HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton

by Jonathan Allen

  Even Hillary knew it was time to back off a little bit. Her friends said she was leaving public life behind at a perfect time, when she could rebound from the concussion and take the time off that she needed so desperately, time she had never had in a twenty-year run as first lady, senator, and secretary of state.

  On February 1, 2013, in a bookend ceremony in the atrium of the State Department’s main building, with all the pomp of her arrival four years earlier, Hillary addressed her troops before she exited the big glass front doors one last time. Most of Hillary’s closest advisers were leaving with her, but Marshall and Mills would remain at the State Department well into 2013, and many other Clinton loyalists remained marbled into the bureaucracy as Kerry struggled to fill political jobs with his own people.

  “I’m proud of the work we’ve done to elevate diplomacy and development, to serve the nation we all love,” she told the crowd, “to understand the challenges, the threats, and the opportunities that the United States faces, and to work with all our heart and all of our might to make sure that America is secure, that our interests are promoted, and our values are respected.”

  At a farewell party at her house that week, aides reminisced with Hillary about the last four years. Marshall joked about Jon Favreau’s cardboard-cutout groping incident way back in 2008. “You’re still talking about that?” Hillary asked, her amusement evident. The old injuries were forgiven, if not entirely forgotten.

  Despite the criticism that she had struck no major peace deal, the last Gallup poll before her departure, taken after Benghazi in November 2012, found that 63 percent of Americans approved of the job she was doing, three points below her peak as secretary but nine points higher than she had stood during the 2008 Democratic National Convention. It was within the margin of error of her standing when she was sworn in as secretary, which was 65 percent, suggesting that, at the very least, she had served her four years without doing any damage to her prospects for the presidency in 2016. Already, perhaps inevitably, her interest in running was a hot topic in the national press, and clues about her viability were piling up.

  In her final days at State, Hillary sent out 811 individualized, typed thank-you notes. Delivered in special envelopes with cardboard inserts—so they could be preserved as keepsakes—the notes were sent to cabinet officials; senior members of the military; national security staff; House and Senate leaders; and State Department employees who were political appointees, members of the foreign service, and members of the civil service. No doubt some of the recipients viewed the letters as possible presidential mementos.

  TWENTY

  Ready for Hillary

  Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign for the presidency had already begun—without her—on November 6, 2012, the day Barack Obama won a second term.

  That night Allida Black and Adam Parkhomenko, veterans of Hillary’s 2008 campaign, began e-mailing each other about plans to construct a virtual national campaign called Ready for Hillary. They knew Hillary had been on the sidelines of politics for four years and hadn’t been able to build her list of volunteers, activists, and donors as aggressively as an overtly political figure could, at a time when the rapid advancement of social media had revolutionized the art of developing a national constituency. They wanted to build Hillary a grassroots organization while she decided whether to run.

  Black, a George Washington University professor with a background in social and political activism dating back to the 1970s, had traveled to fourteen states for Hillary’s 2008 campaign, attending more than five hundred house parties and knocking on more than five thousand doors by her count.

  Part of her allegiance to Hillary stemmed from the fact that after Black’s mother, Anna, suffered a heart attack, Hillary had called Anna at the hospital and had been the last person to talk to her. “I’m really sorry that I haven’t met you,” Hillary said. “But I want you to know that you must be a wonderful woman because you raised a wonderful daughter.” Then Black’s mother died.

  Black and Parkhomenko, who had worked under the deposed Patti Solis Doyle on the 2008 campaign, both had strong ties to Hillaryland’s central nervous system. After Parkhomenko left the campaign following Doyle’s departure, he and Black worked on a petition drive called Vote Both, organized around the hope of a Clinton/Obama or Obama/Clinton “dream ticket.” And when Parkhomenko ran for a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates in 2009, his small donor list was packed with people who had worked for Hillary or contributed large sums of money to her campaign. He reported receiving donations from Elizabeth Bagley and José Villarreal, the pair who raised money for the Shanghai Expo; Beth Dozoretz, a longtime big-dollar Clinton family donor who would later be appointed head of the State Department’s Arts in Embassies program; heavy-hitting Texas megadonor Alonzo Cantu; and a who’s who of Hillary aides starting with Capricia Marshall, Harold Ickes, Burns Strider, Minyon Moore, and Jonathan Mantz, the national finance director for Hillary’s 2008 campaign.

