“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.
—Tom Wolfe, In Our Time
When 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 Clintons—Bill, 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 ‘Little 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 himself—the 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 Foundation—a 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 ‘There’s more than one way to obliterate an old email server’ and ‘If 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, ‘You 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 Initiative–related things.”
Marc was more than a friend of the family; he was a friend with benefits.
He met with a series of wealthy investors who had close ties to Bill and Hillary and apparently brought them closer still. The investors included Lloyd C. Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, which had paid Bill $1.35 million for eight speeches. Another investor, hedge-fund manager Marc Lasry, was a major donor to Hillary’s 2008 presidential campaign. A few years after Chelsea graduated from Stanford University, Lasry was more than happy to give her a job at his fund, Avenue Capital.
Investigative reporters at the Times dug up several other examples of Mezvinsky investors who had close relationships with Bill and Hillary.
“Rock Creek Group, a Washington-based investment advisory firm, placed $13 million from the California Public Employees’ Retirement System and another public pension fund with Eaglevale in late 2011 and early 2012,” the Times reported. “Rock Creek’s chairwoman, Afsaneh Beschloss, attended state dinners at the Clinton White House in the late 1990s and was a panelist in the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative.”
After a dinner with Greece’s prime minister, Mezvinsky bet big on a turnaround of the country’s economy. He invested millions in Greek bank stocks and Greek debt. He lost his shirt—and the shirts of his investors—and in 2014 Eaglevale acknowledged, “Our recent predictions regarding Greek politics have proved incorrect.”
“Investing in Greece is stupid,” Larry Kudlow, an economist and a CNBC senior contributor, told the author of this book. “Doing it on the basis of a dinner with an ultra-weak prime minister who was a temporary figurehead is even stupider. Plus, the Clinton insiderism of the dinner, and the hedge fund’s money raising, is so typically sleazy.”