Hillary Clinton Campaign Quotes

Clinton has cheated on Hillary for years,’ I said (to his campaign manager James Carville). ‘I told you the story about the time in Greenville in 1984, when he invited me to his hotel room. That’s why I’m not volunteering or doing any work for him. He uses women the wrong way.

My father despises cats. He believes them to be Democrats. He considers them to be little mean hillary clintons covered all over with feminist legfur. Cats would have abortions, if given half a chance. Cats would have abortions for fun. Consequently our own soft sinner, a soulful snowshoe named Alice, will stay shut in the bedroom upstairs, padding back and forth on cashmere paws, campaigning for equal pay, educating me about my reproductive system, and generally plotting the downfall of all men.

The commentator Peter Daou, who worked on my 2008 campaign, captured my feelings when he tweeted, “If Trump had won by 3 million votes, lost electoral college by 80K, and Russia had hacked RNC, Republicans would have shut down America.

As mentioned earlier, officials in the Hillary Clinton campaign also met with Kislyak, according to a Kremlin spokesman. However, almost no one accused Clinton of “colluding” with Russia.

Conway agreed with Bannon that if the Trump campaign could make the race about Hillary, not Trump, they would win with those hidden Trump voters. If the race stayed about Trump, “we’ll probably lose.

There was a terrible outbreak of “mansplaining” on the campaign trail—all of it done by a woman. Hillary Clinton was the person with the patronizing and prolix explications.

She’d gone on the attack against a better-liked rival whose platform more closely mirrored the values of the party’s base, creating a boomerang effect on her personal standing. Perhaps

And yet, if there was any question about how women in general fared on Planet Politics, one needed only to look at how Nancy Pelosi, the smart and hard-driving Speaker of the House of Representatives, was often depicted as a shrew or what Hillary Clinton was enduring as cable pundits and opinion writers hashed and rehashed each development in the campaign. Hillary’s gender was used against her relentlessly, drawing from all the worst stereotypes. She was called domineering, a nag, a bitch.

Hillary didn’t have a vision to articulate. And no one else could give one to her. In fact, the more people she assigned to the task of setting the tone for her campaign, the more muddled her message becam

Ailes said they were there for their weekly debate prep. The first presidential debate against Hillary Clinton was a month and a half away, on September 26. “Debate prep?” Bannon said. “You, Christie and Rudy?” “This is the second one.” “He’s actually prepping for the debates?” Bannon said, suddenly impressed. “No, he comes and plays golf and we just talk about the campaign and stuff like that. But we’re trying to get him in the habit.

To all the women, and especially the young women, who put their faith in this campaign and in me, I want you to know that nothing has made me prouder than to be your champion. Now, I know we have still not shattered that highest and hardest glass ceiling, but some day someone will and hopefully sooner than we might think right now.

What do you have to forget or overlook in order to desire that this dysfunctional clan once more occupies the White House and is again in a position to rent the Lincoln Bedroom to campaign donors and to employ the Oval Office as a massage parlor? You have to be able to forget, first, what happened to those who complained, or who told the truth, last time. It's often said, by people trying to show how grown-up and unshocked they are, that all Clinton did to get himself impeached was lie about sex. That's not really true. What he actually lied about, in the perjury that also got him disbarred, was the women. And what this involved was a steady campaign of defamation, backed up by private dicks (you should excuse the expression) and salaried government employees, against women who I believe were telling the truth. In my opinion, Gennifer Flowers was telling the truth; so was Monica Lewinsky, and so was Kathleen Willey, and so, lest we forget, was Juanita Broaddrick, the woman who says she was raped by Bill Clinton. (For the full background on this, see the chapter 'Is There a Rapist in the Oval Office?' in the paperback version of my book No One Left To Lie To. This essay, I may modestly say, has never been challenged by anybody in the fabled Clinton 'rapid response' team.) Yet one constantly reads that both Clintons, including the female who helped intensify the slanders against her mistreated sisters, are excellent on women's 'issues.

There was one major fact that kept the balance steady between us: I still needed my mother. I needed her shoulder to lean on; I needed her wisdom and advice. I used to come home from a long day in the Senate—or, in 2007 and 2008, from a day on the campaign trail—and slide in next to her at our kitchen table and let all my frustrations and worries tumble out. Mostly, she just listened. When she gave advice, it always came down to the same basic idea: you know the right thing to do. Do what’s right.

During the course of the 2016 presidential campaign, associates of the Trump campaign had occasion to meet with or talk to Russians. Some of the encounters were quite brief. None of them constituted criminal activity by Trump or his campaign. Nor did they present a substantial “articulable factual basis for an investigation” by the FBI, as the law demands.

Hillary Clinton’s remark “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons” was not just campaign hyperbole

The more she became a candidate of minority voters, the less affinity whites had for her—particularly those whites who had little or no allegiance to the Democratic Party.

Hillary was fighting the last war. She did that with varying degrees of success. But the variable she couldn’t change was the candidate.

