Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine (23 page)

The selection of Holbrooke, some think, was a classic Hillary mistake: Rely on a dear friend from over the years instead of someone who might be better suited to managing the war on which President Obama was most focused. Holbrooke was in some ways a brilliant foreign policy thinker, but he set out to align himself with the opponents of Afghan president Hamid Karzai in part because Karzai was considered George W. Bush’s man in Kabul. When it came time to work with the complicated and imperfect Karzai, the relationship was sour almost from the start.

Hillary’s loyalty to Holbrooke was unwavering. After he fell ill in 2010 and his condition deteriorated, Hillary visited him every day at George Washington University Hospital. “The night that he was dying or when they decided to pull the plug, she just, wherever she was, she just left and came straight there,” Nasr remembers. When Holbrooke died, his whole crew—all his staff—was waiting downstairs in the hospital. Hillary hugged everybody.

“Let’s go to the closest hotel,” Hillary told the shocked and mournful staff. “Let’s go there and have an Irish wake.”

They left the hospital for the Ritz-Carlton, less than a half mile away, where Hillary stayed until about midnight. “She told stories. She listened to other people tell stories. She cried with everybody, and had tears in her eyes,” Nasr recounts. “That’s the side of her we saw.”

Once she realized she would never really be a major player in Obamaland, Hillary Clinton did what she always did: adjusted her course. “She kept her head down on large issues,” says a former Obama administration official. “She did a nice job of tamping down any tension between her and the White House.” And she focused on her own future. With Clinton taking to the skies and traveling the world, her post at the State Department became a platform for the United States and Hillary Clinton. Except not in that order.

To handle mundane State Department activities, she set up a traditional State Department operation, filled with people comfortable with, and to, the foreign policy establishment.

Her first press secretary, P. J. Crowley, was typical. Crowley’s professional history was steady, but far from sparkling: twenty-six years in the air force; an assistant to the president in the Clinton White House; a vice president for public affairs for the Insurance Information Institute; a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress, the organization that had been designed to be a White House in waiting for Hillary while she was in the Senate.

As a spokesman for Hillary’s State Department, Crowley was not nimble enough for the Foggy Bottom press corps. Clumsy at the podium, he would often create news at times when the State Department wanted to play down stories. By contrast, a good press secretary can conduct an hour-long, on-the-record briefing that makes no news. To be fair, the State Department podium is one of the most difficult to man—it requires knowing America’s position toward every nation in the world. One slipup and an international crisis can be created.

Most infamously, Crowley broke with the U.S. government on the issue of Bradley Manning, the man who leaked secret U.S. documents to Julian Assange of WikiLeaks. “What is being done to Bradley Manning is ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid on the part of the Department of Defense,” Crowley would tell a group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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The break from the administration was so sharp President Obama had to address it later that week at a press conference. Crowley was soon out.

To replace him, Secretary Clinton turned to State Department veteran Victoria Nuland, an immensely talented and knowledgeable foreign policy hand. It was widely thought in Washington that Hillary picked her to preempt criticism from the right. She held previous appointments in the Bush administration, and her husband is Robert Kagan, a conservative foreign affairs columnist for the
Washington Post
and former foreign policy advisor on John McCain’s 2008 presidential run. Nuland’s appointment prevented many establishment Republicans from crossing the prominent Kagan by going after his wife in public.

Hillary even appointed Kagan to her Foreign Affairs Policy Board, which was headed by Strobe Talbott, who had long ago forgiven his former roommate, Bill Clinton, for once hitting on his girlfriend while they were in school. The board, like so many in Washington, was perfunctory—and indeed it’s not apparent any substantive policy recommendations from the board were ever adopted by Hillary. That was hardly the point. Instead, the primary function was similar to the reason Nuland was appointed: If the Washington foreign policy establishment is working for you, and serving you in some way, it’s much less likely that they’ll publicly criticize your actions.

There was a second, almost entirely separate operation set up by Clinton, which might as well have been dubbed “2016.”