  Black, who knew Maggie Williams, Melanne Verveer, and Marshall well, believed strongly that if Hillary didn’t like what she was doing, someone high up in Hillaryland would call and say “Allida, shut this down!” That call never came, and over time an increasing number of high-profile Hillary loyalists jumped on board to give the fledgling super PAC a boost in credibility and fund-raising prowess.

  Hillary’s supporters weren’t the only ones champing at the bit to run the 2016 race. The day after the election, at Politico’s headquarters in Rosslyn, Virginia, editors slated a story about a possible Hillary Clinton–Jeb Bush 2016 matchup for the top of the website the following morning. The story, which began “American politics may be headed back to the future,” posted online at 4:34 a.m. on November 8, less than thirty-six hours after Obama was declared the winner of the 2012 race, and it carried the bylines of the paper’s A-team of political reporters, Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman.

  Not too long after that, the RNC researcher who dealt with foreign policy issues was assigned to full-time Hillary 2016 duty. While the Republican Party kept tabs on other potential Democratic candidates—Vice President Joe Biden, New York governor Andrew Cuomo, and Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, among others—Hillary was what RNC communications director Sean Spicer called the “eight-hundred-pound gorilla” in the Democratic field.

  Even former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who had angered mutual supporters by claiming neutrality while tacitly helping Obama in 2008, jumped on the bandwagon in mid-December, presaging a trend in which women politicians who opposed Hillary in 2008 treated the prospect of a 2016 run as a chance to get back into the good graces of Hillary and her loyalists. “I hope she goes,” Pelosi told NBC’s Andrea Mitchell. “If she decided to run, and I think she would win, she would go into the White House as well prepared or better prepared than almost anybody who has served in that office in a very long time.”

  The depth and breadth of the list of prominent leaders who thought Hillary would make for a capable candidate and commander in chief were impressive. David Petraeus, once mentioned as a possible GOP opponent to Obama, is among those who think she’s more than up to the task. “She’d be a tremendous president,” he said.

  Everyone in the political world, it seemed, was ready for Hillary to start the 2016 campaign—everyone but Hillary.

  After she left State, Hillary took a breather. Though she was the subject of countless headlines, she said very little publicly in her first six weeks as a private citizen. In mid-February she announced that the Harry Walker Agency would manage her lucrative turn on the lecture circuit—the “speeches” part of her “beaches and speeches” mantra. She persuaded Bill to take her out on a triple date with her friends Meryl Streep and Esprit founder Susie Tompkins Buell, and their husbands, to see the play Ann on Broadway. Hillary already had seen the show, a one-woman act about former Texas governor Ann Richards, and she desperately wanted Bill to see it with her the second time. The couples topped off the evening with a dinner at Cafe Lux
embourg on the Upper West Side, the kind of outing she had rarely had time for in years past. She was spotted a handful of times in New York and in Washington, where she continued to live part-time and where she set up a small postgovernment operation on Connecticut Avenue called Hillary Rodham Clinton Office, or HRCO in the e-mail convention her aides used.

  Then in mid-March, prodded by the timing of the arguments before the Supreme Court on a pair of gay marriage cases, Hillary jumped back into the domestic policy debate, in an area in which public attitudes had shifted most dramatically during her time away from the political battlefield. While at State, she had pushed forward on gay rights in ways that she felt fit within the four corners of foreign policy, but she hadn’t addressed her own position on gay marriage in the United States. “She and Cheryl mapped out an agenda,” said one of Hillary’s aides, that boiled down to “We’re going to do, within our field, what we can do, we’re going to do things internally to help our own people, we’re going to put it on the diplomatic agenda, and that’s how we’re going to work on this issue.”

