by Amy Chozick
I can’t explain why in the heat of breaking news, I thought covering Podesta’s hacked emails was any different.
The debate in the politics pod—with Carolyn’s all-powerful whiteboard hovering to one side, a camouflaged Sarah Palin bobblehead, a few leftover bags of Fritos, my wendy for texas sign (for irony) displayed on my desk, and the Access Hollywood video open on most of our screens—went something like this . . .
“What if burglars had broken into Brooklyn and stolen these off Podesta’s desk? Would we cover them?”
“True, these were stolen.”
“But it’s different. They’re all already out there.”
“Is it different?”
“I think so?”
“It’s not like if we don’t write about them, no one will.”
“True. They’re already all over the place.”
“. . . and she could’ve just released the transcripts a long time ago . . .”
I checked the time. 5:37 p.m. I just wanted to write the story and get out of the office. After all those months of controversy, Hillary’s Wall Street speeches weren’t the main news of the day. (If you haven’t picked this up by now, Hillary was rarely the main news of the day.) The desk was chaotic, reporters and editors overwhelmed. We had a Trump–Access Hollywood package that included two stories, one news analysis, a story about GOP reaction, two videos, two annotated transcripts, and a sidebar about Billy Bush. Then there was the hurricane and a separate story by my DC colleagues on the Russian hacking. The desk slotted the speech story, which on any other day would’ve run on page one, above the fold, at twelve hundred words in the vitamin pages.
Everyone agreed that since the emails were already out there—and of importance to voters—it was the Times’ job to “confirm” and “contextualize” them. I agreed. I didn’t argue that it appeared the emails were stolen by a hostile foreign government that had staged an attack on our electoral system. I didn’t push to hold off on publishing them until we could have a less harried discussion. I didn’t raise the possibility that we’d become puppets in Putin’s shadowy campaign. I chose the byline. I always chose the byline. In some twisted way, I put bylines ahead of my husband, my friends, my inner voice that told me not to look at that cell phone.
We didn’t know that for the remaining thirty-one days of the election, WikiLeaks would dump a new batch daily and that we’d spend the rest of the campaign “contextualizing” #PodestaEmails and living in fear that our own incriminating email exchanges would come out in the next pile.
In the end, I cowrote six stories and one blog post off the hacked emails. Two of those stories ran on the front page. Six out of the 1,285 stories I wrote on the Hillary beat for the Times. The stories weren’t all negative—one of them made Chelsea a heroine who cleaned up her family’s foundation (even if Doug Band called her a “brat”), another listed Hillary’s veep list. And yet there is no way around it, their existence tainted my entire body of work.
In December, after the election, my colleagues in DC wrote a Pulitzer-winning story about how the Russians had pulled off the perfect hack. I was on the F train on my way to the newsroom. I had no new beat yet and still existed in a kind of postelection haze that took months to lift. I must’ve read this line fifteen times: “Every major publication, including The Times, published multiple stories citing the DNC and Podesta emails posted by WikiLeaks, becoming a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence.”
I’d been called a cunt and a donkey-faced whore and a Hillary shill, but nothing hurt worse than my own colleagues calling me a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence. The worst part was they were right. The Times columnist David Leonhardt put it best when he wrote, “the overhyped coverage of the hacked emails was the media’s worst mistake in 2016—one sure to be repeated if not properly understood.”
I felt bad leaving Michael and Nick at the office that night so I could make it to a concert, but it was almost 8:30 and Bobby texted me from outside the Gramercy Theatre, “Where r u?”
“Go, go, we can finish things here,” Michael said.
I sat in the darkened theater. Bobby wore his khaki raincoat, the one he was wearing when I first picked him up in the Irish pub a decade earlier. He gave me the aisle seat. We held hands, but my mind was elsewhere. I was perpetually elsewhere. For years, I’d listened to a few minutes of Isbell’s rueful lyrics to calm my nerves, at my desk on deadline or while driving Beast from Iowa City to Ottumwa on dark farm roads.
