The Queen: The Epic Ambition of Hillary and the Coming of a Second "Clinton Era" (5 page)

This cadre of key influencers is not enormous: Remnick, Kristof, Friedman and a few others. Break bread with them and talk knowingly of the difficulty of balancing the realities of Wright’s research with the necessity of protecting our Saudi friends. Refer without specifics to the host of compromises that must be made to maintain the fragile networks of scattered agents of influence. Pretend, in other words, to have long ago read and absorbed all this knowledge Wright provided, and to have been acting on it as only a seasoned and far-seeing diplomat could have.

Condemn the lassitude of your husband’s era. Hint, even, that Bush could not be blamed for the mess he was handed. Imply again and again how you tried, again and again, to get President Obama to at least allocate 30 minutes to this specific threat, but that his vision of a remade world around a rapprochement with Iran mediated by Turkey and/or Egypt killed your attempts to bring some realism to his flights of Nobel Prize-induced fantasy.

Bluntly declare yourself to have been foiled in the effort to combine the reality of Bush’s backbone and almost animal understanding of threat with the deftness of Kissinger-like sophistication in dealing with our triple-faced “allies,” only to be burdened with an incompetent amateur as your boss. “Recall the worst editor you ever had…” and trail off, allowing them to fill in the blanks and thus establish Obama in their minds as the problem of the past eight years.

The president’s time is almost past. Your
New Yorker
friends will not miss him. He did not deliver for them, not even an occasional dinner. He golfs! He does not read! He is in their collective view—shudder—not very smart, but smart enough to have fooled them all. Conned, they will be willing to abet your rewrite of the Wright gap.

Boldness here matters, and not just with Wright, but with every
intellectual of standing who knew scores before they were posted. This was a great strength of W’s. He dined-in with writers: Jay Winik, Victor Davis Hanson. Yes, even Wright. The Beltway press could never bring itself to the collective admission of an intellectual curiosity vastly superior to that of Obama’s and near the equal of your husband’s though not so eclectic. Bush focused on war as you ought to have done, and now must pretend to have done.

It will work. But you must get started.

After Wright, you must pursue and seduce—always with the court scribblers close at hand—the very best writers on the long war: Robin Wright, Robert Kaplan, Dexter Filkins. These are three of the more serious people who saw it all unfolding, who traveled the world to get a first-hand glimpse. They are admired on my side as well as yours. Bring them in. Sit them down. Read their books or at least summaries prepared by eager interns, but best to actually read them. Add to their number the greatest foreign correspondent of our era, the
New York Times’
John Fisher Burns. Have Burns come from London, or better, go to him on the obligatory trip to our most important ally. Be seen as knowing—in the eyes of the Manhattan-Beltway media elite and the conservative intelligentsia both—who realizes the score on the war.

Add to the list Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger, whose
ISIS: The State of Terror
seems likely to be the book of choice for those in your party who will want to at least pretend to have read something on the rise of this al Qaeda variant that makes the first generation fanatics seem almost civilized by comparison.

This is the secret to a successful presidency. There are people who know how the real world works, who have records of anticipating its evolution, and who have written and thought about these things. They will all come to you. They will all tell you what you ought to already know but don’t. It is so easy to acquire what you need and to insist that it be delivered in whatever form you find most fitting.

Imagine asking for 30-minute lectures by such authors as these, with dinner guests of the sort named. Ask and obtain the right to
videotape, for your library—and perhaps for use at a key, crucial moment in the campaign—the evidence of your studiousness on the subject of the greatest fear.

You flunked State Department 101. Now you must persuade people that you have made up for the error. Get started.

CHAPTER 5

“Huma”

A book that tiptoes past your hardest problems does you no good. This chapter will sting, and will produce some false controversy. I expect you to denounce it, but you should follow its advice.

