Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine Read online

  One omnipresent Clinton backer is Lanny Davis, a friend of the Clintons since their shared law school days. Within the Clinton circle, Davis has something of a notorious reputation of one who frequently talks to reporters without authorization and trades on his decades-long associations, not only with the Clintons but with George W. Bush, another friend of his from their days together at Yale. Many Clinton insiders send me to Davis for quotes and gossip, labeling him a “self-promoter” and a gadfly. Davis is in fact a very likable presence, earnest and apparently sincere in his devotion to the former first couple. In his office, adorned with accouterments from his associations with the Clintons and Bushes, he offers this: “I think [Hillary] was destined for public service since the first time I met her.” He adds helpfully, “That’s on the record.”

  Those kinds of quotes are acceptable in ClintonWorld. Others leave Clinton associates vulnerable to a company purge. As in any good corporation, investors in Clinton, Inc. jealously guard the company brand and police insiders who might put it at risk. “They have an infrastructure,” a former Clinton cabinet official tells me, insisting that he be quoted without attribution. “A political infrastructure, political consultants, a press infrastructure, a business infrastructure.” And they have a network of spies, informants, and enforcers.

  All of which leads to a note about sourcing for this book. Wherever I could I have tried to quote sources on the record. In many cases, however, I have agreed to quote prominent Clinton aides on background, or without attribution. I approached many of them at the outset with a liability, my work as a writer and editor for the Weekly Standard, which was rightly seen as a right-of-center magazine often critical of the Clintons. As a result, many people were initially reluctant to speak to me.

  “Write something interesting and surprising that will not be as predictable as what the Weekly Standard has become,” former White House press secretary Mike McCurry advised me. “I used to read it with great interest and even contributed a letter to the editor once. But the conservative critique of Obama . . . and I fear what will be said of Hillary Clinton . . . will be predictably snarky, and designed to add to the current polarization of our politics rather than figuring out how to overcome it. Write something that will make conservatives say, ‘You know, I never thought I could see that in Bill/Hillary Clinton but this made me think . . .’ ”

  The subtext of course is that my book was intended to be unflattering of the Clintons. In some ways, the reporting has borne that out. But as I’ve learned more about Bill and Hillary (and Chelsea), a more complicated portrait has emerged of each of them that is sometimes sharply at odds with their public personas. The private Hillary, for example, is warmer, more likable, and in some ways sadder than her public persona suggests. She’s the more sympathetic and relatable one. Her biggest asset and her biggest vulnerability are one and the same: her husband. Contrary to his emotive Bubba persona, the private Bill Clinton is colder, more calculating, and more compulsive. Many people love his company, at least over the short term, yet he lacks real lifelong friends in a way his wife doesn’t. His charm is legendary but has its limits. Clinton, for example, long admired Arkansas senator J. William Fulbright. A Fulbright relation told me that the senator was never fooled by the aspiring and self-serving politico—who was once the senator’s driver. He related a story at Fulbright’s funeral, in which then-President Clinton insisted on inserting himself into a Fulbright family photo. The suggestion was that the famously fatherless Clinton was clumsily still trying to form ties that existed only in his head. It should be noted that I made repeated efforts to interview both Bill and Hillary Clinton for this book. In one letter sent, I wrote, “I want to give the former President Clinton the chance to answer some of the questions that have been raised by employees, friends, and aides and to give him a platform to put things in context.” The Clintons’ “story deserves to be told. And I’d like to interview President Clinton in order for him to have his say—and in order to get his take.” (Through spokespersons, the Clintons ignored my requests.)

  Over time, I have managed to meet with a large number of people within the Clinton orbits, including a number of friends, colleagues, and aides who dealt with Bill and Hillary and Chelsea on a daily basis. I have had the opportunity to review thousands of pages of documents collected by political operatives, private investigators, and legal teams never disclosed to the public. And I’ve conducted dozens of interviews with Clinton aides, past and present, former cabinet officials (who served in the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations), and a fair number of onetime Clinton adversaries. This has not always proved an easy task. Nearly everyone in Washington has a Clinton story, or two, or two hundred, but many are afraid to air them publicly or on the record, out of fear of retribution or attack from ruthless Clinton aides and their media allies. This is often true these days, contrary to conventional wisdom, even of Republicans.

  Among the first to feel the sting of Clinton attacks is former aide George Stephanopoulos, who in 2000 published a critical and unauthorized memoir about the Clintons, which won their fierce condemnation and enmity. Stephanopoulos’s bracing assessment of the Clintons and himself was a bit too bracing for them. The book included lines such as “I came to see how Clinton’s shamelessness is a key to his political success, how his capacity for denial is tied to the optimism that is his greatest political strength. He exploits the weaknesses of himself and those around him masterfully, but he taps his and their talents as well.”10 While there is not much damage that can be a done to a multimillionaire and well-liked TV personality—Stephanopoulos is now of course the anchor of ABC’s Good Morning America—the pain inflicted on Stephanopoulos has been more personal. After publication of his memoir, he lost a number of friendships that were important to him. Though some longtime friends such as Emanuel and Carville still talk with him regularly, the Clintons themselves have proven unforgiving, according to several close associates of Stephanopoulos with whom I spoke.

