Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine (34 page)

In this current effort the RNC chairman has made reference to one of the major super PACs forming against the Clintons, America Rising. The group, run by former RNC opposition research director Matt Rhoades, who also ran the 2012 Mitt Romney campaign, plans a multimillion-dollar effort to research Clinton’s record and redefine her to voters before she does. He’s joined by Joe Pounder, who was research director for the RNC in 2012, and Tim Miller, who was a spokesman for the Republican Party that year, too. They’re a shadow organization. And already they are off to a good start. There may not have been a “vast right-wing conspiracy” against the Clintons when Hillary coined the phrase in 1998, but in 2014, there certainly is something resembling one.

Their grand strategy includes early filing of multiple Freedom of Information Act requests for documents from Hillary’s time at the State Department, as well as having a legal strategy to prepare for the inevitable stonewalling they’re expecting from her successor at the department, John Kerry. Staffers have been assigned to Arkansas to interview former associates and reexamine past scandals. They’ve been combing the archives.

A comprehensive Republican-aligned polling unit of sorts is in place, one that already has picked up an interesting conundrum. Pollsters have found that voters have a reservoir of sympathy for Clinton, one that traces back to the final years of her husband’s administration and his many womanizing scandals. Their impression of Mrs. Clinton improves each time she is seen as a victim of attacks, by Republicans, Democrats, or the media. It’ll shape how Hillary’s attacked.

“Clinton gains popularity as a ‘victim,’ ” one Republican-aligned research firm discovered in an analysis of Clinton’s poll numbers prepared in preparation for the 2016 presidential election—and never before revealed. “Clinton’s personal popularity appears to rise when she is cast in a sympathetic light due to the perception that she is the victim of unfair attacks or being treated unfairly,” the memo notes. “As a result of these attacks, Clinton’s image is softened. Clinton’s handling of the Monica Lewinsky scandal won her high praise from the public. Multiple pollsters noted that voters tended to sympathize, leading to her ratings rise.”

Instead of a targeted assault on Mrs. Clinton’s personal life or ethics directly, Republican strategists hope to revive in the minds of the voters the many financial scandals and improprieties of the first Clinton administration, to reawaken old scandals with new information, in the hope that Democrats and Republicans will remember why they’d tired of the Clinton circus in the first place. There is hope that more might even be mined from the biggest and most visible scandal magnet of them all—William Jefferson Clinton. This is also a chief concern of Team Clinton, who are hypersensitive about anything involving Bill’s presidency or its accompanying scandals.

On July 29, 2013, CNN announced a planned documentary on the life of Hillary Clinton. Charles Ferguson, the Academy Award–winning director, was going to direct the piece. Ferguson was a left-wing filmmaker likely to be sympathetic to the former First Family. Almost simultaneously, NBC announced a four-hour miniseries called
Hillary
with Diane Lane in the title role.

Both efforts led to a furious reaction from the Clinton camp. Some might say overreaction. (Ironically, Republicans also threw a fit, assuming that any portrayal of Mrs. Clinton in the “lamestream media” would be biased in her favor.)

Nick Merrill, a close aide of Hillary Clinton’s, became involved in what the
New York
Times
labeled a “confrontational” meeting with the director, who had requested access and interviews for the piece. Ferguson reported that he was “interrogated” by Merrill. During a “three-month tug of war,” the director claimed that “Clinton aides had told potential sources not to cooperate with his documentary.”
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Getting attacked from all sides, on the last day of September 2013, CNN announced its decision to cancel the documentary. NBC, facing similar vitriol over its decision to air a Hillary-themed miniseries, followed suit.

In a column for the
Huffington Post
, a baffled and infuriated Ferguson explained in detail the hostile treatment he’d received from Team Clinton:

The day after the contract was signed, I received a message from Nick Merrill, Hillary Clinton’s press secretary. He already knew about the film, and clearly had a source within CNN. He interrogated me; at first I answered, but eventually I stopped. When I requested an off-the-record, private conversation with Mrs. Clinton, Merrill replied that she was busy writing her book, and not speaking to the media.

