Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine (9 page)

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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.

Like many Senate offices, where staff changes are common as people move up and onward to other Senate offices, committees, or the private sector, Senator Clinton’s office saw significant staff turnover. During her eight years in office, she had almost two hundred paid employees. She also put together what biographers Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr. described as a “shadow staff” of a “few dozen” congressional fellows, whose hiring appeared to violate Senate ethics rules.
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These “fellows” would perform work for Clinton’s Senate offices without costing her a dime, and served to significantly expand the size of her staff. “[Hillary’s] practices in running her Senate office have sometimes demonstrated a cavalier attitude toward the rules and a proclivity toward secrecy,” the authors wrote in 2007. “[I]n the case of some of her shadow employees, she has failed to ensure that they agree, in writing, to abide by the same Senate rules that apply to permanent staff.”

Senator Clinton also permitted some staff members to work several jobs. Abedin, for one, at one point received a $27,000 salary in the Senate. Senator Clinton, however, also allowed her to join the payroll of her campaign reelection committee and her political action committee simultaneously. Such activities, which Clinton permitted for dozens of aides, blurred the lines between government work and political work. Though this was permissible under ethics guidelines, and other senators have performed similar feats, the authors noted that Hillary’s use of multiple salaries from multiple organizations for her staffs was exceptional and might well have skirted the spirit, if not the letter, of ethics requirements.

In addition to official and unofficial staff, Senator Clinton maintained close friendships with people who would prove influential to her when she chose to seek the presidency. These included the journalist Sidney Blumenthal, who found work as Washington bureau chief of the influential
Salon
online magazine and wrote fawning books about the Clintons. A
New York Times
review of his book
The Clinton Wars
was scathing: “Barely mentioning others close to the Clintons, and illustrating this memoir with smiling, convivial photographs of himself in their company (though much of the book is about others, like the less lovable Kenneth W. Starr), Mr. Blumenthal sends a clear message to his administration colleagues: Mom liked me best.”
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He proved a tireless defender and promoter of the Clintons’ interests, which all but certainly influenced his journalistic integrity. “His most often repeated assertion, throughout an 800-plus-page memoir and political treatise,” the
Times
noted in its book review, “is this: ‘The charge was, of course, completely false.’ ”

Exhibiting her paranoid tendencies, Senator Clinton focused quickly on the need to counter what she infamously called “the vast right-wing conspiracy.”
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“We do have to do a better job to compete in the arena with the ideas we already have,” Clinton told the
New York Times
in 2003. “But it’s also clear to me that we need some new intellectual capital. There has to be some thought given as to how we build the 21st-century policies that reflect the Democratic Party’s values.”
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So Clinton would also lend a hand to forming two organizations that would serve as liberal policy advocates and, not incidentally, sharp defenders of the Clintons. One of them was the Center for American Progress. “CAP was founded,” one founder would later say, “on the idea that, when you fight on equal footing, progressive ideas come out on top.”
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The organization would be staffed by loyalists like former aide Neera Tanden, who would later become CAP’s president, and who would keep Hillary’s aspirations in mind. It also would include as members John Podesta, a chief of staff in the Clinton White House, along with Gene Sperling, Clinton’s former economic advisor, and Robert Rubin, Clinton’s Treasury secretary
.

“There’s no escaping the imprint of the Clintons. It’s not completely wrong to see it as a shadow government, a kind of Clinton White-House-in-exile—or a White House staff in readiness for President Hillary Clinton,” wrote Robert Dreyfuss, a writer for the liberal
Nation
magazine.
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It was all part of the shadow organization meant in part to serve as a sort of holding ground for policy makers to rethink liberal policy, reframe that policy, fight against conservatives who might see the world differently, and ultimately be ready for when (they hoped) Hillary would retake the White House.

There’s another element of CAP, however. It’s a Clinton legacy organization. It’s founded by Clintonites, for Clintonites. It’s this sort of organization that in part helps define the time between President Bill Clinton’s time in office and the expected entrance of Hillary Rodham Clinton into office.

Of course, other former presidents in the modern era have presidential libraries—and foundations and other organizations established to preserve and in some way shape the legacy of the president they are named after. No other former president, though, has established organizations such as CAP that take such an active role in
current
politics and policy debates. And no other president has created such a legacy organization that is always present in Washington—and always doing what it can to help prepare for the return of the Family back to town—just blocks away from the White House.

