Blood Feud: The Clintons vs. the Obamas (23 page)

That, of course, was untrue.

As my reporting in this book has made unmistakably clear, Hillary was wholeheartedly dedicated to her next run for the White House, and her coy demeanor was a politically convenient act. She was waiting for the right time, after the 2014 midterm elections, to declare her candidacy.

“You know,” Barbara pressed on, “your husband wants you to run in 2016. What do you say to him?”

“He wants me to do what
I
want to do,” Hillary said. “And he has made that very clear.”

Which was an even bigger falsehood.

Bill Clinton woke up every morning with one thought in mind: how to ensure a Clinton Restoration in the White House. As one
of Clinton’s best friends put it to the author of this book, “Bill will make Hillary president or die trying.”

Barbara then pointed out that if Hillary chose to run in 2016, she would be sixty-nine years old, and that if she won a second term, she’d be seventy-seven on leaving office.

“Is your age a concern to you?” asked Barbara, who was still going strong at the age of eighty-three.

“It really isn’t,” Hillary said. “I am, thankfully, knock on wood, not only healthy, but have incredible stamina and energy.”

And that was the biggest lie of all.

For Hillary Clinton suffered from serious medical conditions. She had managed to keep her medical history secret out of fear that, should it become public, it would disqualify her from becoming president. Indeed, the day after Barbara Walters’s interview was broadcast, Hillary fainted, struck her head, and was reported to have suffered a concussion.

Hillary’s fainting spell occurred just days before she was scheduled to testify on Benghazi in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee. The committee chairmen excused her from appearing on the Hill, and this inevitably raised eyebrows in many quarters. Had Hillary faked a concussion in order to dodge her day of reckoning before Congress? Former Republican congressman Allen West thought so; he told Fox News that Hillary was suffering from an illness known as “Benghazi flu.” The
New York Post
called it a “head fake.”

Faced with a new twist to the Benghazi scandal, Philippe Reines, Hillary’s personal spokesman, instantly swung into damage control mode. Reines was a sketchy character with a decidedly mixed reputation among many of Washington’s media mavens.
Vogue
magazine described him as Hillary’s “Michael Clayton-esque image man and fixer.”
Gawker
, the irreverent blog, called Reines “an inveterate gossip-spreader, self-promoter, and berater of reporters on behalf of his boss.” When CNN reported that Ambassador Christopher Stevens had kept a diary in which he worried about an al-Qaeda attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi—a story that contradicted Foggy Bottom’s official account—Reines slammed the network as “disgusting.” Questioned by the late BuzzFeed correspondent Michael Hastings about his intemperate attack on CNN, Reines called Hastings an “unmitigated asshole” and told him in an email to “Fuck Off.” In short, Philippe Reines was Hillary’s attack dog, and anything he said about her medical condition had to be taken with a grain of salt.

According to the version of events that Reines fed the media, Hillary had been alone at home in Whitehaven when she succumbed to a stomach virus, which she had contracted during a trip to Europe. The virus, he said, led to extreme dehydration and caused Hillary to faint and strike her head. Reines didn’t say exactly when the incident occurred, nor did he mention the fact that Hillary had suffered a similar fainting spell in 2005 during an appearance before a women’s group in Buffalo. When asked by Michael Hastings if Hillary had been hospitalized, Reines would only say that she had been seen by her doctors and was recovering at home.

That was Philippe Reines’s story, and the media, which was deprived of any other source of information, went with it.

It turned out to be a pack of lies.

“Bill was traveling when Hillary fell and hit her head,” one of Hillary’s best friends said, “and he was furious at Philippe Reines for the cock-and-bull story he fabricated about a stomach virus and dehydration, which, Bill said, sounded implausible and naturally led to all kinds of conspiracy theories.”

When Bill Clinton arrived back in Washington, he took Reines aside and screamed at him for the inept way he had handled the situation.

“This was a goddamn abortion!” Clinton told Reines. “What were you thinking? Terrible mishandling. Incompetence. The dehydration thing is a transparent lie and absurd. It suggests that Hillary and her handlers weren’t bright enough to see to it that she got regular drinks of water.”

The true story of what happened to Hillary, which is being recounted in these pages for the first time, was radically different from Reines’s version.

To begin with, Hillary fainted while she was working in her seventh-floor office at the State Department, not at home, as Reines told the media. She was treated at the State Department’s infirmary and then, at her own insistence, taken to Whitehaven to recover. However, as soon as Bill appeared on the scene and was able to assess Hillary’s condition for himself, he ordered that she be immediately flown to New York–Presbyterian Hospital
in the Fort Washington section of Manhattan. When Reines subsequently released a statement confirming that Hillary was being treated at the hospital over the New Year’s holiday, it naturally intensified speculation about the seriousness of her medical condition.