But the idea burned into her mind as much as anything else was that she had lost because she’d hired people who put their own interests above getting her elected. The

Hillary’s campaign was so spirit-crushing that her aides eventually shorthanded the feeling of impending doom with a simple mantra: We’re not allowed to have nice things.

And she didn’t want the first major address of what could be a history-making campaign to be set against a minimalistic backdrop like some farmer’s back porch.

If Hillary was a candidate often isolated from her formal campaign—and she was—Abedin was the croc-filled moat encircling her. The

As she had at State, Abedin concerned herself with elements of the operation for which she had no credentials. But

She believed her campaign had failed her—not the other way around—and she wanted “to see who was talking to who, who was leaking to who,” said

The candidate would blame her staff for failing to contain the damage, and, privately, they would fault her for failing to take the steps necessary to do that.

Nor was anyone empowered to both enforce Hillary’s will and tell her when she was wrong without fear of reprisal.

Let us not grow weary in doing good,” she said, paraphrasing Galatians 6:9, “for in due season, we shall reap if we do not lose heart.

. Bill was less reticent. He’d had a sinking feeling that the British vote to leave the European Union had been a harbinger for a kind of screw-it vote in the United States.

Bernie really didn’t make any effort to explain realistic scenarios in which his agenda could be enacted. Obama worried about the costs of his proposals and their real-world impact.

Trump had tapped into a vein in the electorate that Hillary couldn’t locate—and, just as important, that his much narrower focus within the Electoral College provided a viable path to victory.

Do I feel empathy for Trump voters? That’s a question I’ve asked myself a lot. It’s complicated. It’s relatively easy to empathize with hardworking, warmhearted people who decided they couldn’t in good conscience vote for me after reading that letter from Jim Comey . . . or who don’t think any party should control the White House for more than eight years at a time . . . or who have a deeply held belief in limited government, or an overriding moral objection to abortion. I also feel sympathy for people who believed Trump’s promises and are now terrified that he’s trying to take away their health care, not make it better, and cut taxes for the superrich, not invest in infrastructure. I get it. But I have no tolerance for intolerance. None. Bullying disgusts me. I look at the people at Trump’s rallies, cheering for his hateful rants, and I wonder: Where’s their empathy and understanding? Why are they allowed to close their hearts to the striving immigrant father and the grieving black mother, or the LGBT teenager who’s bullied at school and thinking of suicide? Why doesn’t the press write think pieces about Trump voters trying to understand why most Americans rejected their candidate? Why is the burden of opening our hearts only on half the country? And yet I’ve come to believe that for me personally and for our country generally, we have no choice but to try. In the spring of 2017, Pope Francis gave a TED Talk. Yes, a TED Talk. It was amazing. This is the same pope whom Donald Trump attacked on Twitter during the campaign. He called for a “revolution of tenderness.” What a phrase! He said, “We all need each other, none of us is an island, an autonomous and independent ‘I,’ separated from the other, and we can only build the future by standing together, including everyone.” He said that tenderness “means to use our eyes to see the other, our ears to hear the other, to listen to the children, the poor, those who are afraid of the future.

The group’s lists had value, and lawyers for Ready for Hillary and the Clinton campaign would spend weeks planning how they could legally transfer all the data from the super PAC to the campaign. In

I knew how badly Obama had wanted Hillary Clinton to win the White House. He had campaigned tirelessly for her and, by some accounts, harder for her than any other president had for their hoped-for successor.

Though she was speaking with a small group made up mostly of intimates, she sounded like she was addressing a roomful of supporters—inhibited by the concern that whatever she said might be leaked to the press.

Hillary began to home in on one line of inquiry. Do I have to build a big national footprint or can I rely on the Democratic National Committee, state parties, and outside groups to shoulder some of the burden?

The law dictates how much politicians can collect in campaign contributions, limits their ability to make money on the side, and requires the disclosure of those contributors. Hopefully, politicians are also limited to some extent by their conscience. A sense of decency and good judgment ought to prevent politicians on both sides of the aisle from engaging in certain transactions—even if they think they can get away with it.

For Biden, as for other Democrats who had considered running in 2016, Hillary’s ability to co-opt the major institutions, political leaders, operatives, and financiers of the Democratic Party was deeply frustrating.

Hillary—who had been the target of so much venom over the years and who had become a disciple of Obama’s data-driven campaign style—sided with a younger generation that heavily favored science over the art of politics.

Throughout the primary, he’d report back from the field on what he was hearing at campaign events and from friends across the country. Mook’s response was always a variation on the same analysis: the data run counter to your anecdotes.

Hillary had alienated a significant portion of the electorate before she even launched her bid. It would be difficult to reset preconceived notions. “The big challenge of this whole race was there were so many voters who were ungettable,

In the FISA warrant application to spy on Page, the FBI knew, early on, that Steele was not a credible source. They learned that his assignment from Fusion GPS was purely for political reasons to damage Trump. They also learned that his efforts were funded by Trump’s election opponent, Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and the Democratic National Committee. This alone should have been enough for the FBI to disregard Steele and discard his “dossier” as lacking reliability as the law demands.

