HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (52 page)

Hillary’s strong support for gay rights in the diplomatic sphere was overshadowed by her reticence in the domestic political debate, which garnered far more attention among the general public. Still, she had rewritten the department’s rules so that same-sex partners of diplomats posted overseas would get the same benefits as husbands and wives; incorporated the protection and advancement of gay rights abroad as part of the core mission of American diplomats; and given a December 2011 speech to the UN Human Rights Council in which she compared the minority status of gays and lesbians to that of racial, religious, and ethnic minorities, declaring, in an echo of her famous women’s rights speech in Beijing during the Clinton administration, that “
gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights.” What she said to the Human Rights Council, in advocating for the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, went much further than an endorsement of gay marriage. She said that all human rights should apply to them, including international legal protections against violence and discrimination. Beyond the international audience, said one Hillary friend who has worked on gay rights around the world, “it says to American diplomats, ‘You can’t fuck this up, because I’m gonna hold you accountable,’ and that’s pretty stratospheric.”

She also hinted at the domestic debate in the United States, asserting that “my own country’s record on human rights for gay people is far from perfect.” And on a personal level, Hillary celebrated the weddings of same-sex friends. “At long last,” she wrote in a note when Allida Black married her longtime partner, Judy Beck, on April 25, 2012.

But within the United States, as the general public and many politicians came to favor gay marriage, Hillary’s last known position was the one from her 2008 campaign: she opposed it. Joe Biden had thrown his support behind gay marriage in an interview on
Meet the Press
, pushing Barack Obama to follow suit earlier than he wanted to in an election year. Hillary may have been ahead of the curve in the international human rights sphere, but she was behind it in terms of domestic politics. Like many other politicians, including Ohio Republican senator Rob Portman, she thought the oral arguments before the Supreme Court offered an opportunity to weigh in on the issue in a meaningful and timely way.

So in early March, she conducted a conference call with some of her aides, including speechwriter Dan Schwerin, to map out what she wanted to say in a video clip recorded for the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the venerable Washington-based gay rights organization. Hillary wanted to make two main points: she supported gay marriage, and she respected the views of those who didn’t. For years, friends of Hillary’s had seen her struggle with the question of whether legalizing gay marriage could infringe on the rights or beliefs of religious groups, and she told her aides that she wanted to be respectful of their views even as her public position shifted. “There was not a what-should-my-position-be kind of conversation,” said a source involved in the discussion. “She was pretty clear. But she was equally clear that she was not going to demonize people who disagreed with her on this.”

On March 18, the week before the oral arguments at the Supreme Court, HRC released Hillary’s taped remarks. “LGBT Americans are our colleagues, our teachers, our soldiers, our friends, our loved ones, and they are full and equal citizens and deserve the rights of
citizenship. That includes marriage,” she said, looking directly into the camera. “That’s why I support marriage for lesbian and gay couples.”

Reporters seized on it as a politically motivated shift. “Hillary Rodham Clinton’s embrace of gay marriage Monday signals she may be seriously weighing a 2016 presidential run and trying to avoid the type of
late-to-the-party caution that hurt her first bid,” Chuck Babington of the Associated Press wrote.

Despite the obvious political advantage of moving quickly on an issue on which public opinion polls showed metastatic growth, Hillary’s aides insisted that her decision had nothing to do with electoral politics. “Anything we did would be perceived politically,” one aide said, “and obviously that’s not why she wanted to do it.”

Regardless of her motivation, the video was a signal that she felt comfortable weighing in directly on domestic issues again, after four years of accruing the political benefits of remaining above the fray. Republicans were already determined to bring her back down into partisan political warfare. Three days earlier Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell trotted out what would become the GOP’s mainstay argument against both Hillary and Biden, that they were too old to be president. “
Don’t tell me the Democrats are the party of the future when their presidential ticket for 2016 is shaping up to look like a rerun of
The Golden Girls
,” McConnell said to roars from the audience at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. National Republicans set out to contrast their crop of younger rising stars—Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Texas senator Ted Cruz, and New Jersey governor Chris Christie—with Democrats born in the 1940s.

