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

by Daniel Halper

  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.5

  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).6 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.”7

  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.11 (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.”)

  Hired as a White House intern in the first lady’s office in 1996, the twenty-year-old turned heads with her polish and professionalism. She became the backup to Hillary Clinton’s personal aide before taking over the job in time for Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign. In that role, Abedin spent almost every minute of the day with her boss, and with only a few brief sabbaticals since then, she hasn’t left Clinton’s side. “I only have one daughter,” said Hillary, “but if I had a second daughter, it would [be] Huma.”

  “They basically coexisted,” a former Hillary Clinton aide tells me. “There were very few minutes of the day they weren’t together.”

  Abedin’s friend Mike Feldman once called the relationship between Abedin and Clinton “unique,” noting that the two could communicate with “as little as a glance.” Clinton’s longtime media consultant Mandy Grunwald once said, “I’m not sure Hillary could walk out the door without Huma. She’s a little like Radar on M*A*S*H. If the air-conditioning is too cold, Huma is there with the shawl. She’s always thinking three steps ahead of Hillary.”12 One might think Abedin lived a charmed life until one considers her choice of husbands—a man she would meet while working for Hillary. He was New York congressman Anthony Weiner. But that story would come later.

  As her legislative director, Senator Clinton tapped Neera Tanden, who first worked with her in the White House as a senior policy advisor at the age of twenty-seven. Tanden, a well-spoken committed liberal spinner, the child of Indian immigrants, and a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Yale Law School, would become one of Clinton’s most trusted advisors and a staunch promoter of sharply liberal policies.

  In a sign of her distrust for the press and near paranoia about her public image, Senator Clinton hired as her spokesman Philippe Reines. An unmarried man then in his thirties, Reines was known for his contempt for the press corps and willingness to mislead, obfuscate, and freeze out anyone challenging his boss. Sharp-elbowed and abrasive, Reines had quickly come to be loathed and feared by many D.C. reporters.

  He proved quick to send terse nastygrams to those offering even the slightest insinuation of negative coverage of his boss. Years later, for example, Reines would call a reporter at a news website “an unmitigated asshole” and then taunt him by asking, “How’s that for a non-bullshit response? Now that we’ve gotten that out of our systems, have a good day. And by good day, I mean Fuck Off.”13 He is “a master practitioner of self-preservation and the beneficiary of Clinton’s almost maternal protection . . . Hillaryland’s ultimate survivor,” the Washington Post would declare in a self-serving profile of the man.14

  One well-known Washington reporter who worked with Reines and
requested anonymity because he might work with him in the future summed up for me what was a common view among many D.C. reporters. Working with Reines, he said, “was a very unpleasant experience. He carries himself with a kind of amateur theatrics and tries to physically block people from gaining access to people and information.”

  He was, like Howard Wolfson, exactly the kind of press officer the Clintons seemed to prefer: a bully and a brute who often got his way. Even the standard complaints of reporters—over logistics, or schedule, or seats on the plane—were treated like life-or-death offenses against the Clinton regime. “He has a pride of craft to the elaborate and offensive emails he sends to reporters,” the journalist tells me. Reines loved to mock, abuse, and go to war with the press.

  “One of the interesting things that has been historically true about president and Mrs. Clinton’s approach to the press is the staff is very forceful and muscular,” says Ari Fleischer. “The staff is aggressive in dealing with reporters, especially with Mrs. Clinton. They guard her reputation like the crown jewels are guarded. They don’t want anyone to touch it. That’s why I say it’s a fascinating story to me in how it’s going to play out, with how mainstream media will cover Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, because from my experience schizophrenia is the right word to use. They alternate between loving her and hating her.”

  The usual rules of decorum didn’t seem to apply when it came to Reines’s boss, who also demonstrated a knack for bending the usual rules and norms to her own advantage.