Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine (19 page)

The entire network began to panic. “Keep in mind the financial situation,” says a source close to the situation at the time. MSNBC struggles for ratings, and it’s almost always a losing struggle—except on debate nights. “Debates make millions for the networks,” says the source. “They boost their ratings in a huge way.” If Hillary pulled out of the debate, there would be no debate. And “MSNBC couldn’t afford financially to lose a debate.”

Moments later, Shuster got called into a meeting with Phil Griffin, Steve Capus, and several other people, including the vice president for communications at MSNBC, Jeremy Gaines. The consensus from the corporate executives was “We’ve got to do something about this.” As one MSNBC employee puts it, people were “going apeshit.”

Shuster tried to push back. “Don’t you guys get the politics in this?” he asked the corporate bigwigs. “The Clinton campaign is trying to appeal to women, and trying to make Hillary a sympathetic figure.” They wanted to make it look like men, such as David Shuster, were beating up on the woman who could be the first female president of the United States.

Griffin, Capus, and company may have understood the politics of the situation, but it was irrelevant. This wasn’t a fight being waged on the merits. All that mattered was the February 26 debate.

So Shuster tried again, this time explaining to his bosses that Hillary was bluffing. “They need this debate more than Barack Obama does,” he pleaded. Obama was the front-runner and weaker debater, and Hillary’s debate performances were her best chance at snatching the momentum from him. “There’s no way Hillary is pulling out of this debate.”

“It doesn’t matter,” one executive responded. “I mean, we can’t even afford the possibility that they are not going to participate in this debate.”

Shuster disagreed, but by then he knew he was alone. Looking for a way out, he asked, “What do you want me to do? Do you want me to apologize directly to Hillary? To Chelsea?”

“Yeah, why don’t you do that,” one MSNBC suit said. “That would be a good start.”

Shuster got right on it. “Howard,” he said in a phone call to Howard Wolfson, “sorry about all the confusion over everything. I’d like to apologize directly to Hillary Clinton. Can you patch me through to Huma, on the campaign trail, so I can call and apologize directly to Mrs. Clinton?” Huma—the wife of then-congressman Anthony Weiner—was Hillary’s personal aide, a constant presence at the presidential candidate’s side.

“We’re not going to let you do that,” Wolfson replied.

“Okay. Um, all right,” Shuster said. “Can I send a note of apology?”

Wolfson relented, but only slightly. “If you want to email Huma, here’s her email.”

Moments later Shuster sent Huma an apology, hoping it would get directly to Hillary, who had supposedly cried, according to her aides, when she heard Shuster’s remarks about Chelsea. Shuster was hoping the direct apology would be the beginning of his rehabilitation.

It wasn’t.

In fact, it wasn’t even acknowledged. An hour later, Howard Wolfson held a press call with reporters. “The worst part of this,” he said, misleadingly, is that Shuster “has not apologized to Hillary and Chelsea Clinton.”

“Fucker!” Shuster thought when he got wind of Wolfson’s call. “He wouldn’t let me apologize!”

Shuster wasn’t on the call, but he found out about it when the Associated Press called him up for a reaction. “Howard Wolfson just went off on you for not apologizing,” the AP reporter told Shuster.

“This is crazy!” said Shuster. Wolfson’s statement on the press call was of course technically true, but only because Wolfson had personally blocked all attempts at a direct apology. Like a laundry list of Clinton targets and scapegoats, from Paula Jones to Ken Starr, Shuster was seeing the lengths to which the Clintons have always gone to destroy inconvenient obstacles to their power, and he felt like a helpless pedestrian watching a speeding bus (driven by the Clintons) plow straight at him.

Meanwhile, as someone who worked at MSNBC at the time explains, “NBC is freaked out. The Clinton campaign is, like, ratcheting this up.” According to a source close to the situation, the Clintons called people on the board of NBC’s parent company, General Electric, to say, “Well, this is outrageous, how NBC News and MSNBC are handling this, and we need to do something about it.” Before long, GE’s chairman, Jeffrey Immelt, was on the phone with Jeff Zucker, the president and CEO of NBC Universal at the time, and Steve Capus asking, “What the hell is going on over there? Why are my board members talking about the reporter, and why is your reporter referring to Chelsea as a prostitute?”

