A New York Times reporter who recently published a book about Hillary Clinton’s State Department says the agency was the most “unabashedly political” it has ever been during her tenure as secretary of state.
“One of the things I tried to show in this book is how the State Department has never been so unabashedly political as it was. And there was all sorts of polling, they continued to look at her poll numbers throughout her period as secretary of state,” Mark Landler told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell during an interview on Thursday.
In his book, “Alter Egos,” Lander draws on his work as both a White House correspondent and State Department reporter to detail the “fraught and fascinating relationship between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.”
Mitchell, who also covered Clinton’s State Department, agreed that the agency was highly political during the Democratic presidential candidate’s watch.
“Those staffs were going at it and she, you know, populated her State Department with political advisors,” Mitchell said.
In his book, Landler suggests that the Clinton State Department’s insularity stemmed from conditions that were set in place when she agreed to serve as Obama’s top diplomat shortly after his election.
Obama pressed Clinton for weeks to take the job, but the then-Senator declined. She finally accepted the job after Obama agreed that Clinton could hire her own staff. Normally the White House puts its own people in key positions within federal agencies.
Clinton surrounded herself with longtime allies and operatives, many of whom prioritized her future political interests. The White House did intervene to veto some hiring decisions. Clinton had hoped to hire her longtime friend Sidney Blumenthal to work at the agency, but Obama’s then-chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, nixed the idea. Blumenthal had helped spread false rumors about Obama during the Democratic primaries.
While State and the White House did manage to get along, the silent political battle helped breed some mistrust in the relationship.
During his interview — as well as in his book — Landler cited as an example Clinton’s offer in 2012 to travel to the Middle East to broker a peace deal between Israel and Hamas. In 2009, Clinton had refused the White House’s request to visit Israel during an Obama trip to Egypt because, Landler reported, she thought the trip could only hurt her politically.
When Clinton offered to go to the region three years later, the White House was skeptical of her motives, according to Landler.
“Among the president’s advisors after she made this risky, politically dangerous proposal, the debate was ‘well, is she just doing this to make herself look good?'” Landler said. “So on both sides, the relationship never stopped being viewed through a political lens.”
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