  Hillary’s strong support for gay rights in the diplomatic sphere was overshadowed by her reticence in the domestic political debate, which garnered far more attention among the general public. Still, she had rewritten the department’s rules so that same-sex partners of diplomats posted overseas would get the same benefits as husbands and wives; incorporated the protection and advancement of gay rights abroad as part of the core mission of American diplomats; and given a December 2011 speech to the UN Human Rights Council in which she compared the minority status of gays and lesbians to that of racial, religious, and ethnic minorities, declaring, in an echo of her famous women’s rights speech in Beijing during the Clinton administration, that “gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights.” What she said to the Human Rights Council, in advocating for the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, went much further than an endorsement of gay marriage. She said that all human rights should apply to them, including international legal protections against violence and discrimination. Beyond the international audience, said one Hillary friend who has worked on gay rights around the world, “it says to American diplomats, ‘You can’t fuck this up, because I’m gonna hold you accountable,’ and that’s pretty stratospheric.”

  She also hinted at the domestic debate in the United States, asserting that “my own country’s record on human rights for gay people is far from perfect.” And on a personal level, Hillary celebrated the weddings of same-sex friends. “At long last,” she wrote in a note when Allida Black married her longtime partner, Judy Beck, on April 25, 2012.

  But within the United States, as the general public and many politicians came to favor gay marriage, Hillary’s last known position was the one from her 2008 campaign: she opposed it. Joe Biden had thrown his support behind gay marriage in an interview on Meet the Press, pushing Barack Obama to follow suit earlier than he wanted to in an election year. Hillary may have been ahead of the curve in the international human rights sphere, but she was behind it in terms of domestic politics. Like many other politicians, including Ohio Republican senator Rob Portman, she thought the oral arguments before the Supreme Court offered an opportunity to weigh in on the issue in a meaningful and timely way.

  So in early March, she conducted a conference call with some of her aides, including speechwriter Dan Schwerin, to map out what she wanted to say in a video clip recorded for the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the venerable Washington-based gay rights organization. Hillary wanted to make two main points: she supported gay marriage, and she respected the views of those who didn’t. For years, friends of Hillary’s had seen her struggle with the question of whether legalizing gay marriage could infringe on the rights or beliefs of religious groups, and she told her aides that she wanted to be respectful of their views even as her public position shifted. “There was not a what-should-my-position-be kind of conversation,” said a source involved in the discussion. “She was pretty clear. But she was equally clear that she was not going to demonize people who disagreed with her on this.”

  On March 18, the week before the oral arguments at the Supreme Court, HRC released Hillary’s taped remarks. “LGBT Americans are our colleagues, our teachers, our soldiers, our friends, our loved ones, and they are full and equal citizens and deserve the rights of citizenship. That includes marriage,” she said, looking directly into the camera. “That’s why I support marriage for lesbian and gay couples.”

  Reporters seized on it as a politically motivated shift. “Hillary Rodham Clinton’s embrace of gay marriage Monday signals she may be seriously weighing a 2016 presidential run and trying to avoid the type of late-to-the-party caution that hurt her first bid,” Chuck Babington of the Associated Press wrote.

  Despite the obvious political advantage of moving quickly on an issue on which public opinion polls showed metastatic growth, Hillary’s aides insisted that her decision had nothing to do with electoral politics. “Anything we did would be perceived politically,” one aide said, “and obviously that’s not why she wanted to do it.”

  Regardless of her motivation, the video was a signal that she felt comfortable weighing in directly on domestic issues again, after four years of accruing the political benefits of remaining above the fray. Republicans were already determined to bring her back down into partisan political warfare. Three days earlier Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell trotted out what would become the GOP’s mainstay argument against both Hillary and Biden, that they were too old to be president. “Don’t tell me the Democrats are the party of the future when their presidential ticket for 2016 is shaping up to look like a rerun of The Golden Girls,” McConnell said to roars from the audience at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. National Republicans set out to contrast their crop of younger rising stars—Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Texas senator Ted Cruz, and New Jersey governor Chris Christie—with Democrats born in the 1940s.

