Unlikeable by Edward Klein Page A

Hillaryhad ordered her aides to wipe her hard drive clean, thereby destroying the thirty thousand so-called “personal” e-mails on her private server.
    By any measure, it was a massive political cover-up, second only to the most famous case of evidence tampering on behalf of a high-ranking official of the U.S. government—the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap in the Nixon tapes.

    Hillary’s twenty-one-minute press conference was almost universally deemed a failure.
    â€œWhen Hillary first approached the podium,” wrote Ashe Schow, a staff writer at the Washington Examiner , “she was all smiles and held her head high; she looked at ease. ‘Look at all the little people come to see me,’ her demeanor seemed to suggest. She rattled off some information about the Clinton Foundation’s latest report detailing the problems women face worldwide. She took a shot at Republicans for sending a letter to Iran. She then read from her prepared remarks addressing her ongoing email scandal.
    â€œBut as the questions kept coming and moved beyond those that simply allowed her to reiterate her prepared remarks, Clinton became visibly irritated,” Schow continued. “Her answers were shorter and she began talking over reporters. Finally, a woman touched her arm and it was time to end the event.
    â€œIf she expected the mainstream media to take her press conference as a signal to end the unflattering story, she was wrong.”
    Indeed, John F. Harris, the editor in chief of Politico , spoke for most of the mainstream press when he wrote that beneath Hillary’s politesse“was an unmistakable message [to the media] . . . easily distilled into three short words: Go to hell.”
    Rem Rieder, editor at large and media columnist for USA Today , agreed:“Clinton put on a clinic on how not to defuse a crisis. . . . But even worse than the substance [of what she said] was the manner. Clinton seemed imperial, rigid, above it all—and too clever by half. As the ordeal dragged on, her body language made clear she’d rather be anywhere else in the world rather than batting down these questions from these wretched reporters. . . .
    â€œCandidates need to undergo this intense scrutiny not for the special interests of news outlets but for the American people. This is a big, important job these candidates are applying for.
    â€œAnd if Clinton finds this experience unendurable, maybe she should be applying for a different job.”

CHAPTER 16 CHAPTER 16
    â€œSKIN IN THE GAME” “SKIN IN THE GAME”
    The president shared his account of the Lewinsky matter with me. . . . He did so unguardedly and freely, under the assumption that we were speaking in complete privacy. What I told the grand jury under oath supports completely what the president has told the American people and is contrary to any charge that the president has done anything wrong.
    â€”Sidney Blumenthal, June 25, 1998
    S everal years ago, I wrote a book called The Kennedy Curse , which examined how tragedy haunted one of America’s most powerful families.
    Hillary Clinton reminded me of the Kennedys in one notable way.
    Hubris led members of the Kennedy family to take risks that often ended in calamity and death. In Hillary’s case, hubris led to a different kind of self-destruction. When presented with the choice of doing the right thing or doing the wrong thing, she compulsively chose the unethical alternative and ended up mired in scandal and disgrace.
    A perfect example of how Hillary constantly chose the unethical alternative was a letter she sent to Representative Trey Gowdy, the Republican chairman of the House Select Committee investigating the deadly terrorist attacks in Benghazi. In her letter, Hillary insisted that the only private e-mail address she ever used while secretary of state was [email protected] .
    That was a lie.
    In fact, she had used a second secret e-mail address,