HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton

by Jonathan Allen

  They landed in Jerusalem shortly before ten p.m. local time on Tuesday, November 20—about forty-eight hours before guests were scheduled to arrive for Hillary’s annual Thanksgiving dinner in Chappaqua. She and her team went directly to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Advisers to Netanyahu and Hillary crowded into his small personal office, dragging in extra chairs. Shapiro, David Hale, who had succeeded George Mitchell as the special envoy for the Middle East, lawyer Jonathan Schwartz, and Jake Sullivan joined Hillary to form the American contingent. It seemed to the Americans that the entire Israeli leadership was in the room. In addition to Netanyahu, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, national security adviser Yaakov Amidror, and Miami-born Netanyahu adviser Ron Dermer were among the Israelis who participated.

  Hillary planned to spend an hour with the Israeli leader, but the meeting dragged on into the early morning hours, as advisers shuffled in and out and noshed on fruit and cookies. Rather than a two-sided debate, the Americans and Israelis were trying together to come up with an offer of concessions that Netanyahu could live with and that would satisfy the Palestinians enough to bring about a cease-fire agreement. Some of the Americans were struck by the Talmudic style of discussion among the Israelis. Netanyahu would suggest a possible solution, and one of his advisers would challenge his thinking directly in a manner that contrasted sharply with the deferential treatment the president of the United States expected in meetings with foreign guests.

  The free-flowing discussion made little progress, even though both sides had the same goal. “Everybody was just trying to figure out how to crack the nut,” said one of the participants. But there remained a huge gulf between what the Palestinians wanted from the Israelis and what the Israelis were willing to give. It wasn’t going well.

  “I’m not sure we should have come,” Sullivan told a colleague during a break in the marathon session. “It’s going nowhere. This is probably a big mistake.”

  Hillary, who was due in Ramallah the next day for a talk with Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, left Netanyahu’s office with nothing in hand.

  “It wouldn’t take but one direct rocket hit somewhere to lead to a ground assault. Things were hanging on the knife’s edge,” a meeting participant said. “When we left that night, it was not clear to me that we had a way forward.”

  But overnight, Netanyahu’s aides called Hillary’s team and asked for another meeting in the morning. She agreed to see Netanyahu after her session with Abbas, and Sullivan and Schwartz headed back to the prime minister’s office to try to lay groundwork. By the time she returned to Jerusalem, Netanyahu had found concessions he felt comfortable with. He gave Hillary enough “in her pocket to be able to go to Cairo and get the deal closed,” said one of her aides. Essentially, in exchange for an end to Palestinian rocket shots into Israel, Israel would halt its strikes and would agree to open up crossings on the Gaza border, which would allow Palestinians to move freely and reengage in commerce.

  In Cairo, Hillary sat down with Morsi, Foreign Minister Mohamed Kamel Amr, and Essam al-Haddad, the top national security adviser to Morsi. Because the United States did not negotiate directly with Hamas, the Islamist military group in power in the Gaza Strip, Egypt, which had a relationship with Hamas, was the key to getting the Palestinians to agree to, and observe, a cease-fire. From Cairo, Hillary spoke to Netanyahu by phone. Obama also placed calls to Netanyahu and Morsi. Hillary, according to sources close to her, kept emphasizing that Thanksgiving was fast approaching. She had to leave soon if she was going to get home to her family.

  Finally, she told the Egyptians the pot wasn’t going to get any better. The Israelis had signed off, and it was time for Morsi to do the same.

  Hillary was playing hardball. “This is the deal, and we are announcing it tonight,” she told Morsi, Haddad, and Amr, according to a source who was present. “It’s happening.”

  The Egyptians were risking an Israeli invasion of Gaza, Palestinian lives, and the international embarrassment of pulling out of a deal. For Morsi’s fledgling government, that amounted to a big gamble. Eager to show he could be a serious player on the international stage, Morsi agreed to the terms.