Much of this infighting might have been avoided had someone been given the authority to have the final say on matters large and small. But Hillary distributed power so broadly that none of her aides or advisers had control of the whole apparatus.

My father despises cats. He believes them to be Democrats. He considers them to be little mean hillary clintons covered all over with feminist legfur. Cats would have abortions, if given half a chance. Cats would have abortions for fun. Consequently our own soft sinner, a soulful snowshoe named Alice, will stay shut in the bedroom upstairs, padding back and forth on cashmere paws, campaigning for equal pay, educating me about my reproductive options, and generally plotting the downfall of all men.

During the campaign, I supported and encouraged the Clinton campaign strategy, but in hindsight, I lost track of one of the core lessons of Obama's success--campaigns are about telling the American people a story--a story about where we are, where we are going, and why you are the right person, and your opponent is the wrong person, to take the country there. It's a story that needs to be compelling, but also easily understood, and then driven home by the candidate and the campaign with relentless discipline.

The one person with whom she didn’t seem particularly upset: herself. No one who drew a salary from the campaign would tell her that. It was a self-signed death warrant to raise a question about Hillary’s competence—to her or anyone else—in loyalty-obsessed Clintonworld.

Another example was relentlessly expressed during Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the presidency, and especially since her defeat: the assertion that she was the victim of misogynistic comments and that she lost because she was a woman. None of it is true. But it keeps feminists thinking of women as victims — and people who think of themselves as victims are rendered weak....Modern feminists are afraid of life. They are afraid of differences of opinion, and especially afraid of men.....Feminists are outraged and unduly stressed by much of life itself.

Podesta had just left the Peninsula for the Javits Center. He went over because the campaign’s contract expired at 2:30 a.m., which was nearing, and there was still no decision from Hillary on what she wanted to do, other than avoid giving a public concession speech that night.

And I get angry. Because we've tried so hard. Ninety-six percent of Black women tried so hard in voting against him. And not only did this country not elect Clinton, it elected a person who publicly supported sexual assault, a man one accused of rape by his daughter Ivanka's mother. I am angry with the Democratic Party for not knowing that there could have been and should have been a better candidate and angry that a better campaign -- a campaign that honored the journey, that included community in real and transformative ways -- was not launched. I am angry I didn't realize -- or accept on a cellular level -- how wedded to racism and misogyny average Americans are. I am angry at my own naiveté. Our own naiveté. There was a real and substantive difference between these two candidates and we didn't take that seriously enough.

Both archetypes were familiar in Clintonworld: the cold-eyed, self-serving strategists who build up themselves by building up one Clinton or both and the sycophants who prove their loyalty to a Clinton by devoting their entire lives to the family. Hillary wanted them to coexist. But

Bill believed the push for Brexit—and its eventual approval by voters—showed a strong contempt for existing power structures that reflected the mood of the American electorate. You guys are underestimating the significance of Brexit, he told Brooklyn and his own advisers over and over.

Her approach, guided by Mook and informed by the demands of winning the primary, was to build a coalition focused on core strengths: African Americans, Latinos, college-educated whites, and women. But the more she catered to them, the more she pushed away other segments of the electorate.

For both sides, Hillary was the perfect symbol of everything wrong with America. At times, Trump and Sanders would act as the right and left speakers on a stereo blaring a chorus on repeat: Hillary’s a corrupt insider who has helped rig the political and economic systems in favor of the powerful.

Over the course of her life, no matter how good things got for her, she was always waiting for the other shoe to drop. When two-thirds of Americans had approved of her during her tenure as secretary of state, she’d known those numbers would plummet back to Earth once she became a candidate again.

For Bernie, winning wasn’t the only thing. I’m a backbencher in Congress, he told Devine. I want to come out of this in a better position to push the issues I care about. He wanted a higher profile in the Senate if he ran and lost. “A presidential campaign, if done well, can accomplish that,” Devine replied.

Eleven stories above Brooklyn Heights in a 659,000-square-foot building that also housed Morgan Stanley and the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York, Hillary’s top aides were as miserable as midlevel bureaucrats in an agency with no clear plans for how to attain its mission. They

After years of watching adversaries comb through her public records for any hint of a scandal, and after accessing her own aides’ e-mails, Hillary well understood the danger of exposing her own private thoughts to scrutiny. And that was reason enough to want them shielded from political enemies, journalists, and the public.

On a phone call with a longtime friend a couple of days after the election, Hillary was much less accepting of her defeat. She put a fine point on the factors she believed cost her the presidency: the FBI (Comey), the KGB (the old name for Russia’s intelligence service), and the KKK (the support Trump got from white nationalists).