Now Isbell stood, black blazer against a bare-bones stage. I hadn’t been in such an intimate venue, so engrossed by acoustic guitar since Austin, when all I wanted was to leave, to move to New York, and to become a journalist. I closed my eyes and let his bluesy vocals fill me . . .
“Everything you built that’s all for show goes up in flames, in twenty-four frames . . .”
48
The “Big Ball of Ugly”
October 2016
Hillary hardly had time to watch the video when her phone started to ring. Friends and advisers urged her to make calls from Chappaqua. Every faith leader, every “family values” Republican, female executives, activists. Rally them all in shared outrage. But she didn’t. How could she? She was married to Bill. Hillary remembered what happened the year before, right around Christmas, when she’d kicked the crazy bear.
Trump remembered, too. He knew his womanizing (or worse) would come out. But he’d effectively turned Bill Clinton into a human shield. Trump dismissed his comments in the video as “locker-room banter,” adding, “Bill Clinton has said far worse to me on the golf course—not even close.”
In the months since Hillary began her campaign, Roger Ailes was ousted from Fox News after widespread claims of sexual harassment; Bill Cosby was accused of drugging and raping women; Brock Turner, a former Stanford University student found guilty of sexual assault, received a paltry six-month jail sentence; a Columbia University student carried a fifty-pound mattress around to protest the school’s handling of her rape allegation. After the Access Hollywood video came out, more women came forward saying Trump had sexually harassed them.
I wanted Hillary, the first female nominee for president and a feminist icon, to be the collective voice of a nation on the verge of a cathartic scream. Instead, in those early days after the video hit, and allegations mounted against Trump, Hillary mostly talked about cat videos.
“Now, it makes you want to turn off the news. It makes you want to unplug the Internet. Or just look at cat GIFs,” she said at a fund-raiser in San Francisco when the subject of Trump and women came up. “Believe me, I get it. In the last few weeks, I’ve watched a lot of cats do a lot of weird and interesting things. But we have a job to do, and it’ll be good for people and for cats.”
Michelle Obama, a first lady untainted by sexual scandal, said what Hillary couldn’t. “I can’t believe I’m saying that a candidate for president of the United Sates has bragged about sexually assaulting women,” Michelle said, placing her hand over her heart as a crowd of young women in New Hampshire watched in silence. “I can’t stop thinking about this. It has shaken me to my core.”
In the standard political playbook, Hillary’s impulse made sense. The Times’ Upshot predicted that her lead was insurmountable. She should sit back and let her opponent implode. Still, I wanted to see Beijing Hillary. I wanted to see Wellesley Bullhorn Hillary. I wanted to see the Hillary who defended her health-care plan to the House Committee on Ways and Means as “a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister, a woman,” and then compared Republican representative Dick Armey to Dr. Kevorkian. (“The reports on your charm are overstated and the reports on your wit are understated,” Armey replied.) The Hillary I definitively did not want to see was the one who pivoted to a safe list of key Democratic constituencies.
“It’s more than just the way he degrades women, as horrible as that is,” she often said. “He has attacked immigrants, African Americans, Latinos, people with disabilities, POWs, Muslims, and our
military.” She might as well have added Diet Coke drinkers to the list.
Brooklyn kept complaining that the press cared more about the Access Hollywood video than the Russian meddling. They did this whole woe-is-me act about what “bad luck” they had that multiple intelligence agencies had released their report on Russian hacking on the same day as the Access Hollywood video. This spin had only one sensible response: Give me a fucking break. Clinton allies had tried for months to unearth damaging video or audio from Trump’s reality TV years. In private, Robby didn’t really care about the Russians. He thought Hillary should focus on the economy rather than try to explain to voters some convoluted intelligence report about a cyberattack.
There was no question that a foreign adversary attacking our democracy was the more significant news story—and that the media (myself included) should’ve given it more attention—but in terms of winning an election with a month to go, “Grab ’Em by the Pussy” was a slam dunk. The daily #PodestaEmail stories weren’t helpful to Hillary (and I hated being summoned back to the newsroom to write them), but they mostly got buried in the vitamin pages as story after story on Pussygate and its implications for Trump landed on page one.