  “We had a big staff reunion and the Clintons invited everyone no matter how disgraced they were,” a former Clinton press aide recalls. “And George was one of the few people that somehow didn’t make that list.”

  To this day the ABC News host is trying to gain their forgiveness while Bill Clinton in particular seems to take joy in denigrating his former aide in private settings.

  “Bill still hates him,” says a source.

  A similar psychological toll has taken hold of Bill Richardson, who took the risk of endorsing Barack Obama over Hillary in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary. Bill Clinton has never forgiven him, and that clearly stings Richardson.

  “He has no interest in healing the breach,” Richardson told me during an interview. “I think that sends a message to me that every relationship that he has is mainly about him and not about the other person. . . . He expects total loyalty. It’s his way or the highway in the end in a relationship. I wish his forgiveness, his spirit of forgiveness were there and apparently it isn’t.”

  The personal loss hurts the most. “I just want to hear him say, ‘I love you’ again,” Richardson wrote.11

  Even former vice president Al Gore has paid the price for his break with the Clintons over his 2000 loss, which Gore blamed in part on the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Though he and Clinton had a faux reconciliation a few years back, “it’s still really bad,” a close friend says. Gore to this day is all but a nonfactor in the Democratic Party, and rarely consulted by the Clintons.

  In contrast to his wife and according to people who know him well, Bill Clinton has few personal friends. “He has cyclical friends, transactional friends,” says one close associate, people who circle in and out of his orbit without forming long, meaningful connections. Two exceptions during his postpresidential life were billionaire Ron Burkle and a young aide named Doug Band. Both have since felt the dark side of a friendship with the former president.

  Burkle used to treat Clinton to rides aboard his private Boeing 757
.12 But as the Daily Beast reported in 2010, Clinton has consistently been “badmouthing” Burkle in Democratic circles after a business deal between the two went bad, with Clinton accusing his former friend of owing him $20 million. Burkle told BusinessWeek that entering a partnership with Clinton was “the dumbest thing I ever did.”13

  And throughout much of 2013, Doug Band has been the recipient of scores of attacks on his character in newspapers and magazines, such as the New York Times and the liberal New Republic, for his alleged role in the financial mismanagement of Bill’s various enterprises. “[C]oncern was rising inside and outside the [Clinton] organization about Douglas J. Band, a onetime personal assistant to Mr. Clinton who had started a lucrative corporate consulting firm—which Mr. Clinton joined as a paid advisor—while overseeing the Clinton Global Initiative, the foundation’s glitzy annual gathering of chief executives, heads of state, and celebrities,” the Times reported in a lengthy piece in 2013.14 Former Clinton aides tell me that the attacks have been “hypercoordinated.”

  As for Hillary, a book released in 2014 reported on her State Department “enemies list” of those who didn’t support her campaign in 2008 and merited punishment.15 Though that revelation won a number of headlines, it in fact was not actually all that new. It already was commonly known in Washington that her State Department blackballed Obama political appointees who’d worked against her in 2008. The new revelation only underscored what is well known among Democrats in Washington, D.C.: You cross the Clintons at your peril. They are watching you.

  A source tells me that Bill Richardson, the former ambassador to the United Nations and former secretary of energy, was blackballed by the Clinton team from having any serious role in the Obama administration. And that Hillary’s aides, or Hillary herself, blocked an effort by Obama to appoint the veteran diplomat to negotiate the release of an American held hostage in North Korea. Bill Clinton was sent instead.

  Thus it is pretty clear why less powerful figures inside Clinton, Inc. insist on anonymity. The panic among Clintonites, past and present, is palpable. “Don’t fuck me,” one well-known Clintonite once begged me after our interview, despite my repeated assurances of anonymity. “You aren’t going to fuck me, right?” He asked this multiple times, on more than one occasion.

  Clintonites are known to scour through magazine articles and books to try to decipher blind quotes and tie them to a suspect. For example, a well-known Clinton aide, Jay Carson, was fingered as a source for gossip on Hillary’s 2008 campaign and ire toward Obama in the bestselling book Game Change. Former press secretary Jake Siewert was tsk-tsked for being quoted on the record in a 2008 book about Bill’s activities called Clinton in Exile. As a result, Siewert is reluctant to be quoted elsewhere.

  Adding to the paranoia, Clinton associates are masters at cultivating an aura of knowing everything before others do. One author of an unauthorized book on the Clintons, Sally Bedell Smith, tells me of attending a party with veteran Clinton hand (and now Virginia governor) Terry McAuliffe, whom she had interviewed. McAuliffe, a Washington fixture and fierce Clinton partisan known for his overcaffeinated, staccato style, came up to Smith to say hello and drop a bit of news.

  “You know he has your book,” McAuliffe said.

  “He has my book?” she asked.

  “Yeah, the president has your book.”

  Smith was shocked—and rattled. The manuscript was not yet released to the public and had been tightly held by the publisher so its details would not be leaked. “That can’t be,” she protested. “There aren’t any copies out. There are no galleys.”