The campaign was an unholy mess, fraught with tangled lines of authority, petty jealousies, distorted priorities, and no sense of greater purpose. No one was in charge, and no one had figured out how to make the campaign about something bigger than Hillary. Muscatine felt that the speech said nothing because it tried to say too much.

Will we ever have a woman President? We will. I hope I'll be around to vote for her--assuming I agree with her agenda. She'll have to earn my vote based on her qualifications and ideas, just like anyone else. When that day comes, I believe that my two presidential campaigns will have helped pave the way for her. We did not win, but we made the sight of a woman nominee more familiar. We brought the possibility of a woman president closer. We helped bring into the mainstream the idea of a woman leader for our country. That's a big deal, and everyone who played a role in making that happen should be deeply proud. This was worth it. I will never think otherwise. This fight was worth it.

This was especially true in the months leading up to the 2016 election, when the FBI conducted two politically explosive investigations: the first, about Hillary Clinton’s email practices at the State Department, became widely known, while the second, about possible Russian infiltration of the Trump campaign, never became public before Election Day.

There was never any evidence that candidate Trump had personal conversations or contacts with Russian government officials or anyone connected with the Kremlin. Indeed, he consistently denied it and no one has come forth to assert that he did. His frustration over being falsely accused of “colluding” with a foreign power during his campaign was understandable. It is why he asked Comey and others to reveal the truth that no evidence existed that would prove otherwise. People who are wrongfully persecuted feel compelled to try to clear themselves of the taint of impropriety. It is the natural instinct in us all. Trump had the same right as a private citizen or public figure or presidential candidate.

Mostly, this was the fault of white, Rust Belt, out-of-work Democrats. They had voted twice for Barack Obama, but now they were being told that they were racists or white supremacists for voting for Trump and giving him an Electoral College edge. The contrarian liberal genius Michael Moore had been a lonely prophet who had seen it coming, but the Clinton team had ignored him, just as they had ignored their own patriarch, Bill Clinton, who sounded the same warning. In a live performance, Moore had teased voters in Wilmington, Ohio, months before the election, telling them that he knew what they were planning to do. And they laughed with him, like guilty children caught in the act by a bemused cousin. He knew they were going to vote for Trump. He didn’t like it, but at least he was one person who could not be fooled. People who had been overlooked, despised, stomped on, used, taken for granted. This was their moment to speak. They had been shamed into telling the pollsters what they wanted to hear, but in the privacy of their polling booths, they had struck a blow. This

Hochschild points out that "virtually all those I talked with felt on shaky economic ground... They also felt culturally marginalized.." Their traditional views were held up to ridicule by the national media; they felt belittled and besieged. Referring to people like this as "deplorables," as Hillary Clinton did during the campaign, is not a great way to win them back.

Clinton’s aides didn’t know that batches of Podesta’s e-mails would be released day after day from October 7 until November 7, the last day before the election. Nor could they have imagined that the intelligence finding of Russian interference in the election would so quickly get drowned out by the combination of the Trump Access Hollywood video and the Podesta e-mails.

Ultimately, it was a battle between those who believed that it was folly to think Hillary could show up in lower-population areas and change hearts and minds and those who believed, just as firmly, that politics and Hillary’s path to victory were fundamentally about doing just that. That elemental split hung over nearly every internal skirmish over strategy and tactics—from

had campaigned hard to the very end, but Barack had won and now it was time to support him. The causes and people I had campaigned for, the Americans who had lost jobs and health care, who couldn’t afford gas or groceries or college, who had felt invisible to their government for the previous seven years, now depended on his becoming the forty-fourth President of the United States.

Make America Great Again”—ripped off from Ronald Reagan, and traced the decline of the country to the mid-1960s. Though he didn’t mention the Johnson era’s Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, or public subsidies for housing and health care, Trump’s dog whistle was just the right pitch to attract the support of white supremacists and nearly all-white crowds of thousands at his campaign rallies.

Hillary Clinton tried to dismiss her role in paying for the “dossier” by stating that it was simply “opposition research.”29 While it is true that political campaigns often use such research, what Clinton, Simpson, Fusion GPS, and Steele did was antithetical to any definition of “research.” In a column published by The Hill, Ned Ryan explained it this way: Opposition research is based on fact, from voting records, court records and public statements, to tax returns and business relationships. Fusion GPS’s dossier, on the other hand, was misinformation. It was not opposition research because it was not based on fact. Given Fusion GPS’s dependence on Russian gossip spread by Vladimir Putin’s spies, there is a good case to be made that Fusion GPS more deeply colluded with the Russians than anyone else.30

within twenty-four hours of her concession speech. Mook and Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.

In the summer of 2008, years before her private e-mail server became a campaign issue, Hillary learned about the power of digital snooping. At the time, she was conducting an autopsy of her failed bid against Barack Obama, and she wanted an honest accounting of what had gone wrong. So she instructed a trusted aide to access the campaign’s server and download the messages sent and received by top staffers.

