Unlikeable (8 page)
Authors: Edward Klein
It would have been perfectly logical if [Huma Abedin] had said, “I'm out of here.” Any woman could have understood that.
âHuma Abedin's friend Rory Tahari
I
t was the spring of 2012 and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was on a late-night flight to Beijing.
As always, Huma Abedin, Hillary's longest-serving aide, was close at hand.
Huma was an attractive and stylish woman with a murky personal background. She was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and moved to Saudi Arabia with her Muslim parents when she was two years old. She grew up speaking English, Urdu (a language associated with the Muslim region of Hindustan), and Arabic.
She didn't return to America until her late teens, when she was admitted to George Washington University. There, she became a
member of the executive board of the Muslim Students Association, which was founded by the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical Islamist group whose stated goal was to instill the Koran and Sunnah (a major source of Islamic law) as the “sole reference point for . . . ordering the life of the Muslim family, individual, community . . . and state.”
As a college intern in 1996, Huma was assigned to the first lady's office in the Clinton White House, where she immediately came to the attention of Hillary.
For the next twelve yearsâfrom 1996 until 2008, when Hillary ran for the Democratic Party's presidential nominationâHuma wore two hats: she was Hillary's “body woman,” her do-it-all personal assistant, and she was the assistant editor of the
Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs
. Her connection to that publication raised eyebrows in conservative circles, because the
Journal
was founded by Abdullah Omar Naseef, a notorious financier of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.
Huma's Pakistani mother, Saleha Mahmood Abedin, served as a representative of the Muslim World League, a fundamentalist group, and became the editor in chief of the
Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs.
Some Islamist-watchers, like Frank J. Gaffney Jr., president of the Center for Security Policy, have written about Huma's
“extensive ties to the Muslim Brotherhood . . . whose self-declared mission is âdestroying Western civilization from within.'”
As “Hillary's shadow,” Huma kept tabs on Hillary's personal needsâlodging, transportation, meals, and snacks. She made sure Hillary was dressed appropriately for the weather. And she
carried Hillary's BlackBerry, which would become a major prop in Hillary's e-mail drama.
Over the years, the two women developed a strong personal bond, and Huma rose in the ranks to become Hillary's deputy chief of staff. More than an aide, Huma was, with the exception of Bill and Chelsea, the closest person to Hillary. Hillary never went anywhere without Huma.
Despite Huma's twenty-year relationship with Hillary, she had managed to remain largely under the public radar until the spring of 2011, when her husband, Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner, was unmasked as a serial pervert who sent lewd photos of himself via Twitter.
During the ensuing scandal, which forced Weiner to resign from Congress, Hillary counseled the now-pregnant Huma on how to deal with her wayward husbandâa subject on which Hillary was of course a world-class expert. Not surprisingly, she urged Huma to follow her example and save her marriage.
Huma listened to Hillary and stuck by the disgraced Weiner.
People said that Hillary treated Huma as an adopted daughter. But she went much further than that. Following Huma's maternity leave, Hillary allowed her to continue drawing a State Department salary of $135,000 as a “special government employee” while at the same time she sat on the board of the Clinton Foundation and worked as a $355,000-a-year outside adviser to Teneo, a strategic consulting firm founded by Doug Band, himself a former adviser to President Bill Clinton.
Huma's double dipping was certainly unethical if not downright illegal. Some people speculated that Huma needed the
money because Anthony Weiner was out of a job and broke. Others said she needed the dough to support her pricey lifestyle, which included designer frocks by Oscar de la Renta, Catherine Malandrino, and Prada, and handbags by Yves Saint Laurent. And some people said that Huma had simply caught the money bug from Hillary.
Huma's years of loyal service were richly rewarded when Hillary announced that she was running for president and anointed Huma as one of her chief surrogates.
“For all intents and purposes,” a Clinton campaign aide told
Politico
, “[Huma is] No. 3 on the campaign, after [campaign chairman John] Podesta and [campaign manager Robby] Mook.”