  “He’s got it,” McAuliffe said, delivering a message with an intimidating glance. “I saw him, he’s read it, and he was devastated.” (True to ClintonWorld code, when the details of this encounter leaked to a reporter, McAuliffe denied the conversation ever took place.)

  When another book that touched on the Clintons was set to be published in 2013, Clinton operative James Carville got in on the act. Claiming to be good friends with the book’s author, Carville asked the publisher for an advance copy. The author in question had neither met Carville nor worked with him. The conversation between the publisher and Carville had been a simple ruse to allow ClintonWorld to get an early edition of the book—so they could try to discredit the contents ahead of time, in the event that there was damning stuff about the Clintons in the pages. The manuscript turned out to be relatively harmless.

  Even my reporting for this book has not been immune to curious activities in recent months. A top executive at Knopf, the publisher of Bill Clinton’s memoir, My Life, has quizzed editors in New York about this book and whether it was “legitimate.” I’ve received a phone call from James Carville’s office asking whom I might be reporting on. Reporters from Democratic-leaning publications, such as media reporter Dylan Byers of the Virginia-based trade publication Politico and Michael Calderone of the left-leaning website Huffington Post, called me up well in advance of the publication of this book to ask about its sourcing. They told me that they have been hearing I haven’t been able to get access. Who might be spreading these rumors? The reporters following up on gossip won’t say.

  Reporters, Washington reporters especially, have a keen sense of self-preservation. Indeed, many of the things described in this book are well known among Washington journalists, and have been openly gossiped about in private settings. But much of this has never been shared with the general public, for fear of Clintonian retribution.

  If they print stories that reflect negatively on the Clintons, they know that any access they have will instantly vanish. Sources inside the Clinton camp have to be extremely careful about who they talk to. For someone most Beltway reporters think will be the next president of the United States, dishing on the Clintons and divulging stories—even ones that are common knowledge among Washington insiders and yet never find their way into print—is career suicide.

  One former Clinton lawyer tried to discourage me from writing too negatively because he said it could affect my career. A CNN producer said she could never have my book on her program for fear that the Clinton people would punish the network by denying them access. In an interview with me, Howard Dean made the case that there isn’t anything new about Hillary that can be written. “There’s nothing anybody’s going to write about Hilary Clinton that either isn’t true or isn’t already well known,” Dean told me.

  I knew something of this when I wanted to write a piece for the Weekly Standard, where I work, and ran afoul of Hillary Clinton’s spokesman Philippe Reines.

  In response to my query about Mrs. Clinton’s release from a hospital after her December 2012 collapse, he sent me a pointed reply. “You and I have to come to an understanding,” he wrote. “This routine of you only checking in when you need something isn’t working and isn’t the way it’s supposed to work.” It was his attempt to strike a deal with me—a deal on how Clinton would be covered. I never responded. And he never answered my question.

  If there is a coldhearted, capitalistic nature to many of the Clintons’ transactions, it is not inadvertent. For the Clintons, politics is just business and one they happen to be very good at. But it is made clear to anyone joining this entity that it exists for the sole protection of Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea. No one else is a member for life. No one else is indispensable, and those who leave the company or expose trade secrets risk punishment while others who prove inconvenient or insufficiently loyal are expendable. Perhaps this is why so many sources keep right on talking to reporters like me. They feel the need to unload. They feel a sense of unfairness and entitlement in how the Clintons deal with their friends—and those who threaten them.

  In short, for such reasons, most of my sources were afraid of crossing the Clintons. To alleviate their fear, I promised to protect their anonymity. In their recklessness toward others, they harkened back to a memory of another famous fictional couple, brought to life by F. Scott Fitzgerald. “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they
smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into . . . whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

  1

  Hillary’s Redemption

  “Sick but brilliant.”

  —a senior Clinton aide on the Bill and Hillary relationship

  “The most difficult decisions I have made in my life were to stay married to Bill and to run for the Senate from New York,” Hillary Clinton once wrote in her bestselling memoir, discussing the aftermath of her husband’s affair with Monica Lewinsky.1 In retrospect, neither of those statements appears to be true. Even as her husband was facing the biggest scandal of his life, Mrs. Clinton’s mind was not on divorce but political survival. Hers, not his.

  On February 12, 1999, the very day the Senate was voting on whether to impeach her husband on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice stemming from his lying about an extramarital relationship with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky, Hillary Clinton huddled with her longtime confidant Harold Ickes, the thin-haired deputy chief of staff to her husband, to plot her course. If the Clintons were a business enterprise, this would be Hillary’s chance to launch a brand of her own.

  The First Lady and Ickes met in the residence at the White House, where Ickes sold her on a New York run, a state where she had never actually lived, but which offered lots of promise.

  The Clintons’ private residence was decorated with personal touches. Framed pictures of the Clintons lying together in a hammock, or enjoying a lunch with Chelsea. Board games, such as Boggle, and a deck of cards. And there were other touches that seemed a bit tackier: Russian nesting dolls that featured the Clintons, a Beanie Baby collection on display. In one of the Clintons’ bedrooms was an embroidered pillow that quoted Albert Einstein: “Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.” (Bill and Hillary, according to at least one biographer, hadn’t shared the same bedroom in seven years.)2