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

by Daniel Halper

  Indeed, over time, Band began to take some liberties with Clinton’s name. Band controlled Clinton’s most valuable commodity—his schedule—and a former White House colleague called Band “a gatekeeper who charged tolls.”33 With or without Clinton’s knowledge, the price Band charged for access to Clinton was enough to buy himself a $2.1 million condo in 2003, move to a $7.1 million condo in 2008, and add a $1.7 million expansion in 2009.34

  Occasionally, Band’s dealings raised eyebrows. When the U.S. Postal Service exercised a purchase option of a Sarasota, Florida, post office building owned in part by Band’s father, Doug Band jacked up the price with an appeal to a Clinton ally on the Postal Service Board of Governors, who later resigned after an inspector general’s report said he failed to uphold his fiduciary duty to the service. Similarly unsubtle was the sales pitch Band arranged in 2012 at a small private gathering of wealthy VIPs in a Manhattan ballroom to hear Clinton, George W. Bush, and Tony Blair discuss terrorism and globalization. The sales pitch was for the corporate consulting company Band founded in 2009 (while also working for Clinton), and according to one guest at the gathering, the pitch was long-winded, “flagrant,” and “inappropriate.”35

  The problem was less about what Band was charging as Clinton’s gatekeeper and more about who he was letting in the door. Victor Dahdaleh got in; he was later arrested in Britain and charged with bribing a Bahraini company with $9.5 million. Frank Giustra got in; he received a uranium-mining contract in Kazakhstan after Clinton traveled to the country and praised Kazakhstan’s corrupt and repressive dictator. Most notably, Raffaello Follieri got in; the con man (and then-boyfriend of actress Anne Hathaway) later pleaded guilty to fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering, forfeited $2.44 million, and served four years in federal prison.38

  The New Republic accused Band of profiting off his relationship with the Clintons and said it concerned Chelsea. But, of course, none of this profiteering had been a problem for Chelsea when it involved other aides. Why didn't it bother her that Huma Abedin would profit off her many associations in ClintonWorld? Why didn't it bother Chelsea when her former minder Philippe Reines went on “contract,” which would allow him not to be full-time and to take on private and corporate clients through the consulting firm he founded, Beacon Global Strategies, whose mission and pitch sounds an awful lot like Teneo’s? At least Reines had waited to leave the State Department. Abedin hadn’t.

  Beacon now boasts a roster of top executives with ties to the Clintons—as well as ties to the investigators into Benghazi and those who were supposed to have been on watch. There’s Andrew J. Shapiro, who served as a senior advisor to Hillary and later as an undersecretary in her State Department; there’s Jeremy Bash, Leon Panetta’s former chief of staff; Michael Allen, former staff director to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, one of the House committees investigating the Benghazi terror attack; and Michael Morell, who was number two at the CIA during the attack. “Business records reviewed by Fox News show that in April 2013, Beacon Global Strategies registered as an LLC,” Fox News’s Catherine Herridge reported.39 In other words: just in the middle of an ongoing investigation into Benghazi, principal actors were colluding to start a firm together—to take on high-paying clients and to turn a nice profit.

  Throughout all of these mini-controversies, Bill Clinton stuck with Band, his traveling partner and all-around accomplice. They traveled around the world many times, visited celebrities and billionaires, hobnobbed with Nicolas Sarkozy in France, and even met with the late Kim Jong Il in North Korea.

  Doug Band was the son Bill always wanted, according to numerous accounts. He was the closest thing Bill ever seemed to have to a friend. He knew too much about the president and his scandalous personal life to just kick him to the curb. And he was indispensable until he wasn’t.

  And although he had been off the foundation payroll since 2010, a series of articles began to appear in the New York Times and elsewhere about financial improprieties at Clinton’s various foundations. All of them were in one way or another overseen by Doug Band. He was mentioned more than thirty times in Vanity Fair’s “The Follieri Charade,”40 and the New Republic’s Alec MacGillis wrote a hard-hitting and well-reported exposé in September 2013 called “Scandal at Clinton Inc.: How Doug Band Drove a Wedge Through a Political Dynasty.”41

  At least one of the most damning articles on Band was written by the New York Times’ Amy Chozick, who at the time was one of the only reporters awarded an extensive interview with Chelsea.