  Hillary and Amr held a press conference in Cairo that night and distributed the points of what was, in the end, a pretty straightforward formal cease-fire. It was clear from later releases by the White House that some side deals had been cut, but the important part, from the standpoint of Hillary and Obama, was that the Palestinians had agreed to stop firing at the Israelis and vice versa. Suddenly, in addition to the expected victory lap in Burma, Hillary had a second trophy from her trip.

  One aide likened the mood to the aftermath of liberating Chen Guangcheng. “We had been in a very unpredictable, difficult situation where at several points along the way it didn’t seem like it was going to work out, and then it did at the last minute,” the aide said.

  One of her aides congratulated her as she boarded her plane for the long trip across the Atlantic.

  “Well, let’s see,” she said, knowingly skeptical of the shelf life of any peace in the Middle East. “Has it broken yet?”

  EIGHTEEN

  Four Dead Americans

  Darrell Issa, the high-energy chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, was at the White House for, of all things, the signing of a whistleblower protection act, when he bumped into Hillary in a West Wing stairwell. It was November 27, about three weeks after Obama’s reelection, and Issa had been fighting with State Department officials for a raft of information on the Benghazi attack, including various memos and cables. An olive-skinned, black-haired, Toledo-born grandson of Lebanese immigrants, Issa was positively disposed toward Hillary after more than a decade of occasional interaction. She was always polite, remembered his name from his earliest days in Congress, and deferentially answered yes to most routine requests. If their relationship wasn’t warm, it was at least cordial.

  Shortly after the Benghazi attack, Hillary had called Issa to offer assistance in his investigation. “I was in the Senate—I get it. You have an obligation,” she had said then. “I would feel the same way, and I want to cooperate. I will give you as much as I can. But I want to underscore that this should not be politicized.”

  She had also offered to provide witnesses above and beyond the number the committee sought and had helped ensure that Issa had access to an early briefing for congressional staff on Capitol Hill. Before Benghazi, she had brought him up to the State Department, along with other members interested in foreign policy, for a series of private lunch briefings. He was always impressed with her ability to dive right into substance, picking up a conversation where it had last left off.

  So when they ran into each other in the stairwell and pulled off into the quiet atrium of the West Wing basement, Issa wasn’t the least bit surprised that Hillary was prepared to answer questions about the status of his sundry requests of her department. One by one, she told him she was working on each question. He began to get the sense—perhaps a confirmation of the bias he had against an administration that had fought him on a set of investigations—that it was the White House, not Clinton, that was impeding him. In his view, the White House had “lawyered up” and taken the position that it would provide only the documents and testimony that White House officials believed were necessary to his investigation.

  Issa challenged her on Undersecretary Pat Kennedy’s refusal to hand over materials. Without throwing Kennedy under the bus, she said she grasped why Issa was upset. She understood his frustration, she said, and was working to get him more information. Fair or not, he perceived Hillary as an honest broker whose hands were tied by an administration for which transparency was more of a talking point than a way of doing business. He thought she had negotiated the treacherous waters of Washington politics better than other secretaries of state, including Republicans Colin Powell and Condi Rice, and was therefore his best hope for getting Obama to ac
cede to his requests.

  That helps explain the question he asked just before they parted ways.

  “Hillary, are you going to stay on until this is resolved?” Issa asked.

  For Hillary, it was the only truly tough question he had posed in their brief chat. She answered not with her typical laugh of avoidance but with a subtler smile. Then she was gone.

  Their exchange was a telling snapshot of a time when Republicans were much more focused on Obama than on Hillary. There was a renewed focus on investigating the administration and proving that it had covered up scandals in service of the campaign. For example, House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) charged that the president might have known about the Justice Department’s probe into CIA director David Petraeus’s affair with biographer Paula Broadwell, which had prompted his resignation just after Election Day. (Hillary showed Petraeus her gracious side in the aftermath of that scandal, writing him a note and calling to express her sympathy. “I have a little experience,” she joked, referring to her husband’s infidelity.)

