Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine (8 page)

Holder told the White House, in words that would come back to haunt him, that he was “neutral, leaning toward favorable” about a pardon in the Rich case.
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Whatever that meant. That was all Clinton needed—he seized upon the “approval” of the Justice Department as one of the factors helping him make his decisions. (The $1 million he received from Denise was, of course, never mentioned.)

Rich’s was not the only controversial pardon. In 1999, Clinton commuted the sentences of sixteen Puerto Rican terrorists, a move interpreted by some as an attempt to help Hillary’s Senate campaign by pandering to New York’s Puerto Rican voters. Then, in 2000, Clinton pardoned fraudsters Edgar and Vonna Jo Gregory, who were friends of Hillary’s brother Tony Rodham and who may have compensated Rodham with more than $100,000 in loans that were not repaid. Finally, in the last hours before Clinton left office, he commuted the sentence of cocaine trafficker Carlos Vignali and pardoned fraudster Almon Glenn Braswell, who each paid Hillary’s other brother Hugh Rodham $200,000 to argue for their clemency.
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Though the pardons clearly seemed influenced by her Senate campaign, Hillary and her new spokesman, Howard Wolfson, said the pardon decisions were strictly Bill’s decisions. Because of Monica, it was easier for the public to believe that Hillary was in a completely different orbit.

The Rich pardon in particular clouded Clinton’s legacy. It was a low point—one even lower than the Lewinsky scandal. “This was an official act that was as sordid as anything he did in four years,” says a high-level former government official. “Probably more so.”

It wasn’t just Republicans who thought this. The Marc Rich case seemed to finally unleash a pent-up frustration among once-reliable Clinton defenders over his personal ethics and behavior. Feelings they’d contained even during Monica.

Erstwhile Clinton defenders like MSNBC’s Chris Matthews berated the Clintons for their “pig fest . . . on their way out the door.”
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The columnist Maureen Dowd labeled them “grifters,”
40
and the
New York Times
chided the president for his “outrageous abuse of the pardoning power.”
41
The
Washington Post
remarked on what the newspaper called the “defining characteristic” of Bill and Hillary Clinton: “They have no capacity for embarrassment.”
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Even Democratic stalwart Jimmy Carter called the pardons “disgraceful.”
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With the Clintons on their way out of the White House, it was finally safe to dump on them.

Eric Holder never forgave them for making him the fall guy in their latest sordid mess. After receiving a fierce rain of bipartisan criticism during Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, Holder told reporters that he wanted to “crawl into bed and pull the covers up over my head.”
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He believed at the time that his public life was over—all thanks to the Clintons. “Eric hates them,” a former colleague of Holder’s says. But he would get a chance to pay them back.

2

On Their Own

“Those were difficult early years. All everyone cared about was what woman was sitting at a table with him or what he was eating.”

—senior Clinton aide on Bill’s post-presidential exile

Freed from the confines of the White House, Bill and Hillary Clinton were unleashed on the world in 2001. Bill left the White House, by many accounts, including his own, with a great sense of reluctance. A feeling that things weren’t finished. That he could have been elected to a third term of office in 2000, if the Constitution had allowed it. That was possible, since his job approval ratings remained high, largely attributable to a seemingly robust economy. A January 2001 poll taken by Gallup days before leaving office showed the president with astonishingly high favorables: 66 percent approved, while a measly 29 percent disapproved.
1

Under the surface, however, the widespread view of Clinton among the general public was negative. He was seen as unethical, amoral, and sleazy. Ari Fleischer, who was entering the White House as press secretary to the newly elected George W. Bush, recalled the public sentiment keenly. “[Clinton] left office with a lot of ill will, and a bit of it was generated by those last-minute pardons that were highly controversial, on his way out,” Fleischer told me in an interview.