  Meanwhile, there was renewed focus on the financial questions surrounding Bill Clinton’s various enterprises, particularly how little money the Little Rock–based Clinton Foundation, designed as a charitable nonprofit, actually devoted to charitable causes. In 2011, for example, the William J. Clinton Foundation was listed among the 591 top U.S. foundations in terms of assets ($197,890,114). Its income that year alone was $62,769,161. In terms of grants given out, however, the Clinton Foundation was ranked a paltry 1,673, having given out only $4,728,000 in 2011, or less than 10 percent of the money it had taken in.42

  Over its lifetime the foundation has supported some good causes. In 2011, for example, a $2,374,669 grant went to the Alliance for a Healthier Generation to combat childhood obesity; in 2009, $2,223,000 went to the American Heart Association.

  Larger sums were sent to organizations and entities that seemed to help the Clintons themselves. A whopping $43,200,000 was given from the foundation to the National Archives and Records Administration to support an“[e]ndowment and partial transfer of building.” NARA, as it’s known, administers the Clinton Presidential Library. Almost $3 million went to the city of Little Rock, Arkansas, to support the Clinton Presidential Center Park there. The Clinton Foundation gave $1,981,227 in 2004 to another Clinton organ, the Clinton Foundation AIDS Initiative. Five grants, given each year from 2004 to 2008, went to the Miller Center in Charlottesville, Virginia, housed at the University of Virginia, with one to support an “[o]ral history project of Clinton presidency.”43 The total amount granted to that organization by the Clinton Foundation was $851,250.44

  Executive compensation for the foundation during this time period, given to people like Bruce R. Lindsey, a longtime close friend of President Clinton, amounted to more than $5,393,900, according to tax records. And the salaries and benefits of all staff at the foundation are an eye-popping $220,218,840—well above the total grants for the lifetime of the foundation. Travel expenses paid by the Clinton Foundation far exceed the total of grants outside the top three, and for the years 2003–2011 totaled $55,628,306. Accounting alone has cost the foundation more than $1.5 million. Advertising and promotion are slated at $3.5 million. Even information technology has cost it more than $3 million. Occupancy is $22 million. And fundraising for the foundation has cost more than $25 million.45

  Suddenly many of these embarrassments were noted in the press, and usually linked to criticisms of Doug Band’s mismanagement. It wasn’t long before President Clinton decided Band was a liability. Pretty soon Bill was living without the man he said he “wouldn’t be able to get through the day without.” The two men, inseparable for more than a decade, now speak only a handful of times a year, and their conversations are reportedly awkward at best. “It’s like when your wife cheats on you,” said a witness to the relationship, “and after the divorce, you have to see them at the friend’s wedding or at the supermarket. There’s a strangeness to it.”46 (Others have hinted that the two sneak private conversations a little more frequently.)

  After twenty years of service to Clinton, Doug Band was unceremoniously dumped from the payroll of the William J. Clinton Foundation, his reputation taking one hit after another. In the spring of 2013, the organization was renamed the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation. And it was clear to all who was now firmly in charge.

  In the press and within the foundation, Chelsea is portrayed as a white knight bringing some order to the mess her father and Ba
nd made. One can wonder whether a young person of such limited experience was really capable of running such an enterprise.

  “She is going to be the new face of the Clinton Foundation from this point forward,” says a former Clinton aide who worked with her. “She is running the foundation. She is the head of the foundation. I think that she’s sort of thinking that she’s going to pick up the mantle and run with it.” Which is much easier now that Doug Band is no longer working at the foundation.