“I LOVE YOU, BILLY”
“I LOVE YOU, BILLY”
Those of us who follow politics seriously rather than view it as a game show do not look at Hillary Clinton and simply think “first woman president.” We thinkâfor exampleâ“first ex-co-president” or “first wife of a disbarred lawyer and impeached former incumbent” or “first person to use her daughter as photo-op protection during her husband's perjury rap.”
âChristopher Hitchens
F
rom the window of her Air Force C-32, a military version of the Boeing 757, Hillary could see the towering snow-covered mountain peaks of the Karakoram Range.
She picked up a phone and asked to be connected to her husband, who was thousands of miles away on a flight of his own in a G650 private jet.
Their conversation took place on a speakerphone in the presence of Huma and State Department aides. One of the aides was later interviewed for this book.
“What are you up to?” Bill asked.
“I'm sitting here in my green bathrobe and eating cantaloupe,” Hillary said.
Bill laughed and then fell silent.
Hillary was calling Bill about her trip to China. She rarely made a major decision without consulting him. No matter where in the world she might be, she'd pick up the phone and call him. But Bill's need to cover up his secret life made him cagey, and Hillary always had to drag details out of him.
As usual, he didn't offer any information about where he was and what he was up toâeven though this time he wasn't up to his usual hijinks. He was headed to a Clinton Foundation conference on drugs used to fight AIDS.
In contrast to Bill, Hillary was open and shared every nuance of her life with her husband. She wanted him to know where she was going and what she was doing. And she wanted his input. Not that she took marching orders from Bill. On the contrary, when they spoke, she'd present the problem, usually get into a shouting match with him over what to do, and then come to her own conclusions.
Bill had given her a policy paper, prepared by a China expert, on Beijing's relationship with North Korea, Japan, and Hong Kong. It included specific recommendations on trade, human rights, democracy in Hong Kong, and other pressing issues in East Asia.
“I ran the list by the White House,” Hillary told Bill over the speakerphone, “and they haven't responded.”
“Screw them!” Bill said. “Just go ahead and present the proposals when you get to China. Once you do, they [the White House] can't very well take them back.
Make things happen
.”
Bill was outraged by the way people in the Obama White House treated his wife. In his view, they were not only rude and offensive; they were just plain stupid. They were wasting a valuable resource in Hillary. Obama's team had no idea how to run foreign policy. They had no coherent foreign policy philosophy or comprehensive strategy. They were making things up as they went along. And they were screwing up at every turn.
Bill often expressed his contempt for Obama; it was he who first christened Obama “the Amateur,” a name I adopted for the title of a book. But he was especially scathing in his comments about Valerie Jarrett. He urged Hillary to stand her ground with Jarrett.
But there wasn't much Hillary could do, since it was obvious that Jarrett was Obama's avatar.
“Don't you get it?” Hillary told Bill during their airplane-to-airplane phone call. “The whole idea is to marginalize me.”
“I get it,” he said.
“I wish you were president,” she said.
“I wish
you
were,” he said.
“I love you, Billy,” she said.
And they hung up.
When voters are asked specific things [Hillary Clinton] did as secretary of state, they don't actually know anything.
“What did she accomplish that you consider significant as secretary of state?” Bloomberg's Mark Halperin asked a focus group of Iowa Democrats.
The responses:
“I really can't name anything off the top of my head.”
“Give me a minute. Give me two minutes.”
“Umm ⦠no.”
â
Washington Post
, May 20, 2015
“T
he Washington consensus,” Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute said, “is that [Hillary] was enormously ineffective [as secretary of state] . . . [though] no one was quite sure whether she was ineffective because she wanted to avoid controversy or because she wasn't trusted by the president to do anything.”
In either case, the question that begged to be answered was: Could Hillary point to
any
accomplishments during her four years as secretary of state?