In a sign of just how much Obama was determined to corral her into his cabinet, the president and his top aides had reluctantly agreed to let Hillary, unlike other cabinet officials, refrain from hiring the usual political appointees and campaign staffers and bundlers who had worked to help Obama get elected. Certainly, she wouldn’t have to hire anyone who had worked in 2008 to defeat her. She and she alone would pick political appointees for her department. By contrast, Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, complained that he couldn’t get any of his people through the White House personnel system. (Kerry had endorsed Obama in 2008.)

There were occasional limits to that power. Hillary proposed bringing aboard Sidney Blumenthal, for instance, a trusted Clinton advisor who had fired some of the heaviest artillery directly at Obama in the 2008 campaign. Rahm Emanuel, the brash former Clintonite brought on as Obama’s chief of staff, was given the job of telling her no. It’s long been suspected that it was Blumenthal who during the campaign sent around a photo of Obama dressed in African garb in what was seen as an attempt to make Obama, whose father was born in Kenya, look foreign. It helped feed into the baseless rumors that Obama himself had been born in Kenya—a trope that appears to have originated in Clintonland in a nasty and subversive attempt to dismiss the young senator during the outset of the campaign.

Otherwise, Mrs. Clinton was able to largely reassemble her political operation at State. This included her longtime speechwriter Lissa Muscatine, her press-hating press secretary Philippe Reines, and of course her devoted Huma Abedin, who traveled with her on almost every one of her trips to more than one hundred countries.

“Huma and Philippe were very close personal managers of her affairs,” Nasr says.

Indeed, so close was Reines to Hillary that he was spared what otherwise might have been a firing offense. Because of his actions Hillary was humiliated in front of the Russians, when the cockiness of the press aide prevented him from using wise judgment.

In March 2009, less than two months into the Obama administration, Hillary was meeting her Russian counterpart on neutral ground in Geneva. She brought along a gift: “an emergency stop button that had been hastily pilfered from a swimming pool or Jacuzzi at the hotel,” according to the book
HRC
, cowritten by a former staffer for Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
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The red button, printed in Latin script and not Cyrillic, said
peregruzka
, meaning “overcharge.” It was supposed to read “reset,” a reference to a line Vice President Joe Biden had offered the previous month about offering a “reset” in U.S.-Russia relations following George W. Bush’s rule, but Reines got the translation wrong.

“You got it wrong,” Clinton’s Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, said.

Hillary could only counter, “I got it wrong.” She was humiliated.

Reines tried to blame someone close to Obama, Michael McFaul, who’d go on to serve as President Obama’s ambassador to Russia. Fortunately for Hillary, the press went a little easy on her. “Lost in Translation: A U.S. Gift to Russia,” the
New York Times
declared, playing down the embarrassing gaffe.
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But once again, it was a sign of Hillary’s being ill-served by people who were too close to her to allow for accurate judgments of their work and character.

“Clinton put a team in place to make sure that her hair was in place, her lighting was good, and she was seen with major leaders,” says a former ambassador.

For the first time in modern State Department history, reporters who covered Hillary recall, the secretary of state had her own spokesman on the government payroll for issues that
didn’t
concern American foreign policy but only concerned the secretary herself. The crusty Reines would deal with all press questions that related to Hillary Clinton the public figure. Questions concerning politics and her personal life would go through him. He would answer to varying degrees, depending on whether he liked you (which was unlikely, considering his
hatred
of reporters) or thought you were useful.

The most essential person running Clinton’s political operation was, of course, her choice of chief of staff. All powerful leaders need a loyal alter ego who sits at their right hand, offering sage advice, executing sensitive orders, and managing underlings whose loyalties may or may not lie with their leader. Don Corleone had Tom Hagen. Bill Gates had Steve Ballmer. For Hillary Clinton, the consigliere is Cheryl Mills.

In the battle to turn the tide against Barack Obama’s primary victories, Mills was candidate Clinton’s de facto campaign manager. At Foggy Bottom, she was Secretary Clinton’s chief counsel and chief of staff. And if the Clintons make it back to the White House, Cheryl Mills will be the second most powerful woman in the world. She will be Hillary’s Hagen.