  According to news reports, tensions simmered between the former first daughter and Doug Band. “Chelsea’s handlers are likely auditioning for White House gigs, should Hillary become president, and they bring to their current jobs all the paranoia that may serve them well in Washington. One . . . sits in on her interviews holding an iPhone like a stopwatch (‘you have two minutes’), whisks her away when she’s in the middle of answering one final question, and scolds this journalist for even mentioning Doug Band’s name in Chelsea’s presence. It’s all an odd, occasionally funny blend of control and confusion,” read a recent Fast Times profile of Chelsea.

  One of Chelsea’s handlers is chief of staff Bari Lurie, who’s in her early to midthirties and (like Doug Band) was a former Clinton White House intern and an alumna (just like Huma Abedin) of George Washington University, and who has worked for the former first daughter since 2011. (Even the idea of a former first child having a chief of staff strikes many Chelsea watchers as ridiculous.) Indeed, it’s at the White House, where she was working in the East Wing for the First Lady, where she first met Chelsea Clinton. She’s a committed loyalist, and her relationship in that role spans over a decade. “Bari Lurie joined the Clinton Foundation in August 2011 as chief of staff to Chelsea Clinton. In this capacity she helps shape and implement the strategic direction of the office, including Chelsea’s engagement across the Foundation,” reads her official bio on the website that says she works in the Office of Chelsea Clinton. “Before moving to New York, Bari worked on Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign as well as her 2006 Senate race and for her political action committee, HILLPAC.”

  The whole fight seems a bit amateurish, since Band is not an enemy that the Clinton family would want. He more than any other outsider (with the possible exception of Huma Abedin) knows the family’s secrets. The Band situation is so delicate that as I was working on this book I received a call from the office of one of Clinton’s tireless defenders, James Carville. His assistant, Kees Nordin, asked one question: Would this book focus at all on Band? I sidestepped the question.

  However, James Carville’s wife, the Republican strategist Mary Matalin, would answer a couple of questions for me via email. I asked, What’s a good story that might illustrate how the Clintons work that you’ve heard or personally observed?

  “Once, in Buenos Aires, we got into a conversation waiting for an elevator about Zoroastrianism, which lasted for almost an hour, as many elevators came and went. Another time, we went to an antique store and he found the perfect bracelets for my daughters. He is a great shopper.”

  And they’ve never held the fact she worked for a GOP president, George H. W. Bush, against her. “We have had many occasions to talk issues, family, music, religion, antiques, books, etc.; I greatly enjoy the breadth of his knowledge and curiosity on so many topics; also appreciate his cheerfulness and energy. He is a fun person to engage with and very open and honest. Never thought about the GOP thing; we appreciate each other’s fidelity to our principles and loyalty to our brethren. I appreciate the Clinton’s [sic] kindnesses to my girls and husband and the Bush family,” she would write to me.

  After Doug Band was rolled by the Clintons, simultaneously embarrassed by the national press and distanced from the former president and his family, I was talking to an aide about what happened and why Band, who had so many times been on the giving end, was now on the receiving end.

  “People warned [Doug] that this was going to happen and he didn’t listen,” says a friend. “Doug’s a little naive when it comes to loyalty, which is funny because he works for the ultimate people who claim to care about it, but also don’t give a shit about it.”

  How does Clinton loyalty work? I ask the friend, as we sit in a crowded New York lunch spot.

  “I think it’s a fallacy.”

  In their lives, the Clintons have been loyal to only one person. Their one true thing. And that is their daughter, whose worst traits, according to a number of Clintonites who’ve worked with her, are the residue of a weird, distorted life. A life largely lived in the shadows of her famous mom and dad.

  “That’s probably their only real line in the sand—or true thing: their relationship with Chelsea,” says a longtime aide. “Everything else is transactional . . . everything. It’s a hard way to live.” It certainly has been for Chelsea. And it may well prove to be the undoing of the Clinton comeback, a bigger Achilles’ heel for Hillary than even her reckless husband.