With a tip of the hat to David Letterman, here is how I sum up Hillary's record.
TOP TEN REASONS HILLARY WANTS TO FORGET HER TIME AT FOGGY BOTTOM
Number 10:
I busted my butt offering Russia a “reset,” but I didn't know Putin would translate the word to mean he could reset the Soviet Union's old borders and seize control of Crimea.
Number 9:
I talked Obama into getting rid of Gaddafi, but I didn't know those wild and crazy guys in Libya would let their country become a major breeding ground for the Islamic State.
Number 8:
I “pivoted” to Asia, but I didn't know Beijing would pivot right back by launching an aircraft carrier in the South China Sea and scaring the hell out of America's friends.
Number 7:
I refused to put Boko Haram on a list of foreign terror groups, but I didn't know those ingrates would continue to rape hundreds of women and girls in an effort to create a new generation of Islamist militants.
Number 6:
I sent former CIA spook Frank Wisner to Cairo to persuade President Mubarak to step down in favor of an orderly transition to democracy, but Mubarak laughed Wisner out of the Heliopolis Palace.
Number 5:
I vowed to restore “America's standing around the world,” but our enemies heard me say, “America will just
stand around
” while they take advantage of us.
Number 4:
I made a promise to Obama that the Clinton Foundation wouldn't take donations from foreigners while I was secretary of state, but these days who can tell a foreigner from a native-born American?
Number 3:
I received a report about the deteriorating security situation in Benghazi from my secret agent Sidney Blumenthal, but who listens to someone whose conspiracy theories earned him the nickname “Grassy Knoll”?
Number 2:
I used a personal e-mail address with the initials of my maiden name (
[email protected]
), but I didn't know people would be surprised. After all, Hillary Diane Rodham has always been the real meânot “Mrs. Clinton.”
And Number 1:
I racked up nearly a million miles in the air as secretary of state, but it turned out to be harder than I thought to cash in the frequent-flier miles for a ticket to the White House.
THE FLOODGATES OPEN
THE FLOODGATES OPEN
Eeh dah eeh dah
Ooooh, ooooh, ooooh
Scandalânow you've left me there's no healing the wounds Hey scandal, and all the world can make us out to be fools Here come the bad news, open the floodgates (oooh oooh) They'll leave us bleeding
âQueen, “Scandal”
“GET CAUGHT TRYING”
“GET CAUGHT TRYING”
It is very comforting to believe that leaders who do terrible things are, in fact, mad. That way, all we have to do is make sure we don't put psychotics in high places and we've got the problem solved.
âTom Wolfe,
In Our Time
W
hen Hillary left the State Department in February 2013, she moved her nascent presidential campaign into the Clinton Foundation's new offices in Manhattan's Time-Life Building. Once again, she linked her career to Bill's and made herself a hostage to fortune.
As in the past, Hillary and Bill talked frequently on the phone but rarely saw each other. He continued to rove about the world and spend much of his downtime at his library in Little Rock, where the foundation's nerve center was still located.
In the spring of 2013, the foundation was renamed for all three ClintonsâBill, Hillary, and Chelsea. This provided Chelsea with a cushy gig and gave her more say in the foundation's
day-to-day operation. According to multiple sources,
Chelsea's overbearing, I-know-better attitude rubbed people the wrong way, and many of the senior staff headed for the door.
As it happened, Chelsea was already doing well financially, thank you. She was a member of the board of
IAC/InterActiveCorp, the digital media company run by Barry Diller, a long-time Clinton supporter. IAC/InterActiveCorp paid Chelsea $50,000 a year and granted her $250,000 in restricted stock. In addition, Chelsea pulled down a $600,000-a-year salary as a “special correspondent” for NBC News, doing feel-good segments for
Nightly News
and
Rock Center with Brian Williams
.
When
Politico
revealed Chelsea's NBC salary, the media went into overdrive poking fun at the arrangement.
