allegiance: The Last Campaign of the Cold War a description of presidential politics in 1988. He also gathered his criticisms of the presidency of George W. Bush in How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime.

Throughout his career, Blumenthal has had a propensity to feuding with other writers. Some were ideological adversaries, such as Sullivan. Some had published false stories about him, as Matt Drudge admitted to doing in 1997. Others were colleagues, such as Michael Kelly at The New Yorker. Some were friends or former friends, such as Christopher Hitchens, with whom he fell out over specific events or issues. In 2013, Blumenthal found himself dueling with critics of his son, Max, whose book Goliath compared excesses of the Jewish state in Israel to those of the Nazi regime in Germany.

Shirin Neshat, the most famous contemporary artist to come from Iran, is playing with her rambunctious Labrador puppy in her airy Manhattan apartment. "Ashi, Ashi, come here!" she calls.

The puppy is black. Neshat's apartment is white — white floors, white bookshelves and a long, white leather couch. Black and white defines much of Neshat's work. Her photographs capture the stark contrast between women in long black chadors and men in crisp white cotton shirts. Neshat left Iran as a teenager in 1974 to attend school in Los Angeles. She did not return until 1990.

"When I went to Iran, I was not an artist yet," Neshat says modestly. In truth, she'd been deeply involved in the art world. After studying painting at UC Berkeley, she co-ran a well-regarded non-profit space for art, architecture and design in New York.

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Calligraphy is often layered on the people in Neshat's photos. It falls over them like veils, or tattoos their skin. Curator Melissa Ho says text gives these silent faces a voice. Above, Neshat's 1996 work Speechless from the Women of Allah series. Photograph by Larry Barns/Courtesy Gladstone Gallery hide caption

itoggle caption Photograph by Larry Barns/Courtesy Gladstone Gallery

Calligraphy is often layered on the people in Neshat's photos. It falls over them like veils, or tattoos their skin. Curator Melissa Ho says text gives these silent faces a voice. Above, Neshat's 1996 work Speechless from the Women of Allah series.

Photograph by Larry Barns/Courtesy Gladstone Gallery

But Neshat's sense of herself as an artist changed after going back to Iran, 11 years after the Islamic revolution transformed her country. Men no longer made eye contact with her. Cosmopolitan Tehranian women who'd worn mini-skirts during her youth had become graphic shapes on the street. Neshat processed her complicated feelings through a series of striking, staged photographs showing women in chadors, some holding guns. Neshat was not the photographer, but she conceptualized and directed the Women of Allah series, and appeared in many of them. She says it's meant to explore the dictomy between religion, politics, violence and feminism.

That's exactly why Melissa Chiu decided to mount a Shirin Neshat retrospective as her inaugural exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. Chiu is the museum's brand new director.

"In order to be a 21st-century museum, we have to think about the world in different ways." Chiu says. The Hirshhorn is Smithsonian's home for contemporary art. She wants it to reflect contemporary realities encompassed by Neshat's art and experience.

"This idea of being born in one place, living and working in multiple places — that is a condition that will only increase," Chiu says.

Associate curator Melissa Ho, who helped organize the exhibition, says, "Shirin really believes in the power of the artists' voice to enact change, to unsettle the powerful" — and to protest.

She points to one of Neshat's best known works of video art, Turbulent which is featured in the Hirshhorn show. There are two screens. You stand between them. One features a man singing a classical poem before an adoring all-male audience. Then on the other, a woman in an empty stage sings a wild, guttural and language-less song. It leaves the men on the other screen completely stunned.

"Her music and her presence in this room represents something rebellious," Neshat explains. "... This is indicative of how I feel about women in Iran. In the way that they are so far against the wall, but they are far more resilient and protesting and they're much more of a fighter than the men because they have much more at stake."

The same themes play out in Neshat's movie, Women Without Men, about four Tehranian women from very different class backgrounds who find themselves in a mystical garden in 1953. It's set in 1953, when the CIA helped overthrow the county's first democratically elected leader Mohammad Mossadegh. The film earned Neshat a Silver Lion for directing at the Venice Film Festival in 2009.

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Neshat says her art is about "people who fight power versus people who hold power." Above her 2013 work Rahim (Our House Is on Fire). Photograph by Larry Barns/Courtesy Gladstone Gallery hide caption

itoggle caption Photograph by Larry Barns/Courtesy Gladstone Gallery

Neshat says her art is about "people who fight power versus people who hold power." Above her 2013 work Rahim (Our House Is on Fire).

Photograph by Larry Barns/Courtesy Gladstone Gallery

"The female characters are the non-comformists," says curator Melissa Ho. "Sometimes only quietly or maybe out of sight, but they resist, and they sort of take control of their story, and they decide to defy the rules."

Much like Shirin Neshat. Her art at first was made just for her, a bridge from a place of exile. "And I never imagined that my work someday would be looked upon as a form of dialogue, larger than my own personal life," she says.

"I am not a practicing Muslim," she adds. " I consider myself a secular Muslim. I do have my faith and certain rituals that I do, and I go to mosque when I can, when I'm traveling in that part of the world. I love the sound of the Koran."

