“Did you have any idea of the depth of this story?” John Podesta, now the chairman of Hillary for America, wrote in an e-mail to Robby Mook, the campaign’s manager-to-be, on March 3, 2015. The Times had just reported that Hillary Clinton had used a private e-mail address during her time as Secretary of State, circumventing the government system. “Nope,” Mook replied. “We brought up the existence of emails . . . but were told that everything was taken care of.” It is now clear that this was far from the case. The additional revelation of a private server led to a months-long F.B.I. investigation into Clinton’s e-mail arrangements, and into whether she or her aides had mishandled classified information. That probe ended, in July, with a recommendation that no criminal charges be filed. Even then, the story did not go away, with Donald Trump charging that the inquiry had been rigged.
Then, last Friday, James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, sent a letter to congressional committee chairs saying that the bureau was back at it. A new cache of e-mails had been found, and Comey did not know how long it would take to go through them. This development was reportedly spurred by material found on a device that Huma Abedin, one of Clinton’s closest aides, shared with her estranged husband, Anthony Weiner, a disgraced former congressman. The F.B.I. was looking at Weiner’s devices because he had allegedly had inappropriate exchanges with a fifteen-year-old girl.
“So that is a big announcement,” Trump said on Friday, at a rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, as the crowd shouted, “Lock her up!” “Perhaps, finally, justice will be done.” Clinton, meanwhile, expressed surprise at Comey’s lack of clarity and at his timing, so soon before the election. She called on him to explain the issue—“Let’s get it out”—and said she was confident that the F.B.I.’s conclusion would be the same as in July.
Comey’s letter came at the end of what was already a bad week for Clinton. The polls, which had shown her comfortably ahead, were tightening. The missive from Podesta to Mook was one of more than thirty-five thousand e-mails stolen from Podesta’s account—U.S. intelligence agencies believe that the culprits were hackers linked to Russia—and released by WikiLeaks. The campaign has not confirmed the e-mails’ authenticity, emphasizing instead that the Kremlin has “weaponized” WikiLeaks in an effort to influence the U.S. election. But it has not pointed to any that it thinks are forgeries. The Podesta e-mails join the thousands that Clinton delivered to the State Department after her server became public. (She deleted thousands more.) We have by now read so many e-mails from her and her aides that the provenance can be confusing. WikiLeaks has doled out its haul in more than twenty batches, and, as with the State Department e-mails, Clinton’s defenders began by arguing that they revealed nothing more than the normal business of politics.
It is easy to dismiss a note in which Podesta, during the primaries, calls Senator Bernie Sanders a “doofus.” (Sanders shrugged it off, saying that there were some pretty unflattering things about Clinton in his campaign’s e-mail.) But the accretion of details in the Podesta e-mails indicate, if not actual wrongdoing, an indifference to the distorting role that money plays in the land of the Clintons. In a note from early 2015, Abedin explains why it would be difficult to cancel a planned Hillary Clinton appearance at a meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative in Morocco: “The King has personally committed approx $12 million both for the endowment and to support the meeting.” Backing out would be especially awkward, Abedin said, since approaching the Moroccans was Clinton’s idea. “She created this mess and she knows it.” It certainly seems unwise for Clinton to have put herself in the position of owing a big favor to the King of Morocco, a country with human-rights issues, while contemplating a Presidential run. In the end, Hillary didn’t go, but Bill and Chelsea did, and stayed in one of the King’s palaces.
Similarly, it’s irrelevant that, in late 2011, Doug Band, who for years was one of Bill Clinton’s closest aides, said that Chelsea acted like a “spoiled brat.” But it is relevant that he did so in the context of a fight over what Chelsea saw as Band’s efforts to trade on her father’s name through his consulting company, Teneo. She accused Band of “hustling” for business at foundation events. In a memo for lawyers brought in by Chelsea, Band argues that any hustling was for the Clintons’ personal benefit, far more than for his own, garnering Bill Clinton alone some fifty million dollars. Band says that, for example, he leaned on charitable donors to give the former President speaking engagements and consulting contracts, in a nexus that he refers to as “Bill Clinton, Inc.” In other e-mails, Band complains that he is the only one being asked to avoid conflicts of interest, of which, he says, Bill, Chelsea, and other senior figures at the foundation have plenty: “Everyone takes, everyone.” The extent to which all of this is not normal can be measured by the response of those charged with getting Clinton elected. “We really need to shut Morocco and these paid speeches down,” Mook writes to Podesta in February, 2015.
Nowhere is the dismay more evident than in the case of Clinton’s e-mail setup. Neera Tanden, who runs the Center for American Progress, and was close to the campaign, writes, “Do we actually know who told Hillary she could use a private email? And has that person been drawn and quartered? Like whole thing is fucking insane.” In other messages, Tanden rages about Clinton’s reluctance to apologize for her choices, and about the tendency toward secrecy that she and members of her innermost circle exhibit. Tanden refers to this instinct as “kryptonite.”
Neither e-mail story is likely to dissipate before the election, in part because both reflect what is, for all Clinton’s strengths, one of her flaws: her failure to draw boundaries between the personal and the political, between her family’s private interests and its public obligations. Both sets of e-mails show the idealism and the inclusiveness that are the true drivers of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. She is unquestionably the best candidate for President. And yet the week ended with Trump glorying in the renewed F.B.I. investigation and rallying crowds with tales of pay-to-play. For Clinton’s defenders to say that all this is just politics as usual is to explain why so many Americans distrust politicians—and why, perhaps, politics ought to change. Clinton herself needs to make the case that she can bring reform. And she has a week left to do it. ♦
