WOULDA, COULDA, SHOULDAWOULDA, COULDA, SHOULDA
I asked Hillary why she had chosen Yale Law School over Harvard. She laughed and said, “Harvard didn’t want me.” . . . She explained that . . . [a Harvard] professor looked at her and said, “We have about as many women as we need here. You should go to Yale. The teaching there is more suited to women. . . .”
. . . I told Hillary . . . I would have urged her to come to Harvard. She laughed, turned to her husband, and said, “But then I wouldn’t have met him . . . and he wouldn’t have become President.”
—Alan Dershowitz, Taking the Stand
On March 8, 2015, Bill Plante, CBS News senior White House correspondent, asked Barack Obama a direct question: When did he first learn that Hillary Clinton had used a private e-mail address, rather than the government system, while she served as his secretary of state?
“The same time everybody else learned it, through news reports,” the president replied.
That was the same answer Obama had given on numerous other occasions when something went haywire on his watch.
Back in 2009, an Air Force One plane made an unauthorized photo-op pass over the Statue of Liberty. When did Obama learn about it?
“We found out about, uh, along with all of you,” he said.
The Fast and Furious gun-running operation in Mexico?
“I heard on the news,” he said.
General David Petraeus’s sex scandal?
Same way.
The IRS decision to target conservative political groups?
Same.
The Justice Department’s seizure of AP News reporters’ phone records?
Ditto.
The National Security Agency’s spying operation on friendly foreign leaders?
Ditto.
The Veterans Affairs scandal?
Ditto.
According to Obama, no one ever bothered to tell him what was up. He was in the dark, out of the loop, clueless. The buck didn’t stop at his desk.
Or . . . there was another explanation.
He wasn’t telling the truth.
That was certainly the case in the matter of Hillary’s e-mails, as I learned exclusively in the course of researching this book.
“The White House explicitly warned Hillary early on in her tenure that using her private e-mail account for government business was problematic and possibly illegal,” said a source who discussed the e-mail controversy with Valerie Jarrett. “People in the White House knew what Hillary was doing, because they saw her e-mails daily. Including the president. But she ignored their warnings.
“When the New York Times broke the story about Hillary’s e-mails, the Obamas were very happy,” this source continued. “Gleeful really. As far as they’re concerned, Hillary and Bill brought this on themselves through sheer hubris. Valerie told me, ‘The Clintons act like they’re living in another century where everybody turns a blind eye. But they don’t anymore.’”
Indeed, the story of Hillary’s use of a private e-mail server did not come as a surprise to those who had followed her history of subterfuge and deception.
The story revived memories of past Clinton cover-ups: Whitewater, Chinagate, Travelgate, Hillary’s lost billing records, the Vince Foster mystery, Filegate, Bill’s perjury during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Pardongate, the looting of White House furniture.
It exhumed the old storyline about Hillary’s lack of honesty and trustworthiness and raised fresh doubts among prospective voters and deep-pocketed liberal donors, who wondered if they were backing the wrong horse in 2016.
It kindled the hopes of Hillary’s potential Democratic rivals—Martin O’Malley, Joe Biden, Lincoln Chafee, Jim Webb, Bernie Sanders, and perhaps even the darkest of dark horses—Bill de Blasio and John Kerry.
And it gave fresh insight into the blood feud—both personal and political—between the Clintons and the Obamas.
When Valerie Jarrett was asked by a Bloomberg reporter if Obama had received e-mails from Hillary, she left Hillary to twist in the wind.
“That I don’t know,” she said. “I do know, obviously that President Obama has a very firm policy that emails should be kept on government systems. He believes in transparency.”
Jarrett was not being truthful about what President Obama knew and when he knew it.
Back in 2012, a few months before the end of Hillary’s term as secretary of state, Jarrett had summoned her to the White House to read her the riot act on a whole range of issues that the president found vexing—the Clinton Foundation’s acceptance of foreign donations, Hillary’s use of a private e-mail server, and Hillary’s relationship with Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime Clinton fixer and undercover agent.