I will tell you what the real Benghazi scandal is. It's not that four Americans died and Hillary Clinton may have lied about it. It's that 30,000 Libyans died in a U.S.-NATO bombing campaign, and the whole country was ripped apart, and Hillary Clinton can still openly brag about it. The war was based on lies but the Republicans and the corporate media don't consider that a scandal because they helped her push those lies.

Sessions was acting in his capacity as a United States senator during his encounters with Kislyak, and he reiterated that he did not discuss the election or campaign. This meant his statements to the Judiciary Committee were truthful, not lies as Pelosi claimed. Armed with no evidence, she convicted Sessions without the benefit of a trial. Her accusations and slurs were not just baseless, given the facts, but contemptible.

In late July, the FBI learned that a Trump campaign foreign policy advisor named George Papadopoulos had been discussing, months earlier, obtaining from the Russian government emails damaging to Hillary Clinton. Based on this information, the FBI opened an investigation to try to understand whether Americans, including any associated with the Trump campaign, were working in any way with the Russians in their influence effort.

Biden was for the Iraq War before he was against it. And he was the Senate sponsor of the Clinton White House anticrime law that had led to the mass incarceration of young black men. In addition, he’d ushered Clarence Thomas onto the Supreme Court, spent the early part of his career in the Senate trying to end school busing, and represented perhaps the most business-friendly tax haven in the nation, Delaware, for thirty-six years.

Mook was already operating inside a framework first developed for Hillary by David Plouffe, President Barack Obama’s longtime strategist, who had put together a preliminary memo for Hillary in December 2013. As Obama’s campaign manager in 2008, Plouffe had despised Clinton; that he was now advising her was an important signal of just how completely she would co-opt the Democratic establishment even before she began running. Plouffe

There was a certain duality to Hillary’s vast political empire: while it was true that most of the voices inside and outside the campaign had something valuable to contribute, when taken together, they were cacophonous. Rarely did everyone agree on a particular course of action, and often the counsel Hillary got came with the baggage of the adviser’s agenda in maintaining good relations with the candidate or trying to make a rival look bad. Both

Over the course of a couple of hours, they hammered out remarks aimed at comforting Americans who feared a Trump presidency. They went heavy on themes of constitutional protections and mentioned Muslim Americans and women and others who might feel targeted by the new president. The thrust, one Hillary adviser said, was “We stand with them and we see them, and the fact that we lost this election doesn’t mean that we’re going to stop fighting for them.

Hillary spoke of Dorothy Rodham, age eight, sitting on a train with her little sister on their way to live with family who didn’t want them. “I dream of going up to her and sitting next to her and taking her in my arms,” Hillary said, and telling her, “as hard as it might be to imagine, your daughter will grow up to be a United States Senator, represent our country as Secretary of State and win more than 62 million votes for president of the United States.

Between the Benghazi Committee, which would take depositions from Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin, and Jake Sullivan among other Hillary aides, the drip-drip nature of evolving federal lawsuits, and judicial orders for the State Department to release Hillary’s e-mails on a rolling basis, the early months of the campaign became a private and public hell. It was only a matter of time before voters would know that Hillary had not told the truth about not sending or receiving classified information.

The expectation of the Clinton campaign and the mainstream media was inconsistent with the prior trend, over fifty years, of African Americans giving 11 to 16 percent of their vote to Republican and Independent candidates in presidential elections. Among recent presidents, only Lyndon Johnson in 1964, Al Gore in 2000, and Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 have received 90 percent or more of the black vote. Hillary Clinton received 88 percent of the African American vote. Stop the Steal, Inc. I

After the 2008 campaign, two of her aides, Kris Balderston and Adrienne Elrod, had toiled to assign loyalty scores to members of Congress, ranging from one for the most loyal to seven for those who had committed the most egregious acts of treachery. Bill Clinton had campaigned against some of the sevens in subsequent primary elections, helping to knock them out of office. The fear of retribution was not lost on the remaining sevens, some of whom rushed to endorse Hillary early in the 2016 cycle.

Bill Clinton and many of the older generation of aides and advisers, believed it was a mistake to cordon her off from large swaths of the electorate. They understood the value of slicing and dicing voters to make efficient decisions, but they also felt that Hillary should be doing more to show that she wanted every vote. Some of them believed that instead of basing her campaign on Obama’s core coalition, she should have begun with the working-class whites and Latinos who fueled her 2008 run and built out.

Whether she was perceived as hostile to working- and middle-class whites or just indifferent, it wasn’t a big leap from “she doesn’t care about my job” to “she’d rather give my job to a minority or a foreigner than fight for me to keep it.” She and her aides were focused on the wrong issue set for working-class white Michigan voters, and, even when she talked about the economy—rather than her e-mail scandal, mass shootings, or the water crisis in Flint—it wasn’t at all clear to them that she was on their side.

