The slow drip of revelations about the Russiagate scandal has diminished the significance of the most important truth about it: that it was a Hillary Clinton campaign operation. The campaign paid for the notorious Steele dossier via its law firm, Perkins Coie, and Fusion GPS. Hillary Clinton herself personally approved of the campaign’s decision to disseminate materials related to the Alfa Bank hoax — the false charge that servers at Trump Tower had a secret communications link with a Russian bank — even though the FBI was able to prove quickly that no such secret link existed.
In some ways, it is shocking that a campaign would stoop to such underhanded tricks. But it is all a natural continuation of the Clinton style of politics.
From the time Bill Clinton was elected president 30 years ago, and even before, the Clinton family has been honing its distinctive way of operating. Some have compared it to the mafia. Former insider Doug Band told Vanity Fair in 2020, “It’s like a cult.” Whatever the metaphor, the Clinton organization divides the world into two kinds of people, friends and enemies, and ruthlessly protects the one and attacks the other.
You might think cynically that politics has always been dirty. But using power to punish their opponents and enrich themselves is something the Clintons took to a whole new level.
Hillary Clinton stated firmly last month that a 2024 presidential run is “out of the question.” Assuming she sticks to that, and the Clinton family is finished seeking elected office, we now face a choice as a country: We can either allow the Clinton style of politics to become the new norm, or we can learn from our mistake in letting this family dominate politics for so long and reject their legacy of dirty tricks. The first step in choosing a higher path is confronting just how bad the Clinton way of doing politics really is.
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When local TV reporter Christopher Sign of ABC15 in Phoenix was first tipped off about the secret meeting between Bill Clinton and Attorney General Loretta Lynch in a private plane at Sky Harbor International Airport, he reached out to his national colleagues at ABC News to see if they had any sources who could help him find out what took place at that meeting. Lynch was going to have a press conference later that day, and the ABC15 team wanted to do as much prep work as possible before springing a question on the attorney general. If she and Clinton had discussed the investigation into Hillary’s unauthorized private email servers, this had the makings of a big scandal. Lynch’s reaction would be a valuable data point.
Unfortunately for Sign, his national colleagues did not quietly sound out their sources. They went straight to the attorney general’s press team and told them about the Phoenix affiliate’s scoop. “Apparently our affiliate in Phoenix is hearing that the AG met with Bill Clinton on a plane. … Hoping I can provide them some guidance ASAP,” the ABC News producer wrote. The DOJ director of public affairs called him back within five minutes. The element of surprise was gone.
The national reporters saw Sign’s tip not as a chance to break an important story but as an opportunity to do the Clinton campaign a favor. It may have been a dereliction of journalistic responsibility, but from their perspective, it was perfectly rational.
The most well-known rule in political journalism is that you don’t cross Team Clinton. Stories of their vindictive behavior circulate widely. One reporter who wrote a piece about the Clinton Foundation that was not entirely positive had six different people approach their editor saying they should be demoted. Reporters who give favorable coverage are granted access, and those who do not are harassed or frozen out.
There are dark whispers that Clintonworld sometimes does more than make angry phone calls. Journalist Barbara Feinman Todd, who assisted Hillary as a ghostwriter on It Takes a Village, made the mistake of revealing to Bob Woodward that during their collaboration, she had witnessed the first lady take part in a seance with a couple of New Age mediums who attempted to connect her with the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt. The White House found out that she had leaked the incident. When she returned from a vacation to Italy in 1995, she found that her apartment had been broken into, a plate broken, and a wine bottle left upside down in the middle of the kitchen. Feinman Todd bravely put the story in her memoir published in 2017. Most incidents of this kind never make it into print for obvious reasons.
The Clintons are intense about protecting their secrets because they have so many secrets to protect. It started with Bill’s sex scandals, of course. Adulterers have to become good liars by necessity, doubly so when they are public figures. Clinton’s office also presented him with opportunities to retaliate against those who went public about his affairs. Many of the women who accused Clinton of impropriety, including Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, and Juanita Broaddrick, were audited by the IRS. Clinton later assured an interviewer that he “didn’t have anything to do with it,” but “it stands to some reason” that the IRS would target them since Paula Jones “doesn’t have any visible means of support and is always traveling and driving a new car.”
The financial scandals of the Clinton presidency are less well-remembered but in some ways were more valuable in terms of teaching them lessons in duplicity. Early on, they made amateur mistakes, such as letting Yah Lin “Charlie” Trie channel money to the Democratic National Committee through straw donors with modest incomes who could not possibly have made such large contributions. Practice makes perfect, and in eight years in the White House, the Clintons got plenty of practice at concealing scandalous behavior.
The lessons the Clintons learned were put to use during Bill’s post-presidency. Broke, millions in debt, and saddled with legal bills, Clinton needed a way to make money and, if possible, rehabilitate his image. He found a solution in the Clinton Foundation. As a globe-trotting philanthropist, Clinton was able to fly around the world giving speeches for as much as $750,000 per appearance. The couple’s net worth now stands at over a hundred million dollars.