In private, Trump’s antics tore at Hillary. How could they not? On Thursday, she took a break from debate prep to have lunch in Manhattan with about a hundred donor friends at the St. Regis (cost: $33,400–$250,000). Meryl Streep introduced Hillary and wove a narrative yarn about standing up to bullies.
Trump had ended the first debate with a warning—“I was going to say something extremely rough to Hillary, to her family, and I said to myself, ‘I can’t do it. It’s inappropriate. It’s not nice.’” Hillary knew what he meant. The word “rape” had already come up in debate-prep sessions.
When Meryl sat down, Hillary took a sip of water and reminisced at length about another debate preparation session. The one when she was in the tenth grade at Maine South High School in Park Ridge. The debaters were boys, juniors and seniors, some of them bulky football players who had no time for the overachieving blonde. “But one football player stood out,” Hillary said, her voice cracking.
He’d opened the old bifurcated window of the classroom, overlooking a courtyard where other students ate lunch and socialized. As Hillary tried to make her case, he broke off a rod that kept the windows hinged together and thrust it downward into the courtyard “like a spear,” a show of strength and intimidation that stayed with her.
Fifty years had gone by but Hillary recalled the afternoon with such vivid detail that she started to sound as though she wasn’t addressing donors at all but giving herself a stream-of-consciousness pep talk. Too bad only a hundred rich people got to hear it.
I didn’t go to the second debate, or the one after that. The reporters who wrote the main stories typically watched from the newsroom. Before the second debate, we turned up the volume on CNN to watch Trump as he sat down for an impromptu press conference with three women, Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick, and Kathleen Willey, who accused Clinton of sexual harassment or sexual assault and one woman, Kathy Shelton, who at age twelve was raped by a man Hillary defended at a trial in Arkansas in 1975.
I had a hard time watching. The accusations in Roger Stone’s book, deemed too salacious and unsubstantiated for us to write about a year earlier, now dominated the election. Stone always made the case that this wasn’t just about Bill but about how Hillary and her liberal friends had treated his accusers, a sexual assault “Swift Boat” campaign designed to chip away at Hillary’s biggest advantage—her standing among women voters. “She’s not a victim. She was an enabler,” Trump told Fox News.
During the primary, Stone’s whisper campaign started to filter down to young women who grew up with the mantra that every woman who accuses a man of sexual assault deserved to be believed. Before the Iowa caucuses I’d written a piece about this generational divide among women. I heard that Lena Dunham, one of the campaign’s top celebrity supporters, told a Park Avenue dinner party that she’d been disturbed by accusations that the Clintons and their allies dismissed and discredited these women. Hillary and the 1990s scandals, one young feminist activist told me, was “a big ball of ugly.”
Hillary erupted after that piece, angry I’d written about the Lena anecdote (which her publicist said had been mischaracterized) and quoted other young women wrestling with this issue. Even my most sympathetic Brooklyn sources told me that they understood why Hillary had been so “disappointed” in me, adding that they were “sad” about the state of the Times.
I didn’t know what to think. It had been a different era in 1992 when Clinton campaign aides used words like “bimbo” and “floozy” and “stalker” to describe Bill’s accusers. I once called Carville to confirm that he made the comment, “If you drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find . . .” His only complaint was that earlier reports mischaracterized the remark. “I was talkin’ about Gennifer Flowers, not Paula Jones.” Got it.
But blaming a wife for her husband’s transgressions also seemed like the ultimate act of sexism. “Show me the wife who, when she finds out her husband is having an affair with a much younger woman, says, ‘Oh, I feel such sisterhood with her,’” Katha Pollitt, the feminist poet and columnist for the Nation, told me.
