The following are excerpted from “Unlikeable: The Problem with Hillary”
“Oh, F*ck off, Bill”
“I worked for Hillary and saw a lot of what was going on,” a college student who interned at Foggy Bottom during Hillary’s last year there said in an interview for this book. “One of my jobs was to go into the conference room that’s adjacent to the secretary’s office and gather up papers that were used by Hillary, Cheryl, Huma, and others during their meetings. It was like I was the invisible man. Nobody gave me a second look. They obviously didn’t think it mattered what a young intern saw, so they didn’t make an effort to hide anything from me.
“The Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative have very distinct logos,” the intern continued. “The foundation’s logo is an open circle of stars surrounding the words Clinton Foundation. The Global Initiative’s logo is similar, but the stars are gold and they’re intersected by four curved lines like parenthesis marks. Often, when I went into the secretary of state’s conference room, I saw those logos on papers that were strewn all over the big table.
“While I was organizing the papers into neat piles, I couldn’t resist taking a look. They were fund-raising papers with the names and dates of contacts on them. There was no mistaking the fact that Hillary and her closest advisers at State were working on foundation and Global Initiative business.
“I mostly recall snippets of conversation that I overheard when I delivered papers from the conference room to Huma and Cheryl and to Hillary’s secretaries.
“I remember one time when Hillary came back from Russia. It must have been the fall of 2012, toward the end of her run at State, and Hillary came into the office wearing one of those Russian fur hats. That was the day I overheard her talking on her cell phone, discussing a contribution to the foundation from a Russian guy. I knew he was Russian because she turned to Huma and said, ‘The fucking translator is so goddamn slow with the Russian.’
“Another time, I delivered a bunch of papers to Cheryl, who was waiting for them in Hillary’s office. The papers were for Hillary to initial and sign. Hillary was in a really crappy mood that day. It looked to me like she was conducting several phone calls on different phones at the same time. The one thing I heard her say was, ‘Bill, I won’t do that. I won’t say that. You tell the president you don’t want to see him, if that’s how you feel.’
“I was shocked. Here I was, in the secretary’s inner office, overhearing her talk to the former president, and I shouldn’t have been there, and for a moment I was so scared I couldn’t move my legs.
“Huma came in and saw me and shoved me toward the door. And the last thing I heard was Hillary saying, ‘Oh, fuck off, Bill!’ and then she threw the cell phone on the floor and it bounced off the rug.”
“I never saw a secretary so disconnected from her job.”
“During her last year at the State Department, Hillary’s priorities took on a different character,” a Foreign Service officer with more than two decades of experience said in an interview. “In 2012, her priorities were first, raising money for her presidential run; second, raising money for the Clinton Foundation; and third, tending to the business of foreign policy.
“She obviously had a busy schedule and had to meet with foreign ministers and other dignitaries, but those meetings seemed rushed and pro forma,” the diplomat continued. “Her real passions were the Clinton Foundation and talking to political strategists like John Podesta, James Carville, Paul Begala, and others. She met in her seventh-floor office with political bundlers, and she had long conversations on strategy with Bill.
“In my time at State, I never saw a secretary so disconnected from her job. She seemed to consider the running of U.S. foreign policy a side job. She was focused on getting the big job—the White House. Everything was about keeping information about her campaign plans from leaking back to the Obama White House. She didn’t trust anybody but her small inner circle. She was completely paranoid, whispering, covering her mouth in case somebody could read lips.”
“She didn’t try to cover up her involvement with the foundation”
“When she flew on her Air Force C-32,” said another veteran Foreign Service officer, “Hillary took along stacks of papers in manila folders that were marked ‘CF’ and ‘CGO’—the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global initiative. They had dividers labeled ‘Donations,’ ‘Fund Raising,’ ‘AIDS/HIV,’ ‘Haiti,’ and so forth.
“She didn’t try to cover up her involvement with the foundation,” this person continued. “One time, after she returned from a grueling trip to Asia that included numerous stops at various capitals, she gave a cocktail party for her staff in a room near her office. It was summertime, a hot, humid day in July, and Hillary talked about the Clinton Foundation and how well fund-raising was going for Haiti and HIV work. She talked about Bill’s accomplishments in lowering the price of AIDS drugs. She was beaming with pride.
“Hillary made it clear to those of us who came within her orbit that she kept up with the work of the foundation and the Global Initiative at the same time that she ran the State Department. She said she had no qualms, because the work she did at State and the work at the foundation and the Global Initiative were related and complemented each other.
“In her mind, there was no conflict of interest. She was doing good work, solving the most daunting problems, and making the United States look like the good guy around the world. She always said her work was twice as hard because she was constantly cleaning up the messes George W. Bush left behind.
“I remember a conversation she had with Bill. I believe it was late in the summer of 2012, because the presidential election campaign was just beginning to heat up. We were on her plane, refueling at some Air Force base in Germany, and I was sitting behind her while she spoke on a phone. All I could hear was her side of the conversation. She was berating Bill. She told him that he had given her rotten advice on dealing with Putin. She should have been tougher with the Russians. She said, ‘Bill, you are so up their asses your judgment sucks.’
“Then she gave him hell about having his picture taken with two hookers. The photos were circulating all over the Internet, and it made him look like a laughingstock for the umpteenth time. There was a long silence while she listened to him, and then all of a sudden she said, ‘Bill, I am fucking hanging up! Good-bye!’”