Looking back, Fleischer marvels at how far Bill Clinton had personally come in terms of public esteem. “It is a remarkable story because President Clinton really did leave in a cloud of controversy,” he said. “He had to cut a deal with the prosecutor [investigating the Paula Jones sexual misconduct allegations] because he did commit perjury under oath. As a result, his license was suspended. People forget that the United States president was barred from practicing law for a period of time as a plea bargain. That happened on his way out, at the end of 2000. It is also worth noting that the press, when they write about President Clinton, they never harken back to that.”

Indeed, on January 19, 2001, his last full day as president, Bill Clinton “accepted and acknowledged” that “he knowingly gave evasive and misleading answers” to a judge “concerning his relationship with Ms. Lewinsky” and “he engaged in conduct that is prejudicial to the administration of justice” in regards to the Paula Jones sexual harassment case against him.
2
As a result, it was “the decision and order of [an Arkansas] Court that William Jefferson Clinton, Arkansas Bar ID #73019, be, and hereby is, SUSPENDED for FIVE YEARS for his conduct in this matter, and the payment of fine in the amount of $25,000,” read the Circuit Court of Pulaski County, Arkansas, agreement. “The suspension shall become effective as of the date of January 19, 2001. IT IS SO ORDERED.”
3
Clinton, with two of his lawyers and two of the plaintiff’s lawyers, signed the document and filed it with the Arkansas court.

That historic agreement, to strip the law privileges of Clinton, who was a sitting president when he signed the document, coupled with the aftereffects of the Marc Rich pardon, stung Bill Clinton hard, especially the rebuke he received from liberal elites. As a result, he went to their main organ of communication, the editorial pages of the
New York Times
, to offer another defense, this time written in his own hand.
4
His op-ed, dated February 18, 2001, contained a number of factual misstatements—so much so that the
Times
felt obliged to append an “Editor’s Note” to Clinton’s version of events, which unwittingly chronicled the Clinton team’s talent for parsing words and obfuscation. It read as follows:

An Op-Ed article by former President Bill Clinton yesterday about the pardons of Marc Rich and Pincus Green stated erroneously in some editions that “the applications were reviewed and advocated” by three prominent lawyers, Leonard Garment, William Bradford Reynolds and Lewis Libby. Mr. Clinton’s office and the lawyers are in agreement that none of the three men, former lawyers for Mr. Rich, reviewed the pardon applications or advocated for the pardons. During the press run, Mr. Clinton’s office asked that the reference to “applications” be changed to “the case for the pardons” to try to clarify Mr. Clinton’s point. Even the revised wording, however, could be read as leaving the impression that the lawyers were involved in the pardon process, which Mr. Clinton’s spokesmen said was not the intended meaning.

The revised wording, according to those spokesmen, was meant to refer to the underlying legal case developed by Mr. Garment, Mr. Reynolds and Mr. Libby, among others, in past years that argued that the criminal indictment of Mr. Rich was flawed. That legal analysis, according to Mr. Clinton’s spokesmen, formed part of the argument that Mr. Rich’s lawyer, Jack Quinn, adopted in applying to Mr. Clinton for the pardon.
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Clinton’s favorability nosedived, clocking in at an abysmal 39 percent, much lower than it had been months before as he was packing his bags to leave the White House. Angered and embarrassed by his latest scandal, Clinton brooded at the family home in Chappaqua. A former high-level press aide who visited the former president there describes a “pretty modest” five-bedroom, four-bathroom suburban home, located at 15 Old House Lane. “He’s very proud of retrofitting it,” the former aide tells me. “It’s very energy efficient.” In exile, Bill continued planning his presidential library in Little Rock and the opening of an office in New York City. But foremost in his mind was restoring his reputation and returning to his place in the sun. The whole thing made him depressed.

He missed the action, missed being in the mix. Aides recall how Clinton would watch everything—Sunday-morning talk shows, cable news channels,
The Daily Show
—to seize on anything he might use in conversation or in kibitzing with former allies, and rivals. His reading habits are legendary. When he left the White House, aides packed up eight thousand books (he’d give a thousand away).
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He fretted constantly about what people were saying about him.