Since Shuster, though a liberal, had once been on the wrong team from the Clintons’ perspective—he had worked at Fox, reported there on the Whitewater and Lewinsky scandals, and had at the time maintained deep contacts in Ken Starr’s office—the Clintons, Shuster believed, took a special joy in trying to destroy him. Their decision to turn against him was a little like Paddy O’Neill’s decision in
Patriot Games
to turn against a female fellow member of the Irish Republican Army. “Paddy O’Neill can sleep at night,” says Harrison Ford’s Jack Ryan. “In fact he probably enjoys the irony. She’s not Irish; she’s English.”

By that Friday afternoon, Steve Capus, Phil Griffin, and Jeremy Gaines told Shuster he’d have to accept a two-week suspension. “We need this debate,” said Capus, who was then president of NBC News. “You’re going to be the one who is going to have to jump on the grenade,” added Gaines.

“If NBC buckles on this,” asked Shuster, once he realized the time had passed for defending himself on the merits, “what kind of message does that send?”

The response was dismissive: “That’s not your job to worry about.” They weren’t there for a debate. The decision to make Shuster a sacrificial lamb on the altar of Clinton, Inc. had been made before Shuster walked into the room. The best they could do for their reporter was to promise to pay him during the suspension—so long as he kept it a secret.

Shuster’s colleagues tried to comfort him. Tucker Carlson, Pat Buchanan, Joe Scarborough, and even Clinton confidant Lanny Davis came to his defense—in private. (Davis would call several times to ensure that, regardless of what happened with the Clintons, he’d still have a relationship with Shuster.) And Tim Russert, the most respected reporter in the NBC News empire, candidly told Shuster. “I know what’s going on.” Russert had been through the same sort of games before he grew too powerful for politicos to play games with, and he assured Shuster, “Someday we’re going to have a beer and laugh about this.” (Russert would suddenly pass away before the two ever had a chance to laugh about it over beers.)

The Clintons, however, weren’t finished. As Chuck Todd had warned, sure enough the exchange of emails between the Clinton campaign and Shuster was leaked by the Clinton campaign to
Politico
, and organizations like Media Matters, run by Clinton ally David Brock, whipped up liberal fear. The story took a long time to die, because the Clintons didn’t want it to die.

After two weeks, David Shuster returned to the airwaves, but he felt he never fully recovered from the harm to his standing at the network. Shuster believed he had once been “seen as some sort of straight-shooter, take-no-prisoners” political commentator, but that was before the fights with management and the bad-mouthing by someone of Hillary Clinton’s prestige. After the “pimped out” affair, Shuster believed his bosses thought he “was some kind of a hothead.”

Whether Shuster could have handled the situation better is debatable. Should he have apologized more enthusiastically on
Morning Joe
? Probably. Should he have tried harder to more quickly apologize directly to Hillary and Chelsea? Maybe. There was, after all, nothing stopping him from offering his regrets to them over the air. It’s unclear, however, whether anything Shuster could have done would have made a difference, because with the Clintons, one couldn’t be sure whether their outrage was sincere or feigned for political purposes. What
is
clear is that the Clintons saw a political opportunity and seized it with the desperate tenacity they’d shown countless times when their backs were against the wall. Consider what their character assassination of David Shuster accomplished. In a matter of days, they silenced any criticism of Chelsea’s refusal to answer questions about her role in lobbying superdelegates. More important, they appealed to female voters by making Hillary and Chelsea look like persecuted victims of men. Finally, they sent a message to the media: You may like Obama more than Hillary, but you’d better watch what you say, because we have the power the destroy you.

To deliver their message, a popular ex-president, the nation’s most famous senator, and their powerful friends bullied a relatively obscure reporter with powerless friends and spineless bosses. While they were at it, the press and public were misled about his attempts to apologize. And Chelsea was used not just to lobby superdelegates, but also to portray themselves as victims of a malicious media and score political points with the public.