The conflicts of interest between the Clinton family’s philanthropy and its political influence were glaring, especially when Hillary became a senator and then secretary of state. Canadian mining magnate Frank Giustra was awarded a lucrative mining concession in Kazakhstan shortly after visiting that country’s dictator with Bill Clinton and shortly before he donated more than $30 million to Clinton’s foundation. Other big-dollar donors to the Clinton Foundation included foreign individuals and governments, such as the king of Morocco, the government of Algeria, and Ukrainian oligarchs, that may have seen their donations as a way to curry favor with a secretary of state and likely future president.
The Obama administration was sufficiently concerned about these conflicts of interest that it insisted the Clinton Foundation publish its list of donors as a condition of offering Hillary the position of secretary of state. The State Department’s lawyers told Hillary that she would under no circumstances be allowed to solicit donations for the foundation personally. But the subtleties of whether Bill or Hillary was doing the fundraising were lost on many donors, who rightly saw the Clinton name as a brand that both parties shared equally.
Donations to the Clinton Foundation have dropped precipitously since Hillary lost the race for the presidency, which certainly bolsters suspicions that it was a vehicle for corruption. The Clinton Foundation raised $249 million in 2009, when Clinton was secretary of state. It raised $62.9 million the year she ran for president. In 2018, its revenue was less than half that, $30.7 million. Three years later, it was a mere $16 million. That represents a 93% drop-off from its peak.
When Ronald Reagan was paid $2 million by the Fujisankei Communications Group for two speeches in Tokyo during his post-presidency, it was widely condemned as contrary to the dignity of his position. Traditionally, American ex-presidents have avoided the appearance of cashing in. When Clinton chose a different path, he became the first president in modern times to reject that responsibility.
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In April 1993, Hillary gave a speech promising that her husband’s administration would mark “a new ethos of individual responsibility and caring” after the Reagan era’s “selfishness and greed.” The so-called “Politics of Meaning” speech caused the New York Times Magazine to mock her as “Saint Hillary.” Saint she was not, but she was right that America was entering a new era.
The “new ethos” the Clintons inaugurated was not one of compassion but one of corruption. The two most pernicious characteristics of the Clinton brand of politics, personal enrichment and using dirty tricks against enemies, are both dangerously close to becoming institutionalized.
The whole political ecosystem has been touched by the Clintons’ influence. Not just elected officials but unions, trial lawyers, and single-issue activist groups all have Clinton loyalists in their ranks, and they have learned well the lessons of their leading family’s success. From bullying reporters to spying on their opponents, dirty tricks have come to be seen in our political culture as acceptable.
The days when ambitious men would make their pile in business and then enter politics are over. Today, a career in government is something people leverage to make big money in the corporate sector. This development is more recent than some cynics might think. In 2000, none of the five richest counties in America were in the Washington metro region. They were in New York and Connecticut. Today, three of the top five are in the northern Virginia suburbs, including the two richest. The norm that it is unseemly for public servants to be massively rich has eroded precisely during the period of the Clintons’ influence.
As for dirty tricks, the rise of private intelligence firms has revolutionized the world of political journalism and made the old days of “opposition research” look quaint. The firms are not household names — Kroll Associates, Navigant, K2 Intelligence, the Mintz Group — but it is a $2.5 billion industry. They employ former spies and private investigators to dig up dirt on important people and then shop the information they find to campaigns and journalists.
Fusion GPS was one such intelligence firm. Its methods in Russiagate were typical: hire former spy Christopher Steele, get him to write a dossier of unflattering information about the Republican candidate, shop the dossier around the media to get the information out to the public, bring the FBI into it in order to make the allegations seem credible enough to be worth an official investigation.
A perfect storm of factors combined to make Russiagate such a huge story — the New York Times alone published over 3,000 articles about it — including a Democratic campaign comfortable with these kinds of underhanded tactics and a Republican candidate whose persona made people willing to credit all kinds of outlandish allegations. The question now is whether that kind of playbook will be repeated.
In a funny coincidence, the same investigative firm that the Clinton campaign hired in 1992 to dig up dirt on the women making sexual accusations against Bill was hired many years later to do the same to Harvey Weinstein’s accusers. It used to be called Palladino & Sutherland and now has rebranded as PSOPS. The old name sounded like a private eye from a film noir; the new one sounds more corporate. This accurately reflects how the industry has evolved. Pretty soon, skulduggery-for-hire will be a commodity that campaigns purchase as a matter of course, not from seedy men in offices on the bad side of town but from large firms that offer it as a standardized service.
We are at a tipping point. Russiagate, and particularly the Clinton campaign’s involvement in it, was shocking to the public because it was unprecedented. If the Clinton way of doing politics becomes the new normal, then what was unprecedented in 2016 will become old hat. That would represent a permanent degradation of our political culture. We can choose to follow a different path. The Clintons started this trend. Maybe their disappearance from the scene can reverse it.
Helen Andrews is senior editor of the American Conservative and author of Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster.