Next came Phillipe [
sic
] Reines, Hillary Clinton’s media fixer, who contacted various people at CNN, interrogated them, and expressed concern about alleged conflicts of interest generated because my film was a for-profit endeavor (as nearly all documentaries and news organizations are). When I contacted him, he declined to speak with me. He then repeated his allegations to Politico, which published them.
. . .

CNN and I decided to publicly confirm the film project to clear the air. Immediately afterwards, the chairman of the Republican National Committee announced that the Republicans would boycott CNN with regard to the Republican presidential primary debates in 2016. Shortly afterwards, the entire RNC voted to endorse this position. This did not surprise me. What did surprise me was that, quietly and privately, prominent Democrats made it known both to CNN and to me that they weren’t delighted with the film, either.

Next came David Brock, who published an open letter on his highly partisan Democratic website Media Matters, in which he endorsed the Republican National Committee’s position, repeating Reines’ conflict of interest allegations and suggesting that my documentary would revive old, discredited Clinton scandal stories. Coming from Mr. Brock, this was rather amusing. David Brock began life as an ultraconservative “investigative journalist,” quotation marks very much intended, spreading scandal with little regard for truth. He first attracted attention with
The Real Anita Hill
, his nasty (and factually wrong) hatchet job on the woman who, during Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearings, said that Thomas had sexually harassed her. Years later, he apologized and switched to the Democrats.

When Brock published his letter about my film, I got in touch with several prominent Democrats who knew Hillary Clinton. I told them that this campaign against the film and against CNN was counterproductive. They conveyed this message to Mrs. Clinton personally, along with my request to speak with her. The answer that came back was, basically, over my dead body.
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Asked for a comment on the developments, Merrill emailed a statement to reporters: “Lights, camera, no reaction.” This was a typical response for the Clinton media operation—flippant, seemingly disinterested in the entire issue, and thus highly misleading.

It was easy to understand why the Republicans were making a fuss about the programs. Bashing the liberal media and the Clintons is a sure bet for conservative fund-raising. More confusing was the Clintons’ outsized reaction to a documentary and particularly an NBC miniseries that by almost all accounts seemed relatively innocuous, if not advantageous to them.

Out of curiosity, I emailed a person well connected to the Clinton camp. Why, I asked, did the Clintons care so much about these documentaries? I received a one-word reply.

“Monica.”

The NBC miniseries was to begin with First Lady Hillary Clinton’s discovery of her husband’s affair with a twenty-two-year-old intern in the Oval Office. The stain of the Monica Lewinsky scandal—literal as well as figurative—has not dissolved. At least not in the minds of Bill and Hillary Clinton. It was a moment when the Clintons truly hit rock bottom and all was, for a brief moment, nearly lost. For Republicans, and many Democrats, that scandal is where the story of the 2016 campaign really begins. It is also a reminder of how impressive their comeback has actually been, as well as its potential fragility.

A likely GOP contender, Kentucky senator Rand Paul, already has made clear that the Lewinsky scandal and Bill’s impeachment are fair game in any race that might involve Bill Clinton. Speaking on C-SPAN on a show that aired on February 9, 2014, Paul called the former president a “sexual predator” and argued that candidates should not accept money associated with him.

“They can’t have it both ways,” said Paul of Democrats accepting Clinton money.
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“And so I really think that anybody who wants to take money from Bill Clinton or have a fund-raiser has a lot of explaining to do. In fact, I think they should give the money back. If they want to take a position on women’s rights, by all means do. But you can’t do it and take it from a guy who was using his position of authority to take advantage of young women in the workplace.”

Many members of the GOP establishment blanch at such talk, remembering their experience last time with Bill Clinton’s misbehavior.