The battle for the White House was in full swing, and Hillary’s vacation was over. Around the same time, she began calling advisers and a tight-knit circle of friends with a clear message. “I’ve rested now,” she told them. “I’m ready to work.”

As with the possible presidential campaign, the groundwork for Hillary’s return to the private sector had been laid by others. Over the course of more than two years, first Chelsea and then Huma had
spent time cleaning up the freewheeling Clinton Foundation and its spin-offs, including the Clinton Global Initiative. Shortly after her summer 2010 wedding, Chelsea, who had worked in business consulting at the firm McKinsey & Company, jumped into analyzing how her father’s office was run. The younger Clinton, thirty-one years old at the time, felt the foundation was in need of some serious housekeeping, if not housecleaning, sources familiar with the situation said, and an internal audit was ordered up.

“Chelsea was involved in that effort,” said one foundation insider, “but rumors that have circulated that Chelsea was gonna come in and clean the place out and get rid of persons X, Y, and Z are inaccurate. I don’t think her behavior was any different than any kid who sees their parents’ business in need of some reorganization.”

During the restructuring of the foundation,
Chelsea also recommended that the foundation take a look at bringing aboard her friend and former McKinsey colleague Eric Braverman as chief executive, a move that later came to be.

But Chelsea’s arrival seemed to signal a more dramatic shift in Clintonworld. Not only was Chelsea, who would become the vice chairwoman of the foundation board, for the first time owning her role as heir to the family political and philanthropic dynasty, but this transitional period was also the beginning of the end for Doug Band.
Chelsea grew concerned that Band’s business ties were tainting the Clinton brand her father had worked so hard to build. While Hillary is said to have very much appreciated Band’s work to raise money for the Clinton library and to help pay off her campaign debt, Band’s bad-cop role as gatekeeper to Bill also rubbed some of her advisers, and certainly other Democrats, the wrong way.

Band made Bill notoriously difficult to access and was often hard to pin down himself. Even Obama’s emissaries had to pursue him for months to set up the November 2011 meeting in Bill’s Harlem office that set the stage for Bill’s involvement in the 2012 campaign. By then, Band was already transitioning out of the foundation empire that he had built for Bill. He had started an international consulting company with two other partners, called Teneo
Holdings, that hung its hat on having Bill Clinton and former British prime minister Tony Blair as paid advisers.
Teneo expanded rapidly, counting two hundred employees in thirteen global offices within two years of its launch. More than anything, the firm built its reputation on access, boasting on its website that it worked “
exclusively with the CEOs and leaders of the world’s largest companies, institutions and governments” and solved problems by “leveraging … deep global relationships.”

One of Band’s partners, Declan Kelly, had been appointed by Hillary to be America’s economic envoy to Ireland before starting the company. The State Department cleared Bill Clinton’s role as a paid adviser to Teneo, but the whole idea left a bad taste in the mouths of some Clinton loyalists. Wasn’t there at least the appearance of a conflict of interest if the secretary of state’s husband was being paid to advise a company with international clients? Some Clinton allies thought Band was putting Bill and Hillary in an awkward position to help line his own pockets and theirs.

But the Clintons have a blind spot when it comes to their closest aides, including Band and Huma Abedin. The Clintons’ loyalty to those two aides would come back to haunt Hillary.

Still, the arrangement of Band working for Teneo and CGI didn’t last long. In February 2012,
Politico
reported that
Bill had severed his financial ties to Teneo. Around the same time, Band was pushed out of his role as the linchpin for the global initiative, reportedly at the urging of Hillary loyalists. “
You can do CGI or Teneo, but you can’t do both,” Bill Clinton had told Band, according to a
New York Post
source. “Doug chose Teneo.”