I suggest before you read this you revisit the July 30, 2013,
Politico
story by Andrea Drusch entitled “How Close Are Huma Abedin and Hillary Clinton,” which begins:

“As a student at The George Washington University in 1996, Huma Abedin began working as a White House intern assigned to then first lady Hillary Clinton. The two have been together since, with Abedin traveling the country as Clinton’s “bodywoman” throughout her 2008 Democratic Presidential nomination campaign. She later became Clintons’s deputy chief-of-staff at the State Department, and still works for her transitional team, assisting the former secretary of state’s move back into her private life. Here’s 17 pictures that describe their 17 years together so far.”

Anyone who scrolls through the pictures will instantly and forever understand that Huma is indeed “your second daughter” as she has often been described. She is known as that, and also as the tortured, deeply humiliated wife of sociopath Anthony Weiner. The latter status might even make her sympathetic and thus more useful to your cause, and even help explain your closeness as she has suffered the same sort of public humiliation that you have, a sort of humiliation that puts iron into the soul even as it floods red into the cheeks.

If she was just the unofficial second daughter and the shattered, but-stronger-for-it good wife as well as hyper-competent experienced aide, Huma would be a valued member of the team. But you and I and indeed hundreds already know the problem. And soon thousands will, and in the course of the campaign, millions. She could cost you the election. She must be out until after you are in, and in a very public way.

First, just to let you know the most precise statement of your problem, I have obtained permission from Andrew McCarthy and the
National Review
to reprint the entirety of McCarthy’s article—“The Huma Unmentionables,”—from July 23, 2013, which appeared only a week before the
Politico
slide show of your inseparability.

McCarthy is no crank, though you will have to paint him as one. He prosecuted and convicted the “Blind Sheik.” He is among the most knowledgeable of Americans on the Islamist threat, and he has a standing that while it can be dented and smeared, cannot be destroyed because he is a good man, a fantastic lawyer, an experienced prosecutor and a steady television and radio presence.

The “Charlotte” that McCarthy refers to in the key article printed below is Charlotte Hays, a
National Review
writer disgusted by Huma’s resolute backing of her husband’s bizarre sexting behavior. Charlotte had written a short post, “Abedin Goes For The Power Save,” that read in its entirety:

“The star of Anthony Weiner’s press conference yesterday was the sexting mayoral aspirant’s wife Huma Abedin. Abedin didn’t just stand by her man. While Carlos Danger, as he calls himself when sending lewd messages to women, cowered, Abedin took the mike and publicly forgave her husband for his transgressions, including the latest in the news. Just so you know what Ms. Abedin is publicly forgiving, Mark has linked to the relevant material. I’d like to think a good wife would have urged Weiner to call it quits. What was clear, at least to this observer, however, is that Abedin had a mission beyond common decency: the preservation of a power couple’s political viability. The former Hillary Clinton aide had no shame. Abedin has won accolades from sympathetic Democrats and has no doubt ensured her own political future, elective or appointive, if not that of her ludicrous husband. It was a moment when one glimpsed the raw ambition of today’s New Class political culture. I say: Bring back Silda Spitzer, who merely stood in pained shame as her husband confessed his hooker habit. But shame is so yesterday. If Abedin wants to forgive her husband, that’s fine by me, though next time—and there will be a next time—I beg her to do it in private. She has given standing by your man a bad name.”

McCarthy then posted in response to Hays the detailed article reproduced in its entirety below, and the exchange between Hays and McCarthy anticipates the broader narrative struggle that will define your campaign should Huma be a part of your inner circle now or during the presidency. Someone will raise the Hays complaint of Huma and Weiner, and someone else will write: “That’s nothing, what about her Brotherhood ties?” In the era of the Islamic State, the second narrative is the killer, especially given your ineptitude on all matters Muslim during your tenure at State. Read McCarthy’s piece carefully, and ask yourself—really ask yourself—what will voters think when it is read repeatedly aloud over network television and talk radio, emailed to millions and millions again and again? It was written
before
IS began its rampage. It is the time bomb:

“Charlotte’s revulsion over Huma Abedin’s calculated ‘stand by your man’ routine is surely right. Still, it is amazing, as we speculate about Ms. Abedin’s political future, that the elephant in the room goes unnoticed, or at least studiously unmentioned.