The public and media seem to disagree. In early 2014, for example, the conservative media outlet
Washington
Free Beacon
reported on the personal papers of Hillary Clinton’s deceased best friend, Diane Blair.
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The Blair files, decades old, led to a firestorm of publicity, particularly in relation to the Lewinsky affair and Hillary’s contemporaneous reaction. The files were amplified by the popular website the
Drudge Report
and discussed across the media spectrum for days if not weeks.

The reaction has opened the door for all sorts of trolling into the Clintons’ personal lives and the scandals of the 1990s. A longtime intimate of the Clinton family tells me about being besieged by various reporters seeking to write about Bill’s extramarital activities or reopen the Monica Lewinsky scandal with new allegations and information. “It could be death by a thousand cuts over the next year,” a source well connected to the Clintons tells me. “I mean, just from what I’m hearing.”

Associates of Lewinsky’s have what might be called “The Monica Files”—obtained exclusively for this book—hundreds of pages of allegations about the former president of the United States, his former girlfriend Monica, and his wife. These include things as innocuous, if mildly humorous, as the umpteen media requests Lewinsky received from personalities such as Barbara Walters and Larry King to a long list of allegations against the former first couple of seemingly variable validity. All of these are likely to get into the eager hands of reporters and Republican operatives—as part of what might be dubbed the “thousand cuts” operation.

But there were also a number of more detailed allegations compiled by investigators, attorneys, and other Lewinsky advisors in the event that she might be involved in legal action against the president. Most supported claims of a pattern of sexual misconduct or adventurism by the president.

One of the more promising and detailed nuggets Lewinsky and her associates kept from Starr was the story of a woman who claimed to have met Bill Clinton decades earlier when she was a student at a California university. The year was unclear, but it was after Clinton returned from his studies as a Rhodes scholar in 1970. After a first date, Clinton arranged to meet with the woman again. Lewinsky’s team were told they went to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, where in a wooded area Clinton knocked her to the ground and attempted to have sex with her. Described by a friend as a “big girl” at about five feet eleven, she “scratched and kicked” Clinton until she was able to run away from him. No charges were ever filed. And the two did not meet again.

As the story went, the woman heard from a Clinton staffer decades later, when he was governor of Arkansas. The staffer had located her number in California and called to tell her he was running for president and asked if she would “support” him in the race. She was shocked by the call, but told the staffer yes. (She was a hard-core Democrat.) Though she was angry about the assault, she probably voted for him anyway, the friend guessed.
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And then there was another potential bombshell, never before reported, that Monica shared with representatives on her legal and public relations team and only vaguely with the independent prosecutor investigating the Clintons. According to Republicans, it demonstrated the distraction that Bill Clinton’s behavior could have had on America’s national security.

On March 29, 1997, Clinton called Monica to the Oval Office because he had something “important” to tell her. This also ended up as their last sexual encounter. The president was on crutches after a fall in Florida under dubious circumstances. The president had been walking down dark steps outside the home of Australian golfer Greg Norman at about 1:20 in the morning. The White House physician denied that Clinton had been drinking. Reporters were not immediately notified.
11

“This was one of those occasions when I was babbling on about something,” Lewinsky told prosecutors, “and he just kissed me, kind of to shut me up, I think.” After another sexual encounter, involving oral sex in the study just outside the Oval Office, the president gave Monica important news: “We may have been overheard.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she replied, with concern. “How would they ever hear us? Who would do that?”

“Well, I don’t know,” Clinton said. He appeared cryptic. “If anybody ever says anything about the calls I’ve made to you, tell them we were just joking.” At the time, Lewinsky told prosecutors that Clinton suggested that “they knew their calls were being monitored all along, and the phone sex was just a put-on.” That is all the Starr Report offers on this encounter. But Monica and her team knew more.

They found evidence that the British, Russians, and Israelis all had scooped up the microwaves off the top of the White House. Offering some additional support, Boris Yeltsin, the former Russian president, wrote in his memoir that Russian intelligence had picked up on Clinton’s “predilection for beautiful young women.”