Acting with almost Howard Hughes–like obsession, the former president will see someone on television mischaracterizing some aspect of his administration and reach for the telephone demanding someone go out and correct the record. No issue is too trivial or too time-consuming for his small staff.

“You get frustrated with him,” one former aide says. “He’d see some washed-up Republican or Democratic strategist that no one gives a shit about and he’d insist someone has to get out there.” The aide pauses and shakes her head as if repeating a conversation she’s wanted to have with him for years. “I mean, why do you fucking care?”

A close associate of Clinton’s in his immediate postpresidential life reflected to me on the circumstances at the time—the beginning of the arc of Bill Clinton’s remarkable comeback, which he believes people have forgotten. “He couldn’t get a mortgage. He owed all this money to the lawyers. I mean he was getting killed for doing a paid speech for Morgan Stanley. His daughter had gone back to school. His wife had moved to Washington. He was accused of stealing rugs and things off of Air Force One that didn’t exist. I mean it was a very, very difficult time. I don’t think people ever really grasped how dark those days were.”

“Those were difficult early years,” the source says, as Bill Clinton was pursued by tabloid reporters and gossips. “All everyone cared about was what woman was sitting at a table with him” or his weight. “There were a lot of awful hangers-on,” the source adds, citing by name people like Harry and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason.

Hillary, meanwhile, was forging her own path. The new senator would spend much of her time at Whitehaven, her home near Georgetown, during Senate sessions, leaving there to visit the home in Chappaqua on weekends or during congressional recesses. Bill, according to a different former Clinton aide, rarely spent much time in Washington, at least on overnight visits, a habit that continues to this day. “He’s not in Whitehaven,” an aide tells me. “Like at all.”

Often living cities apart for the first time in decades, they immediately went through the process of building separate identities and, with the exception of holidays and other family occasions, leading largely separate lives. For Hillary that meant work. She was now a political figure all on her own. Her first important decision was how best to use her celebrity. She was, after all, the most recognizable person in the body of one hundred. And, while they say that every senator looks in the mirror and sees a president, she was the only one there who had actually lived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for eight years. Indeed, the only one who had ever lived there and then gone on to serve in what is ridiculously called “the world’s greatest deliberative body.”

There were a few false starts. She made an early effort to try to rally the Democratic caucus. Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, offers a gauzy recollection of the Clinton Senate sojourn. “In 2000, shortly after Hillary Clinton was elected to represent New York in the Senate, I was honored when she called seeking my advice,” she wrote in a 2013 article in a
Politico
-sponsored series called “Women Rule.” “As a senator, Hillary committed herself completely to the nuts and bolts of legislating that separates the show horses from the workhorses in today’s Senate.”
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In 2001, however, relations were more turbulent. Senior Senate staffers recalled for me a testy exchange Clinton and then-senator Mark Dayton had with Feinstein during a closed-door meeting of Senate Democrats. Clinton excoriated Feinstein for voting in support of a Republican-led initiative so ferociously that the veteran California politician left the meeting close to tears.

“A lot of people didn’t like Hillary on the Democratic side,” says a longtime Republican senator who served on committees with Hillary Clinton. He requested that his comments remain anonymous so he could be more forthcoming about his former colleagues.

The body’s internal power structure is based on seniority—on years served in the body. So she had to be careful not to ruffle the egos of senators who had been there for years and pay what they deemed as proper deference. Among them was the Democrat stalwart Edward M. Kennedy. Though Kennedy would famously endorse Obama over Clinton in 2008, what was not commonly known was how much Mrs. Clinton rubbed the Kennedys the wrong way from the start. According to a former Senate aide, Kennedy held the view attributed to his former colleague Pat Moynihan that the Clintons were entitled climbers. The veteran Massachusetts legislator was known to roll his eyes at the junior senator from New York as she held forth in various meetings—especially when Clinton would encroach on issues like education that he felt he had spent years leading the liberal charge on.

