Hillary Clinton’s campaign-in-waiting began to worry about the problems her family’s foundation could cause months before Clinton formally entered the presidential race.
Emails obtained illegally from the inbox of John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chair, shed light on the concerns Clinton’s inner circle shared privately about her political liabilities as they prepared to launch her second bid for the White House.
The more than 10,000 emails published by WikiLeaks as of Friday also suggest Clinton’s team repeatedly misjudged the severity of scandals surrounding her private server and the Clinton Foundation as they dovetailed into one raging controversy.
In March 2015, just weeks before the official launch of her campaign, Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin, one of her closest aides, insisted that Bill Clinton should be allowed to deliver a scheduled paid speech to Morgan Stanley three days after her announcement.
“HRC very strongly did not want him to cancel that particular speech,” Abedin wrote to Robby Mook, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager.
Mook advised against the move, arguing that allowing Bill Clinton to give the speech was “begging for a bad rollout.”
“HRC is reiterating her original position. She does not want him to cancel,” Abedin replied.
However, Mook didn’t budge on his opposition to the paid speech.
“I know this is not the answer she wants, but I feel very strongly that doing the speech is a mistake,” Mook said. “It will be three days after she’s announced and on her first day in Iowa, where caucus goes [sic] have a sharply more negative view of Wall Street than the rest of the electorate.”
“I recognize the sacrifice and dissapointment [sic] that cancelling will create, but it’s a very consequential unforced error and could plague us in stories for months,” Mook added.
Even so, Hillary Clinton said she would only agree to nix the speech if Bill Clinton was open to it, according to Abedin.
Hillary and Bill Clinton’s paid speeches became a flashpoint during the Democratic primary, especially after Sen. Bernie Sanders began calling on his opponent to release transcripts from the speeches she gave to Wall Street firms.
Confronted during a televised town hall in February with a question about the six-figure fees she collected from Goldman Sachs, Hillary Clinton replied dismissively that she had accepted “what they offered” for speeches. She later took fire for the response.
In Oct. 2014 Mook raised early concerns about leaving Hillary Clinton’s name on the foundation masthead. It had been officially renamed the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation in 2013 following Hillary Clinton’s exit from the State Department.
“One question that is specific to the Foundation Is [sic] whether it will still have and/or use her name next year,” Mook wrote to Cheryl Mills, a board member at the Clinton Foundation and a longtime Clinton confidante.
“It only matters for research and press purposes — i.e. it will invite press scrutiny and she’ll be held accountable for what happens there,” Mook said. His warning came seven months before the publication of a book, “Clinton Cash,” that linked dozens of Hillary Clinton’s actions as secretary of state with donations to her family’s foundation.
“[I]t’s a discussion that should be had at some point in my view,” Mook added.
Hillary Clinton’s name was removed from the foundation’s website after she stepped down from its board. However, the charity did not change its legal name once she launched her presidential campaign.
Whether the foreign donors who wrote checks to the foundation during Hillary Clinton’s tenure received special treatment from the State Department has remained a subject of fierce debate. Reporters have put the Clinton Foundation’s books under a microscope, and Donald Trump’s campaign has accused Clinton of operating the State Department as “her own personal hedge fund.”
In April 2015, the New York Times offered the first glimpse into the headaches “Clinton Cash” would cause by publishing a story culled from the book about a massive Russian-backed uranium deal that enriched businessmen tied to the Clinton Foundation.
Internally, Hillary Clinton’s campaign discussed ways to get the Times to back down from its reporting.
Jim Margolis, a Clinton pollster, assured staffers that “a lot of NYT reporters and editors” had conveyed to him “[a] lot of quiet acknowledgement that this was a stupid, thin piece that shouldn’t have seen daylight.”
But outside the campaign, the Russian uranium story was gathering widespread attention. It set the tone for a line of inquiry into the Clinton Foundation and its intersection with the State Department that continued for the rest of the presidential race.
Hillary Clinton’s staff similarly misjudged the extent to which the email saga would define the early months of her campaign.
Within a month of the New York Times story that first exposed Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email account while serving as secretary of state, aides were instructing surrogates to brush off the issue as a “partisan attack” and a “charade” orchestrated by Republicans who were likely guilty of the same infraction.
Hillary Clinton’s team thought they could put the controversy to bed by calling on House Republicans to release their own emails, thereby neutralizing the calls for Hillary Clinton to hand over hers.
Aides carefully avoided any acknowledgement that the former secretary of state had erred in the months before the FBI ramped up its investigation into her conduct.
As Hillary Clinton’s team prepared a script in Aug. 2015 for a video that would attempt to explain the newly-opened FBI probe, staff members took pains not to include any language that was “suggestive of wrongdoing.”
“We should not think it is fine to find something that ‘should have been classified at the time.’ Our position is that no such material exists, else it could be said she mishandled classified info,” wrote Brian Fallon, a campaign spokesman, to a handful of other high-level aides.
Fallon wanted to remove a line that indicated the State Department might decide some emails should have been classified at the time they were written. Hillary Clinton maintained that no such information passed through her server until the FBI concluded in July that 81 email chains contained material that should have been considered classified when it hit her inbox.
Podesta suggested shielding Clinton further from potential future scrutiny as the team prepared a “Q & A” document to post on its website in Clinton’s name.
“This is a campaign doc so if it’s useful to do, I think we can use a ‘It’s our understanding that …’ formulation,” he said.
Philippe Reines, a campaign spokesman, added he had written an answer about the staff members that had recently been forced to turn over emails and noted, “I want [to] pretend [it] was objective.”
But at the same time, surrogates were beginning to question the campaign’s defiant approach to the email controversy, which involved lengthy, nuanced defenses of her conduct.
Andy Spahn, a frequent liaison between Hollywood donors and Democratic candidates, complained that talking points he was provided by the campaign seemed “like…part of the problem” because they did not contain a clear “30-60 second soundbite.”
Several weeks later, another Clinton ally pointed to Hillary Clinton’s refusal to address the email controversy head-on as a growing liability.
“[H]er inability to just do a national interview and communicate genuine feelings of remorse and regret is now, I fear, becoming a character problem (more so than honesty),” wrote Neera Tanden, head of the liberal think-tank Center for American Progress, in a late August 2015 email to Podesta.
“People hate her arrogant, like her down. It’s a sexist context, but I think it’s the truth. I see no downside in her actually just saying, look, I’m sorry. I think it will take so much air out of this,” Tanden added.
Instead, Hillary Clinton’s team devised ways to distract the press from the controversy in the hopes that the story would fade.
Also in Aug. 2015, her campaign planned to leak her opposition to the Keystone Pipeline in the hopes that reporters would focus on her flip-flop, not her emails.
Read the Podesta emails for yourself here.
The Washington Examiner is compiling a list of noteworthy findings here.
