Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign has been all the buzz in Washington. The book, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, is full of stories that probably never would have been told if Hillary had eked out an Electoral College win. Not just because a victorious campaign tends not to air its dirty laundry, but because President Hillary Clinton would have been in a position to punish anyone caught being disloyal. And if there was anything the residents of Hillaryland knew, it was not to run afoul of the boss’s obsessive demands for loyalty.
Hillary had her ways of knowing whose devotion could be counted on: Among the most eye-grabbing revelations in a book full of eye-grabbing revelations is that Hillary—convinced disloyal staffers were to blame for the failure of her 2008 campaign—set out, Queeg-like, to prove it. According to Shattered, she “instructed a trusted aide to access the campaign’s server and download the messages sent and received by top staffers.” She set about reading her team’s correspondence. Why did she stoop so low? She was driven to it, “Prizing loyalty most among human traits.”