  Even three weeks after the election, while she was still secretary of state, Hillary had utility to Issa. She could prevail, or at least try to prevail, on the president to be more cooperative. In a December interview in Issa’s House Rayburn Office Building committee suite, as he got ready to go to the White House Christmas party, he called Hillary a bright spot in the administration.

  “The front end of it, Hillary’s part of it, was very good. By the time you got to Undersecretary Kennedy, he came in with the Obama standard playbook,” Issa said. “I don’t think she’d lie to me. In that sense, I trust her like any politician and particularly any diplomat—every word within a statement has to be carefully made sure you heard it correctly. But no, when you look at Eric Holder, I do not trust him. I do not believe he is trustworthy. I do not believe he is honest. In the case of Secretary Clinton, I think her personal standing—her legacy of tough but honest, diplomatic but not disingenuous—I think it’s important to her.”

  Issa blamed Obama, not Hillary, for what he viewed as an inadequate response to the attack. “When the call came in at three o’clock in the morning, the failure wasn’t viewed, at least as of today, as Secretary Clinton’s,” he said. “It was really an Obama failure.”

  He even said that “her legacy is mostly intact for 2016, if she chooses,” but he stopped short of saying that Republicans wouldn’t go after her on Benghazi, and his investigation would increasingly focus on how high up the chain security decisions in Libya went at State.

  The dynamics on Benghazi were shifting, even as Issa spoke. Republicans weren’t about to let Hillary coast out of the State Department—and possibly into a 2016 bid for the presidency—without making her answer Benghazi questions under oath. The investigations, launched by more than half a dozen committees in the House and Senate, gave Republicans the dull tools they needed for a drawn-out process that would keep Benghazi alive in the headlines well into the start of the presidential election cycle.

  With her shift back to private life imminent, and her name already bandied about as a 2016 front-runner, Hillary was now the main target of Republicans who were thinking about the next election. In addition to the regular congressional committees, several of which had jurisdiction to investigate aspects of Benghazi, Representative Frank Wolf of Virginia and Senator John McCain of Arizona called for the formation of a “special committee” to look into the attacks. Even if some of the lawmakers didn’t think Hillary was at fault, many of their constituents did, and so did right-wing commentators and opinion writers.

  This was nothing new to her. She and her husband had spent eight years fighting congressional committees over Whitewater, Travelgate, and ultimately the Monica Lewinsky affair. Given the history, she wasn’t about to make herself an easy target. While she had a penchant for finding ways to give members of Congress access to information to which she believed they were entitled, there were hard limits to the ways she would make documents available. For example, members of Congress were allowed to look at certain State Department files “in camera,” meaning they could view them but not distribute them or make photocopies of them—and while they reviewed the material, a State Department minder would sit a few feet away, taking notes. A similar strategy had appeased senators Isakson and Corker when it came to reading the negotiating record on the New START Treaty.

  But it didn’t fly with the House Republicans investigating Benghazi. One lawmaker familiar with the records made available to Congress said there were actually 25,000 e-mails related to Benghazi, far more than the one hundred pages of talking-point-related e-mails the White House later released. The two sides were in a high-stakes political dance that could shape whether the attack would cripple a presidential campaign, make Republicans look embarrassingly hyperpolitical, or both. Hillary had more to lose than Republicans in Congress, few if any of whom would be punished by voters in heavily Republican districts and states for going after her.

  Signs of overreach began popping up that December, when a health scare for Hillary turned into fodder for extremists in the Republican Party to accuse her of dodging accountability for Benghazi. The list of people who thought Hillary worked too hard included her boss. Obama had made an example of her at the 2009 cabinet meeting, but the one person who didn’t get the message—or chose to ignore it—was its intended target. Hillary spent 401 days on the road, traveling nearly a million miles to a record 112 countries, sometimes to godforsaken parts of the world. Her time at home could be just as grueling, as the agenda often required her to step off of an international flight and go straight into another day of meetings in a different time zone. Remarkably, she rarely lost focus.