Of equal import was another Clinton-backed creation, Media Matters for America, which bills itself as “a Web-based, not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.”
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The organization was founded by journalist David Brock, a former Hillary Clinton critic who once wrote for the conservative
American Spectator.
It was Brock who first reported that state troopers assigned to Governor Clinton in Arkansas had arranged trysts for the philandering politician and helped cover his tracks. In that article a woman named “Paula” was identified by first name only—and would later be fully identified as Paula Jones.
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Jones would later allege that she had been sexually harassed by Bill Clinton—and the whole thing would lead to the Monica Lewinsky scandal and of course the president’s impeachment.

Brock would famously break with conservatives a couple of years later and eventually become close to Hillary Clinton. As the head of Media Matters, he had helped it become an influential left-wing hit group that focuses on going after the conservative media and receives enormous credibility and attention. Brock’s goal is to keep the media in line for Democrats, a generally easy task made simpler by his hard-hitting maneuvers, which cast all who see the world differently from him as dishonest and evil.

As Hillary Clinton once noted to a liberal audience of activist bloggers, “We are righting that balance—or left-ing that balance—not sure which, and we are certainly better prepared and more focused on taking our arguments and making them effective and disseminating them widely and really putting together a network in the blogosphere in a lot of the new progressive infrastructure—institutions that I helped to start and support like Media Matters and Center for American Progress. We’re beginning to match what I had said for years was the advantage of the other side. You know, when I made that comment about the vast right wing conspiracy, I wasn’t kidding. What I never could’ve predicted is that it wasn’t a conspiracy—it was wide open for everybody to see and unfortunately they elected a president and a vice president with whom we’ve had to contend for the last six and a half years. But the fact is, they were better organized, more mission driven, and better prepared to take on the political balance of the last part of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century.”
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An important aspect of her time as U.S. senator was her learning the ability to fund-raise—and to reward friends. She had played a supporting role for years, helping her husband raise money—and helping pay back the donors. But now it was her turn—and within years she earned the nickname, from the media outlet Bloomberg, the “Queen of Federal Pork.”
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According to documents obtained from an organization that has been doing opposition research on Hillary Clinton and that is combing through her full record, between 2001 to 2007 Mrs. Clinton was able to secure earmarks totaling $536 million for companies that combined to contribute $514,700 to her various campaign organizations. For these companies, for every thousand dollars given to Mrs. Clinton, a million dollars was returned in the form of a federal earmark. BAE Systems got earmarks totaling $9,700,000 in defense appropriations; PACs and individuals associated with the company gave Hillary $10,000. Likewise, Corning, Inc. got $6,700,000 and contributed $95,850 to Hillary; DayStar Technologies got $1,000,000 and gave $1,000; Delphi Corporation got $3,000,000 and gave $2,000; DRS Technologies got $16,500,000 and gave $14,600; EDO Corporation got $1,800,000 and gave $4,500; General Motors got $10,550,000 and gave $206,000. The list goes on.

In one four-year stretch, from 2002 to 2006, Hillary Clinton was able to secure more than $2 billion in earmarks—an eye-popping sum. The Associated Press reported, “The beneficiaries have ranged from defense giant Northrop Grumman Corp. to New York–based Telephonics, which won $5 million for helicopter equipment.”
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Just as the Clintons’ alleged involvement with crooked donors was the subject of congressional inquiries while they were in the White House, the same allegation was made once Hillary began her own political career. She allegedly deployed a fugitive, Norman Hsu, as a fund-raiser, and there were reports that a New York developer named Robert Congel had made a $100,000 donation to Bill Clinton’s foundation in exchange for millions of dollars in federal assistance for a mall project by Congel. The
New York Times
reported that around the time of the donation, “Mrs. Clinton helped enact legislation allowing the developer, Robert J. Congel, to use tax-exempt bonds to help finance the construction of the Destiny USA entertainment and shopping complex,” and nine months after the donation, Clinton “also helped secure a provision in a highway bill that set aside $5 million for Destiny USA roadway construction.”
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