The former president responded to news stories about Band’s departure with a misty statement
nearly twice as long, at a whopping 362 words, as the one he had released when Mother Teresa died in 1997. “
I couldn’t have accomplished half of what I have in my post presidency without Doug Band. Doug is my counselor and a board member of the Clinton Global Initiative, which was created at his suggestion,” Bill said. “He tirelessly works to support the expansion of CGI’s activities and my other foundation work around the
world. In our first ten years, Doug’s strategic vision and fund-raising made it possible for the foundation to survive and thrive. I hope and believe he will continue to advise me and build CGI for another decade.”

The cherry on top for Band, who remained involved with Clinton’s domestic operation, was that Bill didn’t cut his ties to Band and Teneo but rather flipped the flow of money so that he became a client of Teneo rather than a paid adviser. “I felt that I should be paying them, not the other way around,” he said.

But those in the Clinton sphere who were uncomfortable with the whole deal had reason to worry that the Band bond could end up hurting Hillary. In December 2011, Huma Abedin gave birth to a son, Jordan Weiner, and decided she could no longer work as a full-time State Department employee in Washington. So that she could remain as an adviser through the end of her term, Hillary allowed Huma to become an outside consultant to the department
on June 4, 2012, an arrangement under which she could legally earn income from other sources.

“My understanding is Huma is doing some work for Teneo … and has been,” said a Clinton Foundation source in January 2013. At the same time, Band’s relationship with the Clinton Foundation was ending. He “don’t work here no more,” the source said.

Abedin’s dual relationship with the secretary of state and Band’s international consulting firm came to light in May 2013 when
Politico
reported it, sparking a new round of questions about possible self-dealing in Clintonworld. In a July letter bearing her new Park Avenue address, Huma told Republican senator Chuck Grassley that she
provided “strategic advice and consulting services to the firm’s management team” but did not provide “insights about the department, my work with the secretary or any government information to which I may have had access.”

At the time of the letter, she and her husband, former New York congressman and mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner, were dealing with the fallout from the disclosure that he had continued to have sexually explicit extramarital electronic chats after he was forced
to resign from Congress. The damaging investigation into Huma’s business practices didn’t factor in the mayoral race because the new round of stories about Weiner’s sexual proclivities already had sunk his chances of winning. But it did threaten to blot Hillary’s legacy at State and raise questions about her judgment in letting one of her top State Department advisers make money working for an outfit with international clients. At best, it just looked bad. At worst, it presented a conflict of interest.

The appearance questions raised around Band and Abedin—the aides physically and emotionally closest to Bill and Hillary, respectively, for more than a decade—spoke to a tough bind that the most competent and trusted Clinton loyalists faced. If they were willing to earn good money, they’d always have a job at the heart of the operation. But if they wanted to get rich, they would lose access, suffer accusations of trading on the Clinton name, or both. When that happened, it inevitably reflected poorly on either Bill or Hillary, whichever Clinton the staffer was closer to. In Abedin’s case, it was Hillary.

Grassley fumed at the responses he got to questions from Huma and State about her status in the department’s “special government employee” program. “
So far the State Department and Ms. Abedin haven’t provided a single document that I requested,” he said in response to Huma’s letter. “Putting up a stone wall raises a lot more questions about how the program is being used than it answers.”

Huma had taken on another role in the summer of 2012, working to help set up Hillary’s post-State integration into the Clinton Foundation, which was renamed the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation when Hillary left State. Former Hillary aide Tina Flournoy took over the reins in February, as Band exited for good. When Hillary reemerged from her post-State respite to cut the video for the Human Rights Campaign, her long-planned absorption into the Clinton Foundation was just one part of an ambitious—perhaps overly ambitious—agenda for the future.

The question facing Hillary in 2013 wasn’t whether she would run for president but rather whether she would stop running for president. She had built and maintained a political network that kept open the option of running for higher office, and in her case, there was really only one worthwhile rung left on the ladder. In early April she began reconnecting with old political friends, and Bill started reaching out to new ones, even as Hillary focused much of her attention on her publicly advertised gigs for 2013—diving into charitable work, giving speeches, and writing her latest memoir.