In a private moment on the campaign trail, just a few days before the election, Hillary grew reflective about her relationship with the American public. “I know I engender bad reactions from people, and I always have,” she confided in an aide who was traveling with her on a swing through several battleground states. “There are some people in whom I bring out the worst. I know that about myself, and I don’t know why that is. But it is.” “That’s going to be one of the main problems you’re going to face as president,” the aide replied

herself to Moore. “I don’t understand what’s happening with the country. I can’t get my arms around it,” Hillary confided. Moore just listened. “How do I get answers to this?” Hillary asked. It was a quandary that would plague her throughout the campaign. After nearly a year on the campaign trail, and hundreds of stops at diners, coffee shops, and high school gymnasiums and just as many roundtables with young professionals and millworkers, Hillary still couldn’t figure out why Americans were so angry or how she could bring the country together. She

Bernie’s entire campaign was a character assassination—a moral-high-ground argument that she was less pure than he was. Of course, that was true in the sense that she believed in moving forward by building political coalitions. Bernie didn’t work with anyone. He didn’t do it in the House. He didn’t do it in the Senate. His “coalition” on the campaign trail was almost entirely white and disproportionately male. Hell, he was only competitive in states where just a handful of people showed up for caucuses or large portions of the electorate were independents, not Democrats.

No, Schale explained, Trump’s numbers weren’t just big, they were unreal. In rural Polk County, smack-dab in the center of the state, Hillary would collect 3,000 more votes than Obama did in 2012—but Trump would add more than 25,000 votes to Mitt Romney’s total. In Pasco County, a swath of suburbs north of Tampa–St. Petersburg, Trump outran Romney by 30,000 votes. Pasco was one of the counties Schale was paying special attention to because the Tampa area tended to attract retirees from the Rust Belt—folks whose political leanings reflected those of hometowns in the industrial Midwest. In

guarded that information jealously to maintain his own power. Podesta was also wary of at least one member of Hillary’s State Crew. When the e-mail scandal first burst into the open, Philippe Reines, who had a rare direct line to the boss after running her media operations at the State Department and in the Senate, went to war with Jennifer Palmieri, the new communications director for the campaign, over how to respond. Reines, highly obsessive, ultraloyal to Hillary, and possessed of an acid tongue, pointed his finger at Palmieri when Hillary complained that deliberations about the timing of her first public remarks on the e-mail server were leaking to the media.

campaign aides came to believe that there was a big and telling difference between the disclosure of DNC e-mails earlier in the summer and the reveal of the Podesta rounds. Rather than a massive, untargeted one-time release, this time there seemed to be greater political sophistication in the slow-burn method of daily releases for the final month of the campaign—and the Podesta e-mails were presented in an easily searchable format. The biggest difference they detected was that WikiLeaks had seemed to acquire a close enough understanding of American domestic politics to time its releases and publish e-mails on days when they would have greater relevance in the news.

Mook had chosen not to spend money on polling, to the great frustration of some of the campaign’s aides and advisers in key states. In Florida, Craig Smith, the former White House political director, and Scott Arceneaux, a veteran southern Democratic political operative, had begged Mook to poll the state in October to no avail. Mook believed it was a waste of money. He had learned from David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager, that old-school polling should be used for testing messages and gauging the sentiments of the electorate and that analytics were just as good for tracking which candidate was ahead and by how much in each state. Plus, the analytics were quicker and much cheaper.

In a memoir of her tenure as secretary of state, published in June 2014, Hillary Clinton gave her most detailed account of her actions to date. She denounced what she called “misinformation, speculation, and flat-out deceit” about the attacks, and wrote that Obama “gave the order to do whatever was necessary to support our people in Libya.” She wrote: “Losing these fearless public servants in the line of duty was a crushing blow. As Secretary I was the one ultimately responsible for my people’s safety, and I never felt that responsibility more deeply than I did that day.” Addressing the controversy over what triggered the attack, and whether the administration misled the public, she maintained that the Innocence of Muslims video had played a role, though to what extent wasn’t clear. “There were scores of attackers that night, almost certainly with differing motives. It is inaccurate to state that every single one of them was influenced by this hateful video. It is equally inaccurate to state that none of them were.” Clinton’s account was greeted with praise and condemnation in equal measure. As Clinton promoted her book, a new investigation was being launched by the House Select Committee on the Events Surrounding the 2012 Terrorist Attack in Benghazi. Chaired by former federal prosecutor Rep. Trey Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican, the committee’s creation promised to drive questions about Benghazi into the 2016 presidential campaign and beyond.

However, Putin's tilt toward Trump appeared to have been motivated by something deeper than a desire for revenge against Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration. Putin and Trump shared a similar zero-sum worldview and a penchant for operating in the shadows. Each man viewed the idea of a free press with contempt. They both believed that financial interests should be passed down to their children to create family dynasties ... Trump and Putin are both conversant with the secrecy world, practiced hands at using anonymous companies to wall off their activities and keep their business affairs secret. During the campaign, Trump reported that he had 378 individual Delaware companies, but the full extent of his business dealings remains hidden.