  Chelsea might not know everything that goes on around her. Nevertheless, “She’s really inserted herself,” says a source, building a reputation as something of a ruthless operator prone to self-pity and entitlement. Just like dear old dad, who is now actively encouraging her entry into another aspect of the family business. Some sympathetic to Band quietly wonder whether Chelsea will be able to manage the sprawling network given her young age and limited experience. As for her mother’s 2016 hopes, Chelsea’s emergence poses similar problems, ones which her rivals hope to take advantage of.

  10

  Chasing Hillary

  “I’m hearing it could be death by a thousand cuts.”

  —a Clinton aide on Hillary’s 2016 chances

  Among Democrats who hope Hillary Clinton doesn’t run—and their number is larger than one might think—the complaints are familiar. Age and stamina are the obvious considerations. “Look at Obama’s hair color, just like George Bush’s,” says a prominent Washington insider. “Somebody who’s seventy shouldn’t be president. And I think that’s going to be an interesting issue against her, but who in the Democratic Party is going to have the guts to take on that machine?” A former Clinton campaign advisor is equally blunt. “This is gonna sound superficial”—which is an understatement—“but men do age better than women,” he says. “At seventy she’s not gonna be—it’s not gonna be great.”

  Democrats fear she is too radioactive. One of many prominent D.C. Democrats who will only comment on background out of fear of inciting Clintonian wrath complains that “she will lose the general because her negatives are so high.” Then there is the not-so-secret fact that she is not a very good candidate. Hillary is often compared to the kind of politician always better in concept than as an actual flesh-and-blood candidate. Many compare her unfavorably to Al Gore or John Kerry or even Mitt Romney, stiff policy wonks with difficulty making personal connections.

  Some will chalk this up to sexism—or at least the difference between men and women politicians. It is not that Hillary is not a good politician, they will say, but that American politics is not used to female candidates. “We are only now growing used to the style of women in politics. You know, they’re not backslappers, even if they are natural politicians,” says political advisor Bob Shrum, who helped lead Al Gore’s and John Kerry’s presidential campaigns. Hillary, he insists, has grown into a natural politician.

  But the real question being asked in Washington is not whether Hillary can be beaten as such, as it is whether any prominent Democrat has the guts to try to stop her.

  The most obvious primary challenger, of course, is the one most often discounted. Vice President Joe Biden will turn seventy-four in late 2016. Gaffe-prone and perennially underestimated, Biden is expected to quietly step aside for the Clintons, with whom he’s had a long and friendly relationship. Unless, of course, you ask Joe Biden.

  Maybe Obama had forgotten all the trash talk Hillary leveled against Obama back then—but Biden hadn’t. “You decide which makes more sense—entrust our
country to someone who is ready on Day One . . . or to put America in the hands of someone with little national or international experience, who started running for president the day he arrived in the United States Senate,” Hillary Clinton told a reporter in 2007. “He was a part-time state senator for a few years, and then he came to the Senate and immediately started running for president,” she said in early 2007.1 And that was just the stuff she said on the record.

  After Hillary left the secretary of state’s office, the world went on, and so did the administration. If anything, it was hard to notice she was gone. Except for personnel: Obama was free to shift over his traveling campaign press secretary, Jen Psaki, the dashing redhead who had been so harsh to Hillary on the campaign trail in 2008 that she was not allowed near the State Department until Hillary was out of Foggy Bottom. And most of the Clinton loyalists who had come to the State Department four years earlier left to cool their heels in various positions out of government while Hillary cooled hers.

  On policy, John Kerry, some thought, did more for the administration in his first year than she did in her four years. He was able to carry out a key goal of President Obama’s, by beginning to work out the structure of what could be a landmark deal with Iran. And with respect to Syria, Kerry gained plaudits from pundits—and the dovish Obama—for his ability to wage hard-nosed diplomacy by publicly signaling that a deal brokered with the Russians could avert an American strike in the Middle East country. Hillary didn’t accomplish any of that. Instead, she claimed credit for the miles she flew, as if that mattered.