Business Insider calculated that Chelsea made $26,724 for every minute she was on-air. And the
Los Angeles Times
sniffed: “[Chelsea's assignment]
raises the obvious question of NBC's goal in giving [her] a high-profile job and apparently paying her a top-echelon salary. The answer is equally obvious: Plainly, it was done to curry favor with the Clinton family.”
Renaming the family business the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation couldn't have come at a worse time. For in August 2013, the
New York Times
unleashed the first in what would become a fusillade of accusations aimed at the heart of the foundation.
Noted the Gray Lady:
“The Clinton Foundation [has] become a sprawling concern, supervised by a rotating board of old Clinton hands, vulnerable to distraction and threatened by conflicts of interest. It ran multimillion-dollar deficits for several years, despite vast amounts of money flowing in.”
When Chelsea read the
New York Times
story, she went ballistic. She climbed into her Cadillac Escalade and drove from New York City to Chappaqua to confront her father.
It was a muggy weekend in mid-August, and Bill and Hillary had five or six people over for drinks. They had wandered over to Bill's office, where he was showing off his collection of African tribal masks, when Chelsea stormed into the barn, her face livid with anger.
“Inexcusable incompetence!” Chelsea shouted at her father, waving a copy of the
Times
article, which portrayed Doug Band, who was known as “Bill's adopted son,” as the chief villain in the foundation's conflict-of-interest culture.
“Band has to go!” Chelsea screamed.
The guests shrank back against a far wall.
“I tried to give them space, but it was impossible not to hear most of what was said,” recalled one of the guests who was interviewed for this book.
Chelsea told her father, “You treat these bastards like family, like your children, and you blindly trust them. They pay you back by screwing up the foundation's finances so badly it may be impossible to fix it. You assume that people are loyal because you are. But they are not. And this proves it.”
“Everyone who was close to the Clintons knew that the foundation was hemorrhaging money and that Doug Band had a free hand,” said the guest. “Chelsea hated Band. She hated the influence he had over her father, and she deeply resented the inference that he was somehow like a son to Bill. That really grated on her.”
Chelsea walked out and slammed the door to Bill's office. She circled the garden a few times, and then came back in, still fuming.
Bill looked pale and stricken.
Hillary, on the other hand, looked pleased.
“She agreed with Chelsea and was proud of her daughter for facing up to her father,” said the guest. “At that moment it became clear to me that if Bill wasn't exactly afraid of Chelsea, he was definitely in awe of her. I would have bet my last dollar that Chelsea was going to take over the foundation.”
In August 2014, Chelsea announced she was leaving her six-figure job at NBC.
But that didn't alleviate the pain inside the Clinton family.
According to sources close to Hillary, the
Times
article and follow-up stories about the Clinton Foundation rocked the Clinton marriage more than anything since the Monica Lewinsky affair.
“Whenever Hillary gave Bill holy hell, she brought up the subject of his women, and this time was no exception,” said a source. “She accused him of playing around with women in what she called his âLittle Rock love nest.' She complained about the
millions spent on first-class tickets and noncommercial travel for beautiful women. She named names, including several movie stars like Dakota Fanning, who had traveled with Bill to Africa.”
Chelsea joined her mother in criticizing the excesses and extravagance. Mother and daughter insisted that Bill get rid of his old cronies, including Bruce Lindsey, the former White House counsel and chairman of the board of the foundation, who still lived part-time in Arkansas.
Their arguments grew heated, with the three of them shouting at the same time. At one point, Chelsea pointed out that she had worked as a consultant at McKinsey & Company, the business management firm.
“I'm the only one in this family who's got any business experience,” she shouted.
To which Bill reminded her that he had run a pretty big operation himselfâthe U.S. government.