Sorry to interrupt the Best Enabler of a Sociopath Award ceremony but, to recap, Ms. Abedin worked for many years at a journal that promotes Islamic-supremacist ideology that was founded by a top al-Qaeda financier, Abdullah Omar Naseef. Naseef ran the Rabita Trust, a formally designated foreign terrorist organization under American law. Ms. Abedin and Naseef overlapped at the
Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs (JMMA)
for at least seven years. Throughout that time (1996–2003), Ms. Abedin worked for Hillary Clinton in various capacities. Ms. Abedin’s late father, Dr. Zyed Abedin, was recruited by Naseef to run the
JMMA
in Saudi Arabia. The journal was operated under the management of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, a virulently anti-Semitic and sharia-supremacist organization. When Dr. Abedin died, editorial control of the journal passed to his wife, Dr. Saleha Mahmood Abedin—Huma’s mother.

Saleha Abedin is closely tied to the Muslim Brotherhood and to supporters of violent jihad. Among other things, she directs an organization–the International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child. The IICWC, through its parent entity (the International Islamic Council for Dawa and Relief), is a component of the Union for Good (also known as the Union of Good), another formally designated terrorist organization. The Union for Good is led by Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the notorious Muslim Brotherhood jurist who has issued fatwas calling for the killing of American military and support personnel in Iraq as well as suicide bombings in Israel. (As detailed here, the Obama White House recently hosted Qaradawi’s principal deputy, Sheikh Abdulla bin Bayyah, who also endorsed the fatwa calling for the killing of U.S. troops and personnel in Iraq.)

Like Sheikh Qaradawi, who helped write the charter for the IICWC, Saleha Abedin is an influential sharia activist who has, for example, published a book called
Women in Islam
that claims man-made laws enslave women. It reportedly provides sharia justifications for such practices as female-genital mutilation, the death penalty for apostates from Islam, the legal subordination of women, and the participation of women in violent jihad. Dr. Abedin has nevertheless been hailed in the progressive press as a “leading voice on women’s rights in the Muslim world” (to quote
Foreign Policy
). What they never quite get around to telling you is that this means ‘women’s rights’ in the repressive sharia context.

Back to daughter Huma. In the late mid to late Nineties, while she was an intern at the Clinton White House and an assistant editor at
JMMA
, Ms. Abedin was a member of the executive board of the Muslim Students Association (MSA) at George Washington University, heading its “Social Committee.” The MSA, which has a vast network of chapters at universities across North America, is the foundation of the Muslim Brotherhood’s infrastructure in the United States. Obviously, not every Muslim student who joins the MSA graduates to the Brotherhood—many join for the same social and networking reasons that cause college students in general to join campus organizations. But the MSA does have an indoctrination program, which Sam Tadros describes as a lengthy process of study and service that leads to Brotherhood membership—a process “designed to ensure with absolute certainty that there is conformity to the movement’s ideology and a clear adherence to its leadership’s authority.” The MSA gave birth to the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the largest Islamist organization in the U.S. Indeed the MSA and ISNA consider themselves the same organization. Because of its support for Hamas (a designated terrorist organization that is the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch), ISNA was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the
Holy Land Foundation
case, in which several Hamas operatives were convicted of providing the terrorist organization with lavish financing.

As I’ve recounted before, the MSA chapter to which Ms. Abedin belonged at George Washington University has an intriguing history. In 2001 [to be clear, that is after Ms. Abedin had graduated from GWU], its spiritual guide was… Anwar al-Awlaki, the al-Qaeda operative who was then ministering to some of the eventual 9/11 suicide-hijackers. Awlaki himself had led the MSA chapter at Colorado State University in the early nineties. As Patrick Poole has demonstrated, Awlaki is far from the only jihadist to hone his supremacist ideology in the MSA’s friendly confines. In the eighties, Wael Jalaidan ran the MSA at the University of Arizona. He would soon go on to help Osama bin Laden found al-Qaeda; he also partnered with the Abedin family’s patron, Abdullah Omar Naseef, to establish the [afore-mentioned] Rabita Trust—formally designated as a terrorist organization under U.S. law due to its funding of al-Qaeda.