And if these women had been violated by Bill and smeared by the Clintons and their liberal friends, weren’t they being abused all over again now, trotted out like sexual-assault show ponies as 66.5 million Americans settled in to watch the second debate?
A reporter at the press conference yelled out, “Mr. Trump, did you touch women without their consent?” and Paula Jones shot back in her Arkansas drawl, “Why don’t y’all ask Bill Clinton that? Why don’t y’all go ask Bill Clinton that?”
We predicted Trump’s move would backfire. That his bullying would lead to one of those times when the country saw Hillary’s inner strength. Like in the 2000 Senate race, when Rick Lazio stalked toward Hillary’s lectern, insisting she sign a pledge against soft money.
Or in the same debate, when the moderator, Tim Russert, asked Hillary how voters could trust her after she’d sworn in a TV interview that her husband had not had an “adulterous liaison” in the White House. Her eyes welled up, her lips tightened. Hillary replied, “I didn’t mislead anyone. I didn’t know the truth, and there’s a great deal of pain associated with that.”
Michael Barbaro and I spent all afternoon calling women voters. We declared that women watched the debate “through the same inescapable prism: a raunchy, three-minute recording in which Mr. Trump told of kissing and touching women however he pleased.” We called this “Trump’s new, agonizing and self-created reality” and declared his campaign “imperiled by his careless approach to gender . . .”
Less than a month later, Trump would win a majority of white women.
49
Bill’s Last Stand
Sleepless in Chappaqua, October 2016
Bill Clinton was pissed off at the world. Trump parading out those women. Robby and his fucking data. The lawyers insisting he lay off dozens of employees and shutter the Clinton Global Initiative. Brooklyn blaming him for that smug James Comey taking over the email investigation.
Clinton turned seventy in August. He’d always thought Hillary would go to the White House and he could mostly stay in Chappaqua and continue to run the foundation. Even though Hillary moved back there after the State Department, Chappy had always been Clinton’s stomping grounds. In the paid-speech boondoggle years, Hillary would sometimes spend nights at a suite in the Lowell on the Upper East Side. People said Chelsea needed a $10 million apartment so that her mom could sleep over, but that hardly ever happened.
“I hope I’ll get permission to keep this foundation going,” Clinton told Queen Latifah on her eponymous talk show in 2014. Wishful thinking.
Two years later and it was obvious there would be no way for Clinton to maintain any semblance of his postpresident
ial life. His ego took a hit. At Hillary’s Roosevelt Island kickoff speech, I overheard a gaggle of young girls point at Bill as he made his way through the crowd and shout, “Look, there’s Hillary’s husband!”
The Clinton Foundation had been so dragged through the dirt that there was no way he could keep it going. I’d seen the foundation’s work in Africa—seen deaf Ugandan children given the gift of hearing for the first time—and still helped fire the opening shot, with the 2013 investigation into mismanagement and dysfunction at the philanthropy (including the Yorkie) that I cowrote with Nick Confessore. The front-page story, my second on the beat, hadn’t been bad for Hillary. It made Chelsea look gallant in her effort to professionalize her dad’s charity in anticipation of her mom’s arrival. But the story still provided Fox News with days of fodder and caused donors to panic. Clinton released an open letter pushing back against the Times.
Outsider Guy told me that by cowriting the story I’d single-handedly “taken AIDS medication away from thousands of kids.” Not Nick. Not the Times. Not my editors. Not Doug Band, who’d built an enterprise off Bill Clinton Inc. But me. I dismissed this as his usual hyperbole, but three years later, after scrutiny of the charity and its top donors hadn’t let up and its future looked uncertain, I realized he hadn’t been all that far off.
Even if Clinton could somehow avoid the White House Easter Egg Roll and continue to run his foundation after the election, his philanthropy wouldn’t have much money coming in. Along with shutting down the Clinton Global Initiative, the foundation said it would stop accepting foreign donations. There would be no more late nights with rich donors hanging on Clinton’s every word as he yacked about soybean production in Rwanda. No more chartered international flights on which The Guys could charm donors’ buxom wives.
