We don’t know who Bill and Hillary Clinton screwed over yet, but the knives are out for the dynamic duo.
It’s possible, such is their arrogance, that Hillary really will run again and the leaks are coming to stop them from damaging the country.
We don’t know what happened, yet, to cause their friends to start leaking to the media, but they are and it is devastating.
The leaks are payback for something and they are humiliating. My guess is we will see more leaks in the coming months as we find out the truth from Clinton-land.
From Newsweek: One evening earlier this year, an old friend and adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton sat down with the former president for dinner at a quiet Manhattan restaurant. Bill, the friend says, looked thinner and more tired than he had in some time. He is 72 now, 15 years on from open-heart surgery and the complications that arose from it. He was, the friend says, a “bit sad, and more than a bit angry.”
When Hillary insisted in a national television interview last year that her husband’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky was not “an abuse of power” because “she was an adult,” the press reaction was scathing.
According to three friends of the Clintons interviewed for this story (who were granted anonymity to speak candidly), the furor had a “profoundly depressing effect” on the first couple and all those around them who still like and support them.“It was just awful,” says one of the friends. “For Bill, it brought up all the bad times, and it showed yet again that Hillary just has no political fingertips. It couldn’t have been worse.”
Until that point, it had been an open secret in Clinton world that Hillary was at least considering another presidential run, though just how seriously is a matter of dispute. She was being urged on by Bill, according to two sources close to them, who was convinced she would beat Donald Trump in a rematch.
Did they want revenge? Of course they did,” says one former senior adviser. Either on the phone or at the occasional conclave at the couple’s home in Chappaqua, New York, Hillary would bat around the idea with close aides, including former chief of staff Cheryl Williams, 2008 presidential campaign manager Maggie Williams and aide-de-camp Philippe Reines.Some were less enthusiastic than others.
In the first year or so after she lost to Trump, Hillary was somewhat insulated from the anger a lot of Democratic leaders felt toward her. That resentment was a subject Bill didn’t raise, although he was aware of it from his endless soundings of his national network of contacts in the party. Public polling or approval ratings didn’t provide much encouragement. A Gallup Poll in the fall of 2018 had her at 36 percent.
Still, for reasons that bewilder some of their friends, the Clintons continue to feel compelled to be in the public eye, to make themselves heard. Consider the recently concluded tour called “An Evening With the Clintons,” in which the two reminisced about their time in Washington. It began last fall at a sports arena in Toronto—a vast venue more appropriate for a Beyoncé concert than a political trip down memory lane. There were huge numbers of empty seats and large sections of the arena cordoned off by curtain. Ticket sales were slow, and the promoters had to cut prices in half. The entire evening was a debacle, and the tour was postponed.
But not canceled. Organizers booked smaller venues for the spring, lowered prices, and again the Clintons sallied forth: 13 stops across the country, ending on May 4 in Las Vegas, answering softball questions from factotums like former political adviser Paul Begala or celebrities like comedian Jordan Klepper, who, inexplicably, was chosen to host the Washington, D.C., event on April 27.Most of the program is legacy-burnishing: how smart they were; how they wanted to unite not divide; how they grew the economy for everyone, not just the rich. They riff about how they ended the war in Bosnia in the 1990s. “Bill, this is boring!” a heckler yelled at the New York event before being hustled out of the Beacon Theatre.
But the small-scale venues—many were still not sold out—and the cheaper prices speak to the very real cost of exile for the Clintons. Beyond the just-ended tour, their speaking fees have plummeted. After she left her job as secretary of state but before she declared her 2016 candidacy, Hillary used to make $200,000 per speech. In 2014, she spoke at eight different universities and pulled in $1.8 million.
No longer. The head of one prominent public speakers’ agency, who didn’t want to be quoted on the record, says Hillary’s fees have come down sharply—particularly after a couple of post-2016 university speaking engagements (for which she was paid up to $300,000) sparked a fierce backlash. Since then, her fees have been as low as $25,000 or $50,000 per event.