One day, sitting at the dining table, I opened one and started reading. It talked about Michael’s contributions to research into childhood leukemia. His position as head of hematology at the Montreal Children’s Hospital. His work as a lead investigator with the international pediatric oncology group. The writer talked about loss and grief and offered heartfelt condolence. It was from Hillary Rodham Clinton. Secretary Clinton, in the last stages of a bruising brutal campaign for the most powerful job in the world, took time out to write to me. A woman she’d never met. About a man she’d never met. A Canadian who couldn’t even vote for her. It was a private note, not meant to help her in any way, but offering comfort to a stranger in profound grief.

More politically, Medusa has become shorthand for a particular brand of strong female agency perceived as aggressive or ‘unladylike’. Marie Antoinette was depicted with snake-like hair in French seventeenth-century cartoons, while in the early twentieth century, anti-suffragette postcards likened the protesters to the monster. During the 2016 American election campaign, the image of Hillary Clinton’s snake-bedecked, raging head being cut off by her Republican rival Donald Trump – compared to Perseus – appeared on unofficial merchandise. Similarly, another strong female leader, German chancellor Angela Merkel, has found herself depicted as a Gorgon. These portrayals reinforce a millennia-old message from men to women: keep your mouth shut or we’ll shut it for you.

On Saturday, March 19, 2016, at 4:34 A.M., John Podesta, the Hillary Clinton campaign chairman, received what looked like an email from Google about his personal Gmail account. “Hi John Someone just used your password to try to sign in to your Google Account,” read the email from “the Gmail Team.” It noted that the attempted intrusion had come from an IP address in Ukraine. The email went on: “Google stopped this sign-in attempt. You should change your password immediately.” The Gmail Team helpfully included a link to a site where Podesta could make the recommended password change. That morning, Podesta forwarded the email to his chief of staff, Sara Latham, who then sent it along to Charles Delavan, a young IT staffer at the Clinton campaign. At 9:54 AM that morning, Delavan replied, “This is a legitimate email. John needs to change his password immediately, and ensure that two-factor authentication is turned on his account… It is absolutely imperative that this is done ASAP.” Delavan later asserted to colleagues that he had committed a typo. He had meant to write that “this is not a legitimate email.” Not everybody on the Clinton campaign would believe him. But Delavan had an argument in his favor. In his response to Latham, he had included the genuine link Podesta needed to use to change his password. Yet for some reason Podesta clicked on the link in the phony email and used a bogus site to create a new password. The Russians now had the keys to his emails and access to the most private messages of Clinton World going back years.

You could read Hillary Clinton’s shocking loss to Donald Trump as a perfect storm that included a bungled campaign, serial misjudgments about email servers, Russian hacking, FBI meddling, sexism, and more. Even her ability to call out Donald Trump’s grotesque treatment of women was compromised by memories of Bill Clinton’s womanizing and the sick sexting of Anthony Weiner, husband of the candidate’s closest aide. All of that was true—but a far deeper erosion was at work. The statistics of political disaffection of working people from the party of Roosevelt are astonishing. Working-class white voters, defined as those without college degrees, supported Trump by a margin 67 to 28, a gap of 39 percent. Among working-class white men, the margin was an even larger: 72 to 23, or a chasm of 49 percent. Clinton, counting on the feminist symbolism of a shattered glass ceiling to make up the loss, even lost a majority of white women, by 10 points. As

And to all the young people in particular, I hope you will hear this. I have, as Tim said, spent my entire adult life fighting for what I believe in. I’ve had successes and I’ve had setbacks. Sometimes, really painful ones. Many of you are at the beginning of your professional public and political careers. You will have successes and setbacks, too. This loss hurts, but please never stop believing that fighting for what’s right is worth it. It is. It is worth it. And so we need, we need you to keep up these fights now and for the rest of your lives. And to all the women, and especially the young women, who put their faith in this campaign and in me, I want you to know that nothing has made me prouder than to be your champion. Now, I, I know, I know we have still not shattered that highest and hardest glass ceiling, but someday, someone will, and hopefully sooner than we might think right now. And, and to all the little girls who are watching this, never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world to pursue and achieve your own dreams.