  On one occasion, in July 2010, she flew overnight from Hanoi to Andrews Air Force Base so that she could attend a staff retreat at Blair House, the nineteenth-century yellow row house across from the White House that is used as an inn for visiting dignitaries, from Queen Elizabeth II to Afghan president Hamid Karzai. Each member of her senior staff was instructed to prepare a two-minute briefing on the status of issues in his or her area of expertise. It was hot and the room was crowded, but that didn’t stop Richard Holbrooke from going on six and a half times as long as the time allotted for him. Deputy Secretary Jim Steinberg took up ten minutes. By noon, after nearly four hours, most of the staff had checked out mentally, and some were openly scrolling through messages on their BlackBerrys.

  The session dragged on for another five hours after that, but Hillary never seemed to lose interest or focus. “She did not look at her BlackBerry. She had questions. She looked intently. She listened to everything. She focused the entire day,” one participant said. Then her aides were invited to her house on Whitehaven for a reception. Hillary shifted from work to life, greeting spouses in the kitchen and the living room and asking about their children.

  When the gathering began to wind down, a little before nine p.m., one Hillary aide was getting into his car to go home when he caught a glimpse of her sneaking away from the party at her own house. She was loading bags into a sport-utility vehicle that would take her to the airport so she could spend the weekend in Chappaqua.

  “I was like ‘How did she do that? How did she stay awake all day? How did she stay focused? How did she stay so gracious? And, my God, she’s getting on another plane,’ ” the aide said later. “She’s obviously not bionic. Her ability to focus all day long through all these people—and she’s laughing, she’s paying attention, she’s reacting to stuff.”

  By the tail end of her tenure, Hillary joked with friends that she was looking forward to the time when her schedule was filled with nothing but “beaches and speeches.” But before she could escape to a seaside resort or the friendly environs of the paid lecture circuit, her unrelenting work ethic caught up to her and gave her a health scare that began to color discussions of a 2016 presidential run. Of the few major asterisks surrounding a potential bid, perhaps the largest is whether Hillary, who
will be sixty-nine on inauguration day in 2017, can physically sustain the demands of both a modern presidential campaign and the presidency, back-to-back. It was at the end of such a six-year stretch of unrelenting campaigning and governing that Hillary suffered a sobering series of ailments, one of which could have killed her.

  She had been bouncing around the world on both sides of the Thanksgiving break—Australia, Singapore, Thailand, Burma, Cambodia, the Middle East (the hastily scheduled trip to broker the cease-fire), the Czech Republic, Belgium, Ireland, and Northern Ireland—when she caught a nasty stomach virus. By the time she got home from Andrews Air Force Base late the night of Friday, December 7, she was feeling awful. Over the weekend, as she battled dehydration, Hillary fell in her bathroom and hit her head. The stomach bug was bad enough that the State Department initially pushed back a planned trip to Tunisia, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates by a day, and then canceled it altogether. That meant Hillary missed important meetings of the Friends of the Syrian People, the committee of nations supporting reforms in that country.

  In the summer and fall, Hillary had joined David Petraeus in a private internal campaign to get Obama to sign off on arming the Syrian rebels—but opponents of their proposal, concerned about the possibility that arms would end up in the hands of extremist enemies of the United Sates and its allies, won out in the short run.

  It wasn’t until a few days after her fall, when she saw a doctor, that Hillary learned she had suffered a concussion.

  She was supposed to testify on Capitol Hill in conjunction with the release of an Accountability Review Board (ARB) report on Benghazi. Under a system that had been in place for decades, Hillary had appointed the quasi-independent board to review what had happened; to determine who, if anyone, had failed to do his or her job before, during, or after the attack; and to make recommendations about how the State Department could avoid a repeat of the tragedy. Led by retired admiral Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who had befriended Hillary in their early days together at National Security Council meetings, and former ambassador Thomas Pickering, a well-respected veteran of the foreign service, the board was technically independent but also very much stacked with people sympathetic to the notion that the secretary wasn’t directly responsible for the failings of her underlings.