According to Jarrett’s later recollection, which she shared with a close associate, she told Hillary that Obama considered Blumenthal to be a “thug.” During the 2008 primary campaign, Blumenthal leaked malicious stories to the press that accused Obama of being a drug-using Marxist with a hidden sex life. As a result, the victorious incoming Obama administration had barred Blumenthal from working for Hillary in the State Department.
Now, Jarrett said, pacing the floor of her office and lecturing Hillary as though she were a schoolgirl, it had come to the president’s attention that Hillary had ignored his directive and was in frequent contact with Blumenthal. That was unacceptable. Hillary had to cut off all communications with Blumenthal immediately.
Hillary sat stock still, staring out the window and not saying anything.
Jarrett then moved on to the next subject—Hillary’s use of a private e-mail account. This was not the first time the issue had come up, Jarrett reminded Hillary. Four years ago, when Hillary first arrived at the State Department, she had been specifically warned about the security ramifications of using a private e-mail account. At the time, Jarrett went on, Hillary had given her word that she would end the use of private e-mails and instead use the authorized government account.
And yet, just the other day, the president had received an e-mail from Hillary’s private account. He was furious and wanted to know why his orders had been ignored.
According to Jarrett’s account of the meeting, Hillary acted bemused but made no excuses and didn’t apologize.
Jarrett then raised the issue of foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation. Here was an example, she said, of something Hillary had explicitly promised in writing not to do, and was doing anyway. Hillary had struck a solemn agreement with the president. Didn’t she take the president of the United States seriously?
At that, Hillary stood up and said, “This conversation is going nowhere. This meeting is over.”
And she turned her back on Jarrett and walked out of the office.
In the early spring of 2015, shortly after the Times broke the story about Hillary’s use of a private e-mail account, someone found an old ABC 20/20 report that had been available on YouTube for the past several years and that explained why Hillary had gone to such trouble to conceal her State Department e-mails.
“As much as I’ve been investigated and all of that, you know,” Hillary said on the video, “why would I—I don’t even want—why would I ever want to do e-mail?”
In a deliberate effort at concealment, Hillary had violated State Department rules by using a private e-mail account that was linked to a server at her home in suburban Chappaqua. Under departmental rules, employees could only use private e-mails for official business if they immediately turned them over to the government to be archived.
Hillary did nothing of the sort.
She held on to her private e-mails for six years—four years as secretary of state and two more years after she left the State Department.
Hillary had to know she was in violation of the department’s rules, since the State Department’s inspector general had criticized one of her own ambassadors for doing the same thing.
“It is the department’s general policy that normal day-to-day operations be conducted on an authorized information system, which has the proper level of security controls,” the inspector general wrote about a rule that was put on the books four years before Hillary arrived at Foggy Bottom.
“Based upon my first-hand involvement in a number of things during the Clinton administration, I have absolutely no doubt that Secretary Clinton well knows the operation of the Freedom of Information Act and knows what, frankly, what she was doing,” said Dan Metcalfe, who oversaw the implementation of the Freedom of Information Act at the Department of Justice. “There is no doubt in my mind and in the minds, frankly, of people at the National Archives and Records Administration, what she did was contrary to the Federal Records Act.”
“Her admitted destruction of more than 30,000 emails sure looks like obstruction of justice—a serious violation of the criminal law,” wrote Ronald D. Rotunda, who was assistant majority counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee. “Mrs. Clinton should know about obstruction [of justice]: Congress enacted section 1519, making the crime easier to prove, in 2002, as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. As senator, she voted for the law.”
The media’s demand for a full accounting by Hillary opened the floodgates of criticism. But she let days go by and failed to come forward with an explanation.
“Lack of speed kills in this case,” warned David Axelrod, the architect of Barack Obama’s 2008 White House victory. “However this [e-mail scandal] turns out, this problem is being exacerbated by the lack of answers from the Clinton campaign . . . and it would be good to get out there and answer these questions.”
But Hillary hadn’t given a political press conference (as opposed to a foreign policy press conference) in more than seven years, and her handlers were afraid she was rusty. They worried she’d say something that would get her into even hotter water. She was stiff from lack of practice, they said, forgetting that Hillary had never mastered the rope-a-dope of a live political press conference.
