Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

If Clinton moves to Oval Office, aides’ baggage may be heavy

In the final sprint of her campaign, troubled by an FBI inquiry and narrowing polls, Hillary Clinton has held tightly to a handful of advisers who have spent their careers protecting her interests, defending her reputation, and at times sullying it — and their own.

And if she wins Tuesday, the most telling test of Clinton’s transition back to power will arrive quickly: After a campaign season often defined by voters’ weariness with and distrust of her, which old hands will — or should — follow her into the Oval Office?

Almost no top adviser has been left untouched by the two central firestorms of Clinton’s candidacy: the inquiry into her use of a private email server as secretary of state and the WikiLeaks hack of the email account of John Podesta, her campaign chairman.

The unvarnished view of infighting in the stolen documents is unlikely to bother Clinton much, friends say. The political wisdom of importing excess baggage to the executive branch is another matter.

Huma Abedin, the most visible of Clinton’s aides and among her most trusted, has become entangled in an FBI investigation of her estranged husband, former Rep. Anthony Weiner, and his lewd messages.

Jake Sullivan, Clinton’s campaign policy director, has faced questions over whether he mishandled classified information in the course of his round-the-clock email traffic with Clinton at the State Department, an issue that could shadow him as he moves into what is expected to be a key White House role, perhaps national security adviser or chief of staff.

Podesta, who has been with the Clintons since the 1990s and is a candidate for a Cabinet post, has been singed by the publication of his private correspondence. So has Neera Tanden, a former domestic policy adviser to Clinton, who took an acid pen to some of Clinton’s closest aides in emails to Podesta, her friend.

Clinton has plenty of other choices who have been unscathed by the email affairs, including Michèle A. Flournoy, a front-runner for defense secretary, and William J. Burns, who is on a short list for secretary of state.

But allies have long viewed Clinton’s dependence on a small handful of aides with deep concern, lamenting the decades-old reluctance of her and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, to eject anyone from their political lives for good.

And the aides closest to her often reinforce her worst instincts, friends say: a lack of transparency, circle-the-wagons defensiveness and paranoia about the news media.

In her campaign, Clinton has often strained to balance dueling impulses about her overlapping circles, maintaining a long-standing preference for keeping two layers of staff: a larger, more professionalized group and the smaller one she leans on most.

Sensitive to the perception that she would rely on the same voices that guided her in the Senate and during her tumultuous 2008 presidential bid, Clinton asked Robby Mook, 35 at the time, to manage her 2016 campaign, and she recruited a handful of former top aides to President Barack Obama.

Yet as voters weigh whether to return the Clintons to the White House after 16 years away, Clinton’s bumpy march to Election Day has assumed a familiar feel — colored by a generation of aides, baggage and aides’ baggage, all attaching to her in seeming perpetuity.

Bill Daley, a former chief of staff to Obama, said that with the Clintons, two qualities would always predominate in personnel decisions: loyalty and competence. He added that Clinton was unlikely to “go out of the box” in her hiring.

“Everybody likes the sort of, ‘Oh gosh, you come in and then you get a fresh team and a whole new outlook.’ That’s a crock of something,” Daley said about White House transitions. “You dance with the people you came to the dance with.”

Indeed, when Abedin disappeared from the campaign trail — relinquishing her perch, at least temporarily, as the ubiquitous protector at Clinton’s side — her spot on the campaign plane went to a conspicuous replacement: Philippe Reines, a caustic, canny veteran of Clinton’s State Department tenure.

Until that point, Reines had himself been sidelined with no formal campaign role, although he did play the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, during Clinton’s debate preparations. In the WikiLeaks emails, top Clinton staff members portrayed him as a disruptive force.

“One crazy dude,” Podesta called Reines last year, in an exchange that appeared to focus on news coverage of his hostile interactions with reporters.

Clinton’s campaign suggested that the controversies would have no bearing on her decision-making in a transition. “If she wins, Hillary Clinton is going to fill the most critical positions with the most qualified people, period,” said a spokesman, Brian Fallon.