Of course, the biggest way to hit Shuster and MSNBC would have been to actually boycott the MSNBC debate. That would have been, in
Godfather
terms, the equivalent of “going to the mattresses.” But punishing Shuster wasn’t really the Clintons’ goal. He was just the collateral damage of their opportunism, and because Hillary needed the debates more than her front-running opponent did—and was better at them than he was—a boycott of the debate would have hurt Hillary more than it would help, just as Shuster had told his bosses. As someone who worked at MSNBC at the time says, “Their strategy was so transparent and weak that I think calling it a mafia tactic does a disservice to mafia families.”

After Shuster’s gaffe, his subsequent apology, and the announcement of his suspension, Hillary Clinton went through eleven state elections and almost a month before she won another state primary. If her attempt had been to win votes at David Shuster’s expense, she had failed.

As the 2006 midterm election neared, Josh Green, an enterprising reporter who was then with the
Atlantic
magazine, began to consider 2008. Green pitched his editors a story on the Clintons, and when given approval, he turned to Clinton’s Senate office with the pitch: He was going to study her entire Senate career up to that point (nearly one full term served) and dive in deeper and more comprehensively than any reporter had done until that point.

The piece was going to be written regardless, and the Clinton team figured that if they cooperated with the story, they would be able to shape it. Besides, politically, Green fits the mold of a liberal journalist, dating back to his time as an editor at left-of-center publication
Washington Monthly
and as a staff writer at the devoutly liberal
American Prospect
, where he wrote about “frustrating Republican talking points” and the “nauseating roller coaster ride” of the Bush presidency. It helped, too, that he approached Senator Clinton’s office from the
Atlantic
, which might not have been as overtly liberal as the other places Green worked but would on its face suggest friendly coverage.

So Hillary’s Senate staff let Green in. For the most part, they weren’t wrong: It was overall a flattering piece that detailed how Hillary had won over skeptical Republicans and Democrats alike in the Senate and became, against all odds going into the job, pretty well liked among her colleagues.

Clinton, Green uncovered, enthusiastically attended the Senate prayer group, which was dominated by Republican senators who had pretty much all over the years spoken out staunchly against her husband when he was president. Some had even a history of speaking out against Hillary. The piece was filled with great tidbits like that, giving a full picture of how Clinton had been spending her time in the Senate.
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But not all of it was completely flattering. “Today Clinton offers no big ideas, no crusading causes—by her own tacit admission, no evidence of bravery in the service of a larger ideal. Instead, her Senate record is an assemblage of many, many small gains. Her real accomplishment in the Senate has been to rehabilitate the image and political career of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Impressive though that has been in its particulars, it makes for a rather thin claim on the presidency. Senator Clinton has plenty to talk about, but she doesn’t have much to say,” Green concluded.

It was this conclusion that infuriated the Clinton camp, and in a retaliatory mode, they’d move to kill his next Clinton story.

“Early this summer, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign for president learned that the men’s magazine
GQ
was working on a story the campaign was sure to hate: an account of infighting in Hillaryland,” the Virginia-based trade publication
Politico
would report a few months later. “So Clinton’s aides pulled a page from the book of Hollywood publicists and offered
GQ
a stark choice: Kill the piece, or lose access to planned celebrity coverboy Bill Clinton.

“Despite internal protests,
GQ
editor Jim Nelson met the Clinton campaign’s demands, which had been delivered by Bill Clinton’s spokesman, Jay Carson, several sources familiar with the conversations said,” reported Ben Smith of
Politico
.
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That killed
GQ
story was written by Josh Green, the same reporter who had cast doubt on Hillary’s tenure in the Senate. It is how the Clintons operate with the media, controlling the narrative and dictating the story.

Some Clinton apparatchiks did come to the senator’s defense and advocated her candidacy—the always reliable James Carville and the supposedly unaligned website Media Matters for America, among the most prominent.

One of Carville’s broadsides—“If she gave [Obama] one of her cojones, they’d both have two”—led Obama to rebut the former Clinton spokesman turned CNN commentator directly. “Well, you know, James Carville is well known for spouting off his mouth without always knowing what he’s talking about,” Obama replied. “I intend to stay focused on fighting for the American people because what they don’t need is 20 more years of performance art on television.”