Blood Feud: The Clintons vs. the Obamas (19 page)

Several hours later, Bill and Hillary Clinton were seated, along with a few aides, in the living room of Whitehaven, their home on Embassy Row.

“There is no way I’m going to let you do those TV shows with those talking points,” Bill said, according to one of the participants in the meeting. “I’m
ordering
you to turn the White House down.”

“Fuck you!” Hillary said. “Nobody orders
me
around.”

“It’s a fucking trap,” he said.

“I know it’s a fucking trap,” she said. “But how do you say no to the president?”

“Easy—you say N period O period,” Bill said. “Look, I’m thinking of you and the 2016 campaign. Those bullshit talking points manufactured in the White House sausage factory aren’t going to hold up. Axe and the rest of them are trying to hang the whole mess on you. Eventually, the lie is going to be exposed, and you’ll take the fall for it. Then, believe me, Obama will dump you.”

“He’ll never do that,” Hillary said.

“Even if he doesn’t,” Bill said, “if you go on those Sunday shows, the clips of you telling those lies will be used by the Republicans endlessly in attack ads against you in 2016.”

“The intensity of the Clintons’ connection at times like this, when the shit hits the fan, is breathtaking,” said a person who was privy to their conversation. “Their concentration is like that of an athlete, or maybe more like a chess player. Bill said that the Obama people grossly underestimated the Clintons. The Obama people were triumphant after knocking the Clintons out of the 2008 race, and Obama’s hubris had only grown. The Obamas were sure that the Benghazi thing would fall on Hillary and that she’d go out and sabotage her chances for the presidency. Bill said, ‘They think we are stupid as shit.’”

“Okay,” Hillary said at last. “I’ll tell them I’m not interested.”

After Hillary informed Valerie Jarrett that she would not appear on the Sunday shows, Jarrett turned to national security adviser Tom Donilon and asked him to do the Full Ginsburg. Donilon declined, offering the excuse that he wasn’t very good on TV. Next, Jarrett approached CIA director David Petraeus, but that idea turned out to be a nonstarter too, for Petraeus called the sanitized talking points “a joke” and “utterly useless” and asked the White House not to use them.

The one person who seemed more than willing to take on the task was Susan Rice, the hot-tempered United Nations ambassador, who had never gotten over her resentment at being passed over as secretary of state in favor of Hillary. Here was Rice’s chance to show off her foreign policy cred on the Sunday talk shows, which were watched by congressmen, senators, and the rest of the political class in Washington. The Full Ginsburg would be her audition to replace Hillary Clinton, who was scheduled to leave the State Department after the first of the year.

On Sunday, September 16—five full days after the Benghazi debacle—Susan Rice sat down with Jake Tapper, senior White House correspondent for ABC News and substitute host for
This Week
. She was dressed in a black suit, pink camisole, and matching pearl earrings and necklace. Tapper asked her if it was true, as the Libyan government was saying, that there might have been al-Qaeda ties to the militias that attacked the American mission in Benghazi.

“Our current best assessment,” Rice replied, “based on the information we have at present, is that in fact what this began as was a spontaneous—not a premeditated—response to what had transpired in Cairo . . . in reaction to this very offensive video.”

Along with a couple of their close friends, the Clintons gathered in their sunroom at Whitehaven to watch Susan Rice’s simultaneous taped performances on CBS’s
Face the Nation
, NBC’s
Meet the Press
, ABC’s
This Week
, CNN’s
State of the Union
, and Fox News Channel’s
Fox News Sunday.

“I’m almost sad to see Susan take the fall,” Bill said.

“I’m not,” Hillary said.

Susan Rice was on Hillary’s enemies list. Rice had worked in the Clinton White House and State Department, and Hillary considered her a “traitor” for supporting Barack Obama in 2008.

Bill was dressed in golf clothes and taking practice swings with a club while he watched the TV. At one point, he put down the club, made himself a cup of herbal tea, and settled on the velvet sofa.

Bob Schieffer, the host of
Face the Nation
, asked Rice: “But you do not agree . . . that [the Benghazi attack] was something that had been plotted out several months ago?”

“We do not,” Rice replied. “We do not have information at present that leads us to conclude that this was premeditated or preplanned.”

“It’s like watching a train wreck,” Hillary said.

“Well, all I can say is that I’m relieved it isn’t you on the TV,” Bill said.

Hillary got up from her chair, walked behind Bill, and bent down and kissed the top of his head.

He looked up at her and smiled. One of the friends in the room noticed that Bill’s eyes glistened with tears.