Neshat's been working in Egypt recently — shooting a new feature film, about the singer Umm Kulthum, and creating a newer series of portraiture — simple, shattering shots of working class parents in Egypt whose children were killed or arrested during the Arab Spring.

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"It's really about the question of people versus tyranny," she says. "And people who fight power versus people who hold power."

Neshat wants to leverage her current considerable power in the art world to bring more voices from Iran and the Arab world into the global cultural conversation.

Elian Gonzalez, the Cuban boy who was seized 15 years ago from his relatives in Miami by U.S. government officials who returned him to his native country, says he would like to visit the United States as a tourist.

"For my family it has always been, we always have the desire to say to the American people, to say to each household our gratitude, appreciation and love that we have," he tells ABC News. "Perhaps one day we could pay a visit to the United States. I could personally thank those people who helped us, who were there by our side. Because we're so grateful for what they did."

He tells ABC he'd like to see a baseball game, visit museums in Washington and talk to Americans.

Gonzalez, now 21, was rescued in 1999 as a 6-year-old boy off the Florida coast where his mother had died trying to reach the U.S. His father in Cuba wanted him returned, but his Miami-based relatives tried to keep him. A legal battle went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which rejected an appeal from the Miami family. Gonzalez was seized by government agents on April 22, 2000, and returned to his father in Cuba.

ABC adds that Gonzales, who is studying engineering, is engaged to his high school sweetheart, also a student.

He says that though he disagrees with his mother's actions in trying to come to the U.S., he is grateful for her efforts to keep him afloat even as she drowned.

"I believe that if today she is not here with me it is because she fought until the very last minute for me to survive," he tells ABC. "After giving life to me, I believe she was the one who saved me. She was the one who gave life back to me at a time of danger."

You can watch the interview here:

ABC News Videos | ABC Entertainment News

elian gonzalez

Cuba

Voters in more than half the states will soon be able to register online, rather than filling out a paper form and sending it in.

Twenty states have implemented online voter registration so far, almost all in the past few years. Seven other states and the District of Columbia are now in the process of doing so. That includes Florida, whose governor, Republican Rick Scott signed a bill last Friday requiring the state to allow online voter registration by 2017.

Online voter registration has become so popular because election officials say it's more efficient than a paper-based system, and cheaper.

Voters like it because they can register any time of day from home, said David Becker, director of election initiatives for the Pew CharitableTrusts.

"What election officials are finding, is they're saving a ton of money, because they're having to process a lot fewer pieces of paper by hand, right before an election, and get that into the system," he said.

Arizona, for example, says it costs the state only $.03 to register someone online, versus $.83 on paper.

And there's another reason state election officials like online registration. It can be very difficult to keep voter rolls up-to-date and accurate, which has raised concerns about voter fraud and caused confusion at the polls. But information submitted online is immediately compared with driver's license or other state databases, and verified.

"If someone puts in First Avenue, instead of First Street, as their address by mistake and it doesn't match the motor vehicles file, in real time, with the voter still sitting at the screen, they can ask the voter to double check if what they entered was correct," Becker explained, adding that this can avoid a lot of problems on Election Day, especially if the error involves the spelling of the voter's name.

Online voter registration also turns out to be one of the few areas in running elections where many Republicans and Democrats agree.

Louisiana's Republican Secretary of State Tom Schedler says he was skeptical at first. Louisiana was one of the first states to approve online voter registration in 2009.

"Register online? I mean it just was kind of an oxymoron to me. I just was so used to the old system. So I mean, I guess it was more just my confidence level in technology," he said.

But today, Schedler is a huge fan. He says more than 220,000 people have used the system so far, with no reported problems.

"You can go straight online and do it. It takes about two minutes, three minutes max, and it's done," he says.

Still not everyone's sold on the idea. Florida's bill had strong bipartisan support in the legislature, but Gov. Scott said he signed the measure "with some hesitation." Scott said he was worried about meeting the October 2017 deadline, especially with a presidential election on the way. And his secretary of state, Ken Detzner, told lawmakers last month that he also opposed the bill because it was a massive undertaking.

Georgia's online voter registration website. registertovote.sos.ga.gov hide caption

itoggle caption registertovote.sos.ga.gov

"You're dealing with the most sensitive part of an election. You're dealing with voter registration systems. And if we do it wrong, we are in a heap of trouble," Detzner said.

Some Republican lawmakers in Texas have also blocked an online registration bill in that state, saying they're worried the system would be vulnerable to cyber attacks.

However, computer experts say that's not a problem as long as certain safeguards are put in place. Pamela Smith, president of Verified Voting, a technology watchdog group gave this advice: "you want to make sure that you're testing for security while the system is being built and once it's in use. And you want to have a strategy for what happens if there's a failure of the system at a critical moment, like election day," she says.

In most cases, voters need to have a driver's license to use the online system, which means states can also require them to show their licenses the first time they appear at the polls, as an extra precaution, she says.

For everyone else, registering on paper is still an option.

Becker said one other problem that people were worried about has yet to materialize. Some politicians feared that online registration would favor one political party over the other. But according to Becker the party breakdown in states using online registration is almost identical to what it had been before. Red states are just as red, blue states just as blue.