“Bill was so rocked by their attack that he couldn't take it anymore, and he made arrangements to fly to Africa,” said the source. “He simply got the hell out of town. But before he left, he agreed that Hillary and Chelsea could make whatever changes in the foundation they thought necessary. That was when the nerve center of the foundation was moved from his library in Little Rock to the Time-Life Building in New York City, where Chelsea could manage it.”
Not long afterward, Chelsea got her wish about Doug Band. In June 2015, Bubba's money man and “surrogate son,” as the
New York Post
referred to Band, resigned from the Clinton Foundationâa casualty of rubbing Chelsea Clinton the wrong way.
Chelsea was her mother's daughter in a number of ways. Like Hillary, she had a hair-trigger temper and flew into a rage at the slightest provocation. A taste of power only seemed to whet her appetite. And now that she had a big say in running the foundation, she had the urge to go into another part of the family business: book writing as a political art.
While pregnant, she began putting together a book titled
It's Your World: Get Informed, Get Inspired & Get Going.
The book, which was aimed at readers ages ten to fourteen, was due out in mid-September 2015, just as interest in the 2016 presidential primaries would begin to heat up. Chelsea was planning a major book tour, which she saw as an important adjunct to her mother's bid for the White House.
But Chelsea, like Hillary, had a tin political ear, and in a letter posted on her publisher's website, she made a big boo-boo: “We have a saying in my family,” she wrote. “It's always better to get caught trying (rather than not try at all).”
Get caught trying
!
Was that a Freudian slip?
Or was that the motto engraved on the Clinton family's coat of arms?
It was a saying, wrote Heather Wilhelm, a weekly columnist for RealClearPolitics, “that ranks right up there with âThere's more than one way to obliterate an old email server' and âIf the silverware is missing, Sandy Berger's pants are a-jangling.'”
At the same time that she was preparing her book for publication, Chelsea was urging her parents to find a role in the family foundation for her husband, Marc Mezvinsky.
“Since marrying Chelsea Clinton five years ago, Marc Mezvinsky, a money manager, appears to have settled into his life as Bill and Hillary Clinton's son-in-law,” the
New York Times
reported. “He has regularly appeared at charitable events, once introducing the former president at the Clinton Foundation's celebrity poker tournament by dryly saying, âYou may have heard of my father-in-law.'”
Mezvinsky started raising money for his hedge fund, Eaglevale Partners, in 2011, barely a year after he married Chelsea in a wedding ceremony that was attended by some five hundred people, including former secretary of state Madeleine Albright; Democratic super-fund-raiser Terry McAuliffe; fashion designer Vera Wang; Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin; Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen; Chelsea's BFF Nicole Fox; Marc's father, Edward Mezvinsky, who spent eighty months in prison for bank, mail, and wire fraud; and Ghislaine Maxwell, who had attracted worldwide press attention for her relationship with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
“Bill and Hillary were never enthusiastic about Chelsea's marriage to Marc,” a close family friend said in an interview for this book. “They were uncomfortable with Marc's father's felony conviction and jail sentence. They knew it was unfair to blame Marc for the sins of his father, but the fact was the Mezvinsky family name was tainted and it left its stain on Chelsea.
“Bill and Hillary ran as far away as they could from Marc's parents,” this source continued. “When Marc's mother Marjorie filed paperwork in 2013 to run in the Democratic primary for a congressional seat, Hillary and Bill showed her scant support.
“At first, Marc felt left out of the Clinton family. Bill and Hillary didn't pay him much attention. Personally, he wasn't their cup of tea. He's a brooding kind of guy, cerebral and soft-spoken, in contrast to Chelsea, who is upbeat and animated like her father.
“But when Chelsea announced she was pregnant in the spring of 2014, the Clintons' attitude toward Marc underwent a change. I was at a small dinner party at Chappaqua when Bill put his arm around Marc's shoulder and took him into his office for a long talk. They came out looking like best friends, so it was obvious that they had a breakthrough. Marc's name began appearing on Clinton Global Initiativeârelated things.”
