Years before Hillary Clinton’s private email server ever became a campaign issue, Clinton spent a few months doing some digital snooping on her own staff.
The new book “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign” by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes (Crown, out now) reveals that in the summer of 2008, Clinton wanted an honest assessment of what had gone wrong in her failed presidential bid against Barack Obama.
To this end, she had a trusted aide access the campaign’s server and download the emails sent and received by top staffers.
“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 a source familiar with the operation,” Allen and Parnes reveal in the book. “Her political director, Guy Cecil, had talked with members of the media from his campaign account. Her chief strategist, Mark Penn, was a tyrant. And far too many of her minions had fought for turf and status rather than votes.”
Rattled by what the emails revealed, Clinton began calling meetings to evaluate what had gone wrong. The staffers had no idea she’d read their emails.
“I was struck by how good of a sense she had before I walked in there of the problems that were going on,” one aide is quoted as saying.
The email review would be just one part of a months-long postmortem project conducted that summer, and it would have lasting results: Neither Penn nor Cecil would be invited back for the 2016 “no-drama-mantra” Clinton campaign.