“I would think that he may have felt that she was calculating and putting her personal agenda ahead of Kennedy’s agenda, or of the Democratic Party,” the Republican senator who shared committees with Clinton surmises. “Kennedy was a pretty loyal Democrat to the team, and I suspect she was maneuvering ambitiously.”

Quickly souring on the effort to be the leader of the Senate Democrats—a self-interested, fickle assortment of egomaniacs—Clinton opted for the role of the dogged workhorse, cultivating allies where she could.

One close friend of Hillary Clinton, who also worked for her husband, President Clinton, recalls how she early on approached Democratic leaders like Robert Byrd for a tutorial on constitutional issues. The pompous, prideful Byrd, now deceased, was an easy target for ego stroking. “I know that Senator Byrd, who had his doubts about her when she ran for the Senate, was impressed with her enough that he called her a workhorse not a show horse,” says the longtime Clinton friend.

She also went to work building up a formidable entourage that was loyal to her and not necessarily her husband. This was a team, many with national political experience, who would be ready to help her excel in the Senate and eventually move back to the White House.

One of the aides most gossiped about was Huma Abedin, a glamorous woman once dubbed Hillary’s “secret weapon” and from whom the senator was said to be inseparable. Abedin, starting out as a Senate aide at twenty-five, was an attractive woman with long dark hair, impeccable skin, and a perfectly fit physique. She was a legend among her friends and colleagues for her designer clothes, unflappable composure, and quiet confidence. She spoke three languages, had traveled the globe, and was able to make one of the most taxing jobs in the world look easy.

During this time, Abedin’s role in Clinton, Inc. would probably be parallel to that of an executive assistant on track to becoming corporate vice president (unheard-of, but not impossible), with daily duties maintaining Hillary’s image in the Senate, traveling with her constantly between New York and Washington (and abroad, when called for), and doing small tasks like getting her boss a bottle of water when her mouth was parched. She earned about $15,000 her first year working in Hillary’s Senate office. Her title was the lowest in the office: staff assistant.

Abedin’s circuitous journey to national prominence began when she was born to two academics in Kalamazoo, Michigan. After her Indian father taught briefly at Western Michigan University, he and Abedin’s Pakistani mother moved the family to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where Abedin lived until she left for George Washington University (GWU) in Washington, D.C. Her Muslim parents’ approach to their faith, Abedin’s membership in her college’s Muslim Students Association, and her work on the
Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs
have all been reported as consistent with, depending on the source, either the practices of peace-loving moderate Muslims or the record of violent Islamic extremists.
Vogue
reported that Abedin’s father “founded an institute devoted to fostering religious understanding between East and West.”
8
National Review
said he was recruited by “a top al-Qaeda financier” to run the
Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs
, which “promotes Islamic-supremacist ideology.”
9
Her mother is either “a sociology professor” who “helped create one of the first private women’s colleges in” Saudi Arabia, or an “influential sharia activist” whose book
Women in Islam
“claims man-made laws enslave women.” It “reportedly provides sharia justifications for such practices as female-genital mutilation, the death penalty for apostates from Islam, the legal subordination of women, and the participation of women in violent jihad.”
10
On the one hand, Abedin’s GWU Muslim Students Association was a popular, utterly ordinary social group for Muslims at college looking to meet other Muslims—no different from a college Republicans club or a black students association. On the other hand, after Abedin graduated, her group chose as its spiritual guide a senior al-Qaeda terrorist (and American citizen) named Anwar al-Awlaki. Known as the “bin Laden of the Internet,” al-Awlaki was targeted and killed in 2011 by an American drone strike in Yemen.
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(To be sure, no one who knows Abedin believes she’s a jihadist. Quite the opposite. Even Senator John McCain has blasted such attacks as an “unwarranted and unfounded attack on a honorable woman, a dedicated American, and a loyal public servant.”)