  The battle for the White House was in full swing, and Hillary’s vacation was over. Around the same time, she began calling advisers and a tight-knit circle of friends with a clear message. “I’ve rested now,” she told them. “I’m ready to work.”

  As with the possible presidential campaign, the groundwork for Hillary’s return to the private sector had been laid by others. Over the course of more than two years, first Chelsea and then Huma had spent time cleaning up the freewheeling Clinton Foundation and its spin-offs, including the Clinton Global Initiative. Shortly after her summer 2010 wedding, Chelsea, who had worked in business consulting at the firm McKinsey & Company, jumped into analyzing how her father’s office was run. The younger Clinton, thirty-one years old at the time, felt the foundation was in need of some serious housekeeping, if not housecleaning, sources familiar with the situation said, and an internal audit was ordered up.

  “Chelsea was involved in that effort,” said one foundation insider, “but rumors that have circulated that Chelsea was gonna come in and clean the place out and get rid of persons X, Y, and Z are inaccurate. I don’t think her behavior was any different than any kid who sees their parents’ business in need of some reorganization.”

  During the restructuring of the foundation, Chelsea also recommended that the foundation take a look at bringing aboard her friend and former McKinsey colleague Eric Braverman as chief executive, a move that later came to be.

  But Chelsea’s arrival seemed to signal a more dramatic shift in Clintonworld. Not only was Chelsea, who would become the vice chairwoman of the foundation board, for the first time owning her role as heir to the family political and philanthropic dynasty, but this transitional period was also the beginning of the end for Doug Band. Chelsea grew concerned that Band’s business ties were tainting the Clinton brand her father had worked so hard to build. While Hillary is said to have very much appreciated Band’s work to raise money for the Clinton library and to help pay off her campaign debt, Band’s bad-cop role as gatek
eeper to Bill also rubbed some of her advisers, and certainly other Democrats, the wrong way.

  Band made Bill notoriously difficult to access and was often hard to pin down himself. Even Obama’s emissaries had to pursue him for months to set up the November 2011 meeting in Bill’s Harlem office that set the stage for Bill’s involvement in the 2012 campaign. By then, Band was already transitioning out of the foundation empire that he had built for Bill. He had started an international consulting company with two other partners, called Teneo Holdings, that hung its hat on having Bill Clinton and former British prime minister Tony Blair as paid advisers. Teneo expanded rapidly, counting two hundred employees in thirteen global offices within two years of its launch. More than anything, the firm built its reputation on access, boasting on its website that it worked “exclusively with the CEOs and leaders of the world’s largest companies, institutions and governments” and solved problems by “leveraging … deep global relationships.”

  One of Band’s partners, Declan Kelly, had been appointed by Hillary to be America’s economic envoy to Ireland before starting the company. The State Department cleared Bill Clinton’s role as a paid adviser to Teneo, but the whole idea left a bad taste in the mouths of some Clinton loyalists. Wasn’t there at least the appearance of a conflict of interest if the secretary of state’s husband was being paid to advise a company with international clients? Some Clinton allies thought Band was putting Bill and Hillary in an awkward position to help line his own pockets and theirs.

  But the Clintons have a blind spot when it comes to their closest aides, including Band and Huma Abedin. The Clintons’ loyalty to those two aides would come back to haunt Hillary.

  Still, the arrangement of Band working for Teneo and CGI didn’t last long. In February 2012, Politico reported that Bill had severed his financial ties to Teneo. Around the same time, Band was pushed out of his role as the linchpin for the global initiative, reportedly at the urging of Hillary loyalists. “You can do CGI or Teneo, but you can’t do both,” Bill Clinton had told Band, according to a New York Post source. “Doug chose Teneo.”