The daughter of a lieutenant colonel, Mills grew up on army bases across Europe, in Belgium and West Germany, and like many in the military, her loyalties run more toward people than toward ideologies. Just two years out of Stanford Law, Mills left her high-paying job at one of Washington’s most prestigious law firms, moved to Little Rock, and joined the transition team planning the opening phases of Bill Clinton’s presidency. The campaign against George Bush and Ross Perot wasn’t even finished, but Clinton led in the polls. Mills was willing to bet on the Clintons, and when victory came, the impressed Clintons were willing to bet on Mills.

The twenty-seven-year-old was appointed associate counsel to the president, and four years later, she became deputy White House counsel. Her most important job was handling the parade of scandals and investigations that culminated in impeachment. Mills’s allies would say she had a talent for protecting the Clintons from out-of-control investigators with political agendas. Her enemies say she was simply good at covering up illegality.

Mills’s approach was to play hardball with enemies, investigators, and inquiring journalists. If there was a way to avoid sharing requested documents, she found it, never backing down or giving up ground in what she treated as a prolonged trench war for the Clintons’ legal and political survival. Everything from her screen saver (“It’s the lioness that hunts . . .”) to the slogan hanging above her desk (“Don’t Go There”) reflected the attitude she brought to her defense of Bill and Hillary Clinton.
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According to a congressional committee, when it began investigating allegations that the administration had used government workers on government time to create a government database of potential donors that was sent to the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton reelection campaign—a relatively minor scandal by Clinton standards—Mills withheld documents. Then, when testifying before the committee, her veracity was challenged.

According to the
Congressional Record
, this matter was referred to the Department of Justice for investigation of possible perjury and obstruction of the investigation. No charges were ever brought against Mills.

Similarly, after a technical glitch allegedly caused the White House to withhold more than 1.8 million emails from investigators, Congress, and outside groups, Mills was asked to look into the problem. She didn’t. In a sharply worded judicial opinion, a federal judge said Mills’s response to news that the White House was in possession of a huge amount of documents it was legally required to disclose was “totally inadequate,” a “critical error,” and “loathsome.”
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(The most notable exception to her instinct for withholding documents occurred when she recommended releasing government records and private communications by Kathleen Willey, in an attempt to discredit the woman who accused Bill Clinton of groping her in the White House.)

From her first day in the White House, Mills demonstrated the quality that had first impressed the Clintons in Little Rock: her loyalty to them. “She is incredibly loyal to the president,” an anonymous White House aide told a reporter. “If something’s on the other side of a brick wall and the Clintons need it, she’ll find a way to get to it: over, around, or through.” After the House of Representatives impeached Clinton, Mills had a public outlet for her loyalty to the president. On the second day of presentations by Clinton’s lawyers, Mills spoke in Clinton’s defense. With her proud parents looking down from the Senate gallery—the thirty-three-year-old was only the third or fourth African American in history to speak from the Senate floor—Mills said she was “very proud to have had the opportunity to serve our country and this president.” In response to accusations that Clinton lied to thwart Paula Jones’s civil rights case, Mills assured the Senate that Bill Clinton loved civil rights. His “grandfather owned a store” that “catered primarily to African Americans,” and “the president has taken his grandfather’s teachings to heart.” After all, he had hired Cheryl Mills: “I stand here before you today because others before me decided to take a stand,” and “I stand here before you today because President Bill Clinton believed I could stand here for him.”

Her peroration capped a speech that North Dakota’s Byron Dorgan called “one of the most remarkable that I’ve heard in the Senate or in my political career.”
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Summing up the case for Bill Clinton, she repeated the phrase “I am not worried” four times—building to her punch line: “I am not worried about civil rights because this president’s record on civil rights, on women’s rights—on all of our rights—is unimpeachable.” What any of that had to do with lying under oath and obstructing justice was irrelevant—Mills and the rest of the Clinton team had successfully helped to “OJ” the Clinton impeachment trial. It was somehow about race.