During the 2016 US presidential campaign, the hatred shown toward Hillary Clinton far outstripped even the most virulent criticisms that could legitimately be pinned on her. She was linked with “evil” and widely compared to a witch, which is to say that she was attacked as a woman, not as a political leader. After her defeat, some of those critics dug out the song “Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead,” sung in The Wizard of Oz to celebrate the Witch of the East’s death—a jingle already revived in the UK at the time of Margaret Thatcher’s death in 2013. This reference was brandished not only by Donald Trump’s electors, but also by supporters of Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s main rival in the primaries. On Sanders’ official site, a fundraising initiative was announced under the punning title “Bern the Witch”—an announcement that the Vermont senator’s campaign team took down as soon as it was brought to his attention. Continuing this series of limp quips, the conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh quipped, “She’s a witch with a capital B”—he can’t have known that, at the Salem witch trials in the seventeenth century, a key figure had already exploited this consonance by calling his servant, Sarah Churchill, who was one of his accusers, “bitch witch.” In reaction, female Democrat voters started sporting badges calling themselves “Witches for Hillary” or “Hags for Hillary.”48

Hillary rode her husband’s success to become first lady of Arkansas, then first lady of the United States. Then she won an easy race in liberal New York to become its junior senator. As a senator she accomplished, well, nothing. Then she ran for the Democratic presidential nomination, losing to Barack Obama, who appointed her secretary of state. Despite extensive travels, Hillary’s achievements as secretary of state are essentially nil. As with Benghazi, most of her notable actions are screwups. In an apparent confirmation of the Peter Principle, however, Hillary is now back as the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination for president in 2016. Hillary is fortunate, not merely in her career path, but also in being the surprise recipient of hundreds of millions of dollars that have been rained on her and her husband both directly and through the Clinton Foundation. The Clinton Foundation has raised more than $2 billion in contributions. A substantial portion of that came from foreign governments. Some sixteen nations together have given $130 million. In addition, through speeches and consulting fees, more than $100 million has ended up in the pockets of the Clintons themselves. The foundation, although ostensibly a charitable enterprise, gives only one dollar out of ten to charity. It has also been disclosed that the Clintons have developed a penchant for traveling in high style, and use a substantial amount of donation money on private planes and penthouse suites. The rest of the loot seems to have been accumulated into a war chest that is at the behest of the Clintons and the Hillary presidential campaign.

Mueller kicked off the meeting by pulling out a piece of paper with some notes. The attorney general and his aides believed they noticed something worrisome. Mueller’s hands shook as he held the paper. His voice was shaky, too. This was not the Bob Mueller everyone knew. As he made some perfunctory introductory remarks, Barr, Rosenstein, O’Callaghan, and Rabbitt couldn’t help but worry about Mueller’s health. They were taken aback. As Barr would later ask his colleagues, “Did he seem off to you?” Later, close friends would say they noticed Mueller had changed dramatically, but a member of Mueller’s team would insist he had no medical problems. Mueller quickly turned the meeting over to his deputies, a notable handoff. Zebley went first, summing up the Russian interference portion of the investigation. He explained that the team had already shared most of its findings in two major indictments in February and July 2018. Though they had virtually no chance of bringing the accused to trial in the United States, Mueller’s team had indicted thirteen Russian nationals who led a troll farm to flood U.S. social media with phony stories to sow division and help Trump. They also indicted twelve Russian military intelligence officers who hacked internal Democratic Party emails and leaked them to hurt Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The Trump campaign had no known role in either operation. Zebley explained they had found insufficient evidence to suggest a conspiracy, “no campaign finance [violations], no issues found. . . . We have questions about [Paul] Manafort, but we’re very comfortable saying there was no collusion, no conspiracy.” Then Quarles talked about the obstruction of justice portion. “We’re going to follow the OLC opinion and conclude it wasn’t appropriate for us to make a final determination as to whether or not there was a crime,” he said. “We’re going to report the facts, the analysis, and leave it there. We are not going to say we would indict but for the OLC opinion.

Then there were those who were thrilling to Senator Sanders, who believed that Bernie would be the one to give them free college, to solve climate change, and even to bring peace to the Middle East, though that was not an issue most people associated with him. On a trip to Michigan, I met with a group of young Muslims, most of them college students, for whom this was the first election in which they planned to participate. I was excited that they had come to hear more about HRC's campaign. One young woman, speaking for her peers, said she really wanted to be excited about the first woman president, but she had to support Bernie because she believed he would be more effective at finally brokering a peace treaty in the Middle East. Everyone around her nodded. I asked the group why they doubted Hillary Clinton's ability to do the same. "Well, she has done nothing to help the Palestinians." Taking a deep breath, I asked them if they knew that she was the first U.S. official to ever call the territories "Palestine" in the nineties, that she advocated for Palestinian sovereignty back when no other official would. They did not. I then asked them if they were aware that she brought together the last round of direct talks between the Israelis and Palestinians? That she personally negotiated a cease-fire to stop the latest war in Gaza when she was secretary of state? They shook their heads. Had they known that she announced $600 million in assistance to the Palestinian Authority and $300 million in humanitarian aid to Gaza in her first year at State? They began to steal glances at one another. Did they know that she pushed Israel to invest in the West Bank and announced an education program to make college more affordable for Palestinian students? More head shaking. They simply had no idea. "So," I continued, "respectfully, what is it about Senator Sander's twenty-seven-year record in Congress that suggests to you that the Middle East is a priority for him?" The young woman's response encapsulated some what we were up against. "I don't know," she replied. "I just feel it.