HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (47 page)

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.

While she worked from home, Hillary’s stomach issues dissipated, but the effects of the concussion remained.

Hillary had been scheduled to testify on Benghazi in the House and Senate on December 20. But after she
sustained the concussion, doctors told her not to work. Her aides planned to announce on Friday, December 14, that she would have to cancel her planned appearances on Capitol Hill. But because of the unfolding Newtown, Connecticut, school shootings, they held off a day. On Saturday, Mills called Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Senator
John Kerry, the chairs of the two panels, to inform them, just before a public announcement was made.

Republicans and right-tilting media accused her of inventing an injury to elude investigators. On December 18, the
New York Post
editorial page called it
a “head fake.” The night before, during an appearance on Fox News, John Bolton, the ambassador to the United Nations under President George W. Bush, accused Hillary of concocting
a “diplomatic illness.” Representative Allen West of Florida gilded the lily, calling her affliction “
Benghazi flu.” It wasn’t the first time, during her final year at State, that charges of duplicity had been hurled at her and her inner circle: over the summer, Representative Michele Bachmann, the wild-eyed Minnesota Republican on the House Intelligence Committee,
had accused Huma Abedin of having ties to terrorists. But after Hillary’s fall, the old anti-Clinton conspiracy machine really kicked into high gear. To her critics, the timing of her injury seemed all too convenient, just as the State Department was releasing the ARB findings.

The attacks on Hillary’s character brought out the aggressive side of her staff in response. On Christmas Eve, Bolton received a lump of coal in his e-mail inbox. Reines had written Bolton the first of several e-mails, sent over the course of a month, expressing outrage over the “diplomatic illness” remark and providing updates on Hillary’s health. The final missive was sent on January 23, just after Hillary testified before the Senate and House committees. “J—have not heard back from you, and I’m honestly getting concerned,” Reines wrote sarcastically. “I hope you haven’t come down with anything. Something’s definitely going around. The CDC says influenza activity is high across most of the United States. They have a very useful FluView report posted here.” Helpfully, Reines included a link. “But who really knows these days what’s made up and what’s not—could be millions of people across the country faking it,” he wrote. “Anyway, I promised to keep you updated, so I want to make sure you have the transcripts of the secretary’s testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign
Affairs Committee. Best, Philippe.” He pasted the full transcripts of both hearings—each ran several hours—into the body of the e-mail, copying Bolton’s assistant. Bolton never responded, but his assistant sent back a reply about an hour later that subtly signaled her boss had gotten the message. “Thanks,” she wrote.

On December 19, two days after Bolton’s initial remarks, Obama attended the State Department’s annual holiday party, which Hillary missed because she was still recovering. Obama, who had spent so much time in close quarters with Hillary on their recent trip to Southeast Asia, had already called, in the wake of the injury, to express his concern for her.

When he arrived at State for the holiday party, Capricia Marshall greeted him.

“How’s my girl doing?” Obama asked.

“She was so touched by your call,” Marshall replied.

Obama stopped and looked Marshall in the eye to make sure his message sank in.

“I love her, love her,” he said. “I love my friend.”

State had released the ARB report earlier that day, and Hillary sent an accompanying letter to Congress outlining her instructions to the department to begin implementing all twenty-three of the board’s recommendations for actions that might prevent similar lethal attacks in the future. The review board came down hard on senior State Department officials several rungs below Hillary but didn’t implicate her.

“
Systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels within two bureaus of the State Department resulted in a Special Mission [consulate] security posture that was inadequate for Benghazi and grossly inadequate to deal with the attack that took place,” the board found. “Certain senior State Department officials within two bureaus demonstrated a lack of proactive leadership and management ability in their responses to security concerns posed by Special Mission Benghazi, given the deteriorating
threat environment and the lack of reliable host government protection. However, the board did not find reasonable cause to determine that any individual U.S. Government employee breached his or her duty.”

Four State Department employees were immediately
put on leave in response to the ARB. Eric Boswell, the assistant secretary for diplomatic security, resigned from his post as assistant secretary—though, as it turned out, he did not quit State altogether, as he held another position within the department. Charlene Lamb, who had testified before Issa’s committee that the security posture in Benghazi was appropriate, and two others were moved out of their jobs pending further review of their cases. Three of the four worked in diplomatic security. The fourth, Raymond Maxwell, who was a deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, later told Josh Rogin of the
Daily Beast
that he had “
no involvement to any degree with decisions on security and the funding of security at our diplomatic mission in Benghazi.”

Maxwell appeared to be a fall guy for security decisions made above his pay grade. But, unbeknownst to him, the board found that he had not been reading his classified material—which incensed Mike Mullen—according to a senior State official.