While she was at the hospital, doctors diagnosed Hillary with several problems.

She had a right transverse venous thrombosis, or a blood clot between her brain and skull. She had developed the clot in one of the veins that drains blood from the brain to the heart. The doctors explained that blood stagnates when you spend a lot of time on airplanes, and Hillary had clocked countless hours flying around the world.

To make matters worse, it turned out that Hillary had an intrinsic tendency to form clots and faint. In addition to the fainting spell she suffered in Buffalo a few years before, she had fainted boarding her plane in Yemen, fallen and fractured her elbow in 2009, and suffered other unspecified fainting episodes. Several years earlier, she had developed a clot in her leg and was put on anticoagulant therapy by her doctor. However, she had foolishly stopped taking her anticoagulant medicine, which might have explained the most recent thrombotic event.

“The unique thing about clotting in the brain is that it could have transformed into a stroke,” said a cardiac specialist with knowledge of Hillary’s condition. “But that danger was now behind Hillary. I don’t see these clotting events as precluding her from running for president. There should be no residual effects of these clots. There have been several presidents, including Franklin Roosevelt, Ike, and Nixon, who were treated by anticoagulants.
If Hillary maintains her anticoagulant therapy, it would be rare for a clot to reappear.”

According to a source close to Hillary, a thorough medical examination revealed that Hillary’s tendency to form clots was the least of her problems. She also suffered from a thyroid condition, which was common among women of her age, and her fainting spells indicated there was an underlying heart problem as well. A cardiac stress test indicated that her heart rhythm and heart valves were not normal. Put into layman’s language, her heart valves were not pumping in a steady way.

When the author attempted to contact the Clintons’ cardiologist, Dr. Allan Schwartz, he refused to comment, which made it impossible to determine the exact nature of Hillary’s medical status or its long-term significance. However, sources who discussed Hillary’s medical condition with her were told that Hillary’s doctors considered performing valve-replacement surgery. They ultimately decided against it. Still, before they released Hillary from the hospital, they warned Bill Clinton: “She has to be carefully monitored for the rest of her life.”

Bill was still furious at the way the whole episode had been handled. He called it “a disaster” from a political point of view.

“He was red-faced and spitting mad,” said a friend who was with him when he visited Hillary in the hospital. “I was worried that he would be hospitalized with Hillary. He was on the verge of panic about Hillary’s health crisis and the political crisis that it could cause. Everything he had worked for, all his efforts to
make Hillary president, his dream of a third and fourth term in the White House—all this was called into question.

“He told Chelsea, who looked stricken and was in tears, that she was going to have to intervene on her mother’s behalf when he couldn’t be on the scene,” this friend continued. “He said to Chelsea, ‘I don’t trust the idiots that are around your mother. You’ve got to jump in.’ Chelsea got a grip very quickly and shortly after gave the press a statement. She smiled and said her mother was just great and on her way to a full recovery. Bill didn’t let Hillary see his anger, because he didn’t want to upset her. But she was as shaken as I had ever seen her. She was very frightened by what was going on with her heart and the possible consequences, especially of heart surgery in her future.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

“THERE WILL BE BLOOD”

F
ive and a half weeks after her fainting spell, Hillary Clinton finally made it to Capitol Hill for her long-awaited testimony on Benghazi. She was dressed in a forest green pantsuit, which accentuated her sallow complexion. Under the bright TV lights, the crisscross of wrinkles on her forehead and around her eyes and mouth appeared more deeply etched than ever. Because of the aftereffects of her concussion, she had replaced her contact lenses with a pair of thick eyeglasses, and she played nervously with the frames as she read a prepared statement to the members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The
Guardian
of Britain, which posted a real-time blog of the hearing, noted that Hillary’s tone of voice “was almost plaintive, as if there’s an element of unfairness to her having to testify.”

In many ways, the hearing was a prelude to the 2016 presidential campaign, for Hillary faced two members of the committee—Rand
Paul of Kentucky and Marco Rubio of Florida—who were among a long list of Republicans considering a run for the White House.

“Had I been president at the time, and I found that you did not read the cables from Benghazi, you did not read the cables from Ambassador Stevens,” Rand Paul said, “I would have relieved you of your post.”

But the most dramatic moment came when Ron Johnson, a Tea Party Republican and the senior senator from Wisconsin, asked Hillary why she had given an inaccurate version of the Benghazi attack and insisted that it was a spontaneous protest rather than a planned assault.