Reines, Abedin and Sullivan, the campaign’s policy director, were Clinton’s closest aides at the State Department, their bonds cemented over hundreds of hours of flying time during the 112 trips she made as secretary. Friends and former colleagues of Clinton say the three would be likely to play a similar role in the White House — although of the three, only Sullivan seems a candidate for a major management job.

Each has been badly bruised by email-related disclosures in the past two years. Sullivan and Abedin, who corresponded with Clinton on sensitive issues at the State Department, were swept up in the FBI investigation into whether Clinton mishandled classified information. And even before the WikiLeaks releases, Reines turned over hundreds of emails with reporters in response to requests made under the Freedom of Information Act.

While Sullivan and Abedin were spared legal charges in the investigation of Clinton’s private email server, they each had to hire lawyers, and they endured months of uncertainty about whether they would lose their security clearances.

Friends of Clinton express deep frustration with Abedin and say they wish Clinton would distance herself from her and Weiner. But they expect Clinton’s instinct will be to protect her. Several predicted that Clinton would find a place for Abedin in the White House, perhaps as a senior adviser with an undefined but wide-ranging portfolio, similar to the role Valerie Jarrett has played in the Obama White House.

For all their problems, the aides bring valuable skills. At the State Department, Abedin and Reines organized Clinton’s foreign trips, which generated some of the most favorable news coverage of her career.

Sullivan, in particular, became indispensable as a policy adviser, a role that helps explain why he sent and received so many of those sensitive emails at the State Department, where he served as both deputy chief of staff and head of the policy planning department.

Still, if she is elected, Clinton is expected to supplement her closest aides with a cadre of professional advisers, similar to those who occupy senior posts in her campaign. How these people will mesh with the inner circle is not clear.

While Trump’s chaotic bid for the presidency has often served to overshadow potential management issues on Clinton’s team, the operation had for most of the year appeared relatively drama-free — at least compared with 2008. But the publication of private emails from the hacked account of Podesta changed that, even as the campaign sought to remind the public of the trove’s origins — a breach attributed to Russian interference — not its contents.

Still, the documents exposed a predictable, if ugly, trail of personal slights and backbiting that could leave Clinton’s staff even more distrustful.

Already, some in Clinton’s inner circle have said that the acerbic comments of Tanden, a former top policy adviser to Clinton who is close to Podesta, are enough to disqualify her from a White House post. (Among the most memorable entries, Tanden joked that whoever advised Clinton to use a private email server as secretary of state should be “drawn and quartered,” laying the blame at the feet of Cheryl D. Mills, a longtime Clinton adviser and lawyer.)

“In this business, you have to develop a tough skin, and you can’t isolate people who might not say what you want to hear,” said Melanne Verveer, Clinton’s chief of staff when she was first lady. “I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these people go in.”

At the same time, Verveer said she expected Clinton to reach out to people she did not know well to fill certain positions. “You need to strike a balance,” she said.

Much will depend on Clinton’s choice of chief of staff. A professional manager like Ron Klain, who has worked for both Obama and former Vice President Al Gore, would reassure many in Clinton’s orbit. As one friend pointed out, Bill Clinton chose a businessman and childhood friend from Arkansas, Thomas F. McLarty, as his first chief of staff, with disappointing results.

Hillary Clinton has a history of strong-willed chiefs of staff, all of them women, including Maggie Williams and Verveer in the White House, and Mills at the State Department. But even Mills, a diamond-hard lawyer who defended Bill Clinton during his impeachment trial, at a minimum failed to deter Hillary Clinton from the decision to use a personal email address for government business.

“Obviously, you need people you fully trust to have your back,” said Lissa Muscatine, a former chief speechwriter for Clinton. “But that doesn’t mean you want yes women and yes men.”

There is one other difference between the Hillary Clinton of the 1990s and today’s. As first lady, she surrounded herself with contemporaries: women like Williams and Verveer, who had substantial outside experience before working for her.

Now, at 69, Clinton is a generation older than most of her aides. Some have worked almost exclusively for her, already confronting a lifetime of political combat in their young careers.

Daley suggested that having a few battle scars was not a bad thing — to a point.

“Everybody who’s been around for years has baggage,” he said. “Some have more than others.”

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