So she delayed and delayed.
Her silence only fed the most alarming suspicions.
Had Hillary’s use of a private e-mail account jeopardized national security?
Did hdr22@clintonemail.com have the same level of security employed by the government’s e-mail system?
How did she know that her e-mail server hadn’t been hacked?
Finally, Hillary caved under the overwhelming pressure and agreed to meet the press.
Dressed in a gray coat dress that looked a size too big for her, she emerged from a meeting at the United Nations, walked down a long hall past a copy of Guernica, Picasso’s unsparing black, white, and gray masterpiece, and took up a position in front of twenty-five TV cameras. She looked nervous, defensive, and annoyed, as though this was the last place in the world she wanted to be. She had a hard time meeting the eyes of individual reporters, fifty of whom were gathered in a scrum behind a rope.
Reading stiffly from a prepared text, she explained that she hadn’t followed the rules governing State Department e-mails, because it wasn’t convenient to carry two phones.
In retrospect, she admitted, she woulda, coulda, shoulda.
Her explanation was laughable.
Even the most tech-challenged senior citizen knew you could have two or more e-mail accounts on one phone.
And anyway, Hillary didn’t have to lug her phone around.
Huma did that for her.
But that wasn’t the worst of it.
At one point during the press conference, Hillary said that she had deleted half of her e-mails—about thirty thousand of them—because they were “personal” and concerned things like her yoga appointments and preparations for Chelsea’s wedding. At another point, she contradicted herself and said that those “personal” e-mails remained on a private server at her home in Chappaqua.
Trust me, she said, my lawyers have carefully combed through each of the sixty thousand or so e-mails and sent the work-related ones—about thirty thousand—to the State Department.
But her lawyers never reviewed each e-mail.
According to Time magazine, the legal “review did not involve opening and reading each email; instead, Clinton’s lawyers created a list of names and keywords related to her work and searched for those.”
As the Atlantic put it: “The idea that such a process could produce ‘absolute confidence’ that all public records were identified is as curious as the notion that Bill Clinton never inhaled.”
By the end of her press conference, Hillary looked guiltier than when she started it. What’s more, in the following days and weeks, the public learned even more disquieting news. Hillary had ordered her aides to wipe her hard drive clean, thereby destroying the thirty thousand so-called “personal” e-mails on her private server.
By any measure, it was a massive political cover-up, second only to the most famous case of evidence tampering on behalf of a high-ranking official of the U.S. government—the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap in the Nixon tapes.
Hillary’s twenty-one-minute press conference was almost universally deemed a failure.
“When Hillary first approached the podium,” wrote Ashe Schow, a staff writer at the Washington Examiner, “she was all smiles and held her head high; she looked at ease. ‘Look at all the little people come to see me,’ her demeanor seemed to suggest. She rattled off some information about the Clinton Foundation’s latest report detailing the problems women face worldwide. She took a shot at Republicans for sending a letter to Iran. She then read from her prepared remarks addressing her ongoing email scandal.
“But as the questions kept coming and moved beyond those that simply allowed her to reiterate her prepared remarks, Clinton became visibly irritated,” Schow continued. “Her answers were shorter and she began talking over reporters. Finally, a woman touched her arm and it was time to end the event.
“If she expected the mainstream media to take her press conference as a signal to end the unflattering story, she was wrong.”
Indeed, John F. Harris, the editor in chief of Politico, spoke for most of the mainstream press when he wrote that beneath Hillary’s politesse “was an unmistakable message [to the media] . . . easily distilled into three short words: Go to hell.”
Rem Rieder, editor at large and media columnist for USA Today, agreed: “Clinton put on a clinic on how not to defuse a crisis. . . . But even worse than the substance [of what she said] was the manner. Clinton seemed imperial, rigid, above it all—and too clever by half. As the ordeal dragged on, her body language made clear she’d rather be anywhere else in the world rather than batting down these questions from these wretched reporters. . . .
“Candidates need to undergo this intense scrutiny not for the special interests of news outlets but for the American people. This is a big, important job these candidates are applying for.
“And if Clinton finds this experience unendurable, maybe she should be applying for a different job.”