Larry Sinclair, who is being interviewed today by Tucker Carlson on X, says he had sex with former President Barack Obama in 1999. But he isn’t telling his story for the first time.
“I had given Barack $250 to pay for coke. I start putting a line on a CD tray to snort, and next thing I know he’s got a little pipe and he’s smoking,” Sinclair said in a clip posted yesterday to X by Carlson.
“I just started rubbing my hand along his thigh to see where it was going and it went the direction I intended it to go,” Sinclair continued.
“You had sex with him twice, you … watched him smoke crack twice—you had no idea who he was,” Carlson said.
“It would be a story if the media really cared about telling people the truth,” Sinclair finished.
Who is Larry Sinclair?
Sinclair first made it into the news cycle in 2008 when he posted a viral YouTube video detailing the alleged encounter with Obama in Chicago when the former president was an Illinois state senator.
Sinclair later expanded on the story at a press conference in 2008 hosted at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. accompanied by his kilt-wearing lawyer Montgomery Blair Sibley (whose law license was suspended in D.C. and Florida at the time, reported Politico).
Sinclair told the press a similar story to the one he’s teasing on Carlson’s show. He said he’d come to Chicago to attend his godson’s graduation from Navy basic training, then hired a limo driver to take him around the city. He asked the limo driver to get him in touch with somebody who wanted to socialize and show him around Chicago, and said that the driver called up a guy named Barack Obama.
Sinclair says he gave Obama $250 to buy cocaine for him, which Obama proceeded to do, then came back and smoked crack. Sinclair then “performed fellatio on Senator Obama in the limousine during the time Senator Obama was smoking crack cocaine,” he said in his Nation Press Club statement.
Sinclair gave reporters a series of phone numbers to contact to follow up on the story, but they didn’t seem to go much of anywhere.
Tim Shipman at the Telegraph wrote after the press conference that at least some of Sinclair’s other alleged corroborating information didn’t seem to add up. Sinclair said the name of the driver of the limousine was Paramjit Multani, but in documents he provided to reporters the driver’s name was Rashpal Pultani.
A website called Whitehouse.com also offered Sinclair $100,000 to pass a polygraph test about his claims, but when he took the test, he allegedly had results that “indicated deception,” reported Politico, which also covered Sinclair’s long criminal history, which included multiple forgery charges and theft of an acquaintance’s tax refunds.
Sinclair battled with a series of liberal bloggers, including the now defunct Firedoglake and the Huffington Post, which organized a petition for Sinclair to be pulled from his National Press Club appearance so as to not lend the venue’s credibility to his claims. Some of those online combats played out on Sinclair’s now-defunct WordPress blog, including a defamation lawsuit he launched against a pseudonymous critic called TubeSockTedD.
After Sinclair’s press conference in D.C., he was arrested by the D.C. police on a larceny charge.
According to a 2009 book published by Sinclair about his claims, the arrest was orchestrated by Joe Biden and his late son Beau Biden, then Delaware Attorney General, in an attempt to curry favor with Obama to get the vice president position for Joe and a Delaware Senate seat for Beau.
However, since Sinclair’s big Carlson interview, the drama over his claims appears to have petered out.