Hillary had dodged the bullet, if only for a while, but in the last few weeks of the presidential campaign, Barack Obama came under a withering hail of fire for Benghazi. Republicans attacked him on three counts: first, for refusing to say where he had been on the night of the attack; second, for failing to protect the Benghazi mission; and third, for the false claim that the assault was a spontaneous demonstration caused by an anti-Muslim video. Obama only made matters worse by repeating that claim over and over:

          
•
   
On September 18, Obama appeared on
The Late Show with David Letterman
and said that “extremists and terrorists used [the anti-Muslim YouTube video] as an excuse to attack a variety of our embassies.”

          
•
   
On September 20, Obama appeared at a Univision town hall and said that the “natural protests that arose because of the outrage over the video were used as an excuse by extremists to see if they can also directly harm U.S. interests.”

          
•
   
On September 25, Obama addressed the United Nations General Assembly and referred to “a crude
and disgusting video [that] sparked outrage throughout the Muslim world. . . . There is no video that justifies an attack on an embassy.”

It wasn’t until September 27—more than two weeks after the attack—that White House spokesman Jay Carney finally told the White House press corps that the president had come to terms with the truth.

“The president’s position,” said Carney, “[is] that this was a terrorist attack.”

On CNN’s
State of the Union
, Candy Crowley asked John McCain, the senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, why it had taken the administration so long to reach that obvious conclusion.

“It interferes with the depiction that the administration is trying to convey that al-Qaeda is on the wane,” McCain answered. “How else could you trot out our UN ambassador to say this was a spontaneous demonstration?. . . It was either willful ignorance or abysmal intelligence to think that people come to spontaneous demonstrations with heavy weapons, mortars, and the attack goes on for hours.”

Yet, for all the partisan heat that the Benghazi story generated inside the Beltway, it didn’t seem to catch fire among voters around the country. The reason for that was not hard to find: the liberal mainstream media largely ignored or minimized the importance of the story—and in at least one instance purposely suppressed the truth.

Back in September, less than twenty-four hours after the attack, Obama had sat down for an interview with his favorite
journalist, Steve Kroft of
60 Minutes.
But when the interview aired on September 23, a critical portion of the tape—in which Obama refused to declare the attack an act of terrorism—was missing. Kroft sat on this crucial part of the interview until November 4, two days before the election, when CBS News finally released it—on the internet, not on
60 Minutes
, where it should have been broadcast in the first place.

Thus was added yet another dimension to the Benghazi Deception: the role of the mainstream media in suppressing the truth.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

HUBRIS

A
lthough Bill Clinton had blown hot and cold about Obama during much of the presidential campaign, he was enough of a realist to understand that it was in the Clintons’ long-term interest if Obama won the election. A victorious Obama would owe them big time—both for Bill’s convention speech and for Hillary’s parrotlike repetition of the Benghazi talking points. As far as Bill was concerned, the Clintons had a deal with Obama—their support in 2012 for his in 2016—and the time was nearing for Obama to begin showing them his gratitude.

However, in his eagerness to collect on his chits, Bill Clinton seemed to forget one of his own political maxims. As he had once reminded Hillary: “Loyalty doesn’t exist in politics. There’s no such word in the political rulebook.”

Obama was a living, breathing example of that maxim. Indeed, he was famous for his ingratitude. His biggest campaign bundlers—men and women who had raised millions of dollars for his reelection—rarely if ever heard from Obama, because he didn’t think he owed them anything. Influential African Americans who had supported Obama since his earliest days in the Illinois legislature didn’t get their calls answered when they phoned the White House. Top congressional Democrats like Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, and Steny Hoyer, the House minority whip, complained that Obama routinely ignored them.

The first sign that Obama didn’t feel under any obligation to the Clintons came in late September when Bill asked Doug Band, his right-hand man, to call the White House and say that the former president would be more than happy to give Obama some pointers on how to get the best of Mitt Romney during their upcoming first debate on October 3 at the University of Denver.

As Clinton knew from personal experience, incumbent presidents were accustomed to being surrounded by ego-inflating yes-men and often failed to take their opponents seriously. He was concerned that Obama, who had an exaggerated opinion of his powers of persuasion, was going to blow the debate. Clinton had heard through the Democratic Party grapevine that Obama was behaving so cocksure about his election prospects that he wasn’t taking his debate prep seriously.

Clinton waited several days for a response, but none was forthcoming. He was dumbfounded that Obama had ignored his offer, and his hurt quickly boiled over into anger.

“Bill assumed that he and Obama were on friendly terms after the convention,” one of his friends said. “He couldn’t believe that
the White House didn’t even extend him the courtesy of a return phone call.”