Hillary, the Blogger, and the Singer Dude

Way back in 2011, Bill Clinton gave an exceptionally dumb interview about Israel and the Palestinians. In it he blamed Israel and especially Prime Minister Netanyahu for the failure of peace efforts; there was zero blame for the Palestinian side, and zero credit for anything Israel had done (like getting out of Gaza, making peace proposals, and so on).

Moreover, Clinton provided an exceptionally dumb explanation for why Israel had killed off peace: Immigrants from Russia did it! “You’ve had all these immigrants coming in from the former Soviet Union, and they have no history in Israel proper, so the traditional claims of Palestinians have less weight with them….The most anti-peace [Israelis] are the ultra-religious…and what you might call the territorialists, the people who just showed up lately and they’re not encumbered by the historical record.”

My response was an article here in THE WEEKLY STANDARD, where I suggested that Clinton was actually the person “not encumbered by the historical record.” I went through the record on peace efforts, and then quoted Natan Sharansky on the smear of Russians in Israel: “I am particularly disappointed by the president’s casual use of inappropriate stereotypes about Israelis, dividing their views on peace based on ethnic origins.” I reminded readers that Clinton had, while president, invited Yasser Arafat to the White House 13 times, more times even than Tony Blair.

I thought the article had disappeared down the memory hole, but this week it turned up again—in the latest batch of Hillary emails. When I published it in 2011, I sent it to my friend the ambassador of the United Arab Emirates, and he sent it on to Doug Band. Band was Bill Clinton’s “personal assistant” (we won’t ask what that job entails) and a big shot at the Clinton Global Initiative and the Clinton Foundation. Band then sent it on to Huma Abedin, Hillary’s top assistant at the Department of State, and to some other Bill Clinton staffers, without comment. Apparently it was the job of the United States Department of State to defend the reputation of Bill Clinton at all times (your tax dollars at work), so Huma did not reply “Why are you sending me this? What’s it got to do with the State Department?” She knew better.

Instead, a young Bill Clinton staffer named Amitabh Desai commented “Why don’t we just vet our transcript and then release it, to show that the blogger and his editors twisted it?”

The blade twists! I, a former big shot at the State Department and the NSC in times gone by, am the now nameless person called “the blogger.” Doug Band replies “yep” to this proposal about “the blogger.” Desai then sends this email exchange on to Jake Sullivan, Hillary’s director of policy planning (and perhaps our next National Security Advisor, in a Hillary White House) and asks about releasing the full transcript of Bill’s remarks. Sullivan replies that “Aside from the Russian stuff, this ain’t bad,” presumably meaning that Sharansky was right and Bill should not have blamed Russian Jews—but blaming Israel and Bibi Netanyahu for the failure of peace efforts was quite fine. (AIPAC, take note!)

And the email colloquy ends with Ami Desai asking “You ok with us releasing it to burn that blogger who mischaracterized it?” That blogger!

Sic transit gloria mundi, I guess. Am I nasty to ask “Who the hell is Amitabh Desai?” Turns out he is the actual “Director of Foreign Policy” at the Clinton Foundation, where his bio says “Before joining the Clinton Foundation in January 2007, Ami served as Legislative Aide to then-U.S. senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, with responsibility for various foreign policy issues including Africa, humanitarian crises, and international trade….Ami holds a master’s degree in foreign policy from Columbia University and a bachelor’s degree in public health from Johns Hopkins University.”

Am I crushed that none of the Clinton folk—not Doug Band, not Ami Desai, not Huma Abedin—appears to know that this faceless “blogger” was so distinguished a person as, well, yours truly? That Desai got through his master’s degree program at Columbia and his service as “Director of Foreign Policy” at the Clinton Foundation without ever once coming across my voluminous, wonderful, actually quite essential writings about the Middle East? Naaah. Perhaps the “Director of Foreign Policy” basically holds the “little tin box” and is actually “Director of Contributions From People Who Want Stuff from Hillary,” and he wouldn’t find me on that presumably very long list. And anyway, all these people were simply very busy, emailing each other constantly so as to ensure that the Clinton Foundation, the Clinton Global Initiative, the Department of State, and the Clinton privy purse were fully linked up. Who among them had time to sit around reading THE WEEKLY STANDARD, except of course when someone had the temerity to say Bill Clinton was babbling nonsense?

In truth I am in very, very good company. On November 27, 2009 Doug Band sent the following message (yes, these email releases are treasure troves) to Huma Abedin at State: “Who is dave brubeck.” And Abedin replied twenty-six seconds later (in other words, writing from vast and deep personal knowledge, not Wikipedia) “some singer dude who wjc loves.”

If Dave Brubeck is “some singer dude,” I can’t be upset at being “that blogger.” I guess Brubeck never made any contributions to the Clinton Foundation either.

Elliott Abrams is a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He was an assistant secretary of state in the Reagan administration and a deputy national security advisor in the George W. Bush White House.