We all know it’s tough being Hillary Clinton. From her meteoric rise from post-White House poverty to her failed Presidential candidacy to her second attempt at running for the highest office in the land, Clinton has faced a grueling schedule and endless obstacles, peppered only by short naps during the workday.
Thanks to Citizens United—the same organization that obtained the Democrats’ favorite campaign finance decision, allowing for SuperPACs—we now have a complete record of everything Hillary Clinton did from 2009 through 2011, while she served as Secretary of State.
The documents are an eye-opening look into the micro-management necessary to wrangle diplomats including Secretary Clinton, but also provide insight into Clinton’s most valuable relationships, especially the ones she cultivated for specific reasons.
Here are a few highlights from the approximately 3,700 pages.
1. You Can’t Sit With Us, Cheryl: Clinton met with her Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills daily—and even relied on Mills to help her through her interview with the FBI, about that private server she kept in her Chappaqua home—but she wasn’t Hillary’s prized confidante. Clinton traveled everywhere with Huma Abedin in the car, next to her on the plane, and within earshot while on assignment. Cheryl Mills frequently got bumped from the “cool kids” table, and was forced to ride alone.
2. She Met With Quite a Few Clinton Foundation Donors During Work Hours: While on active duty at the State Department, Clinton would often take time out of her busy day of solving global crises to chat with millionaires and billionaires who, we now know, had deep connections to her family foundation.
In October of 2009, she devoted an hour to Bill and Melinda Gates, who gave more than $25 million to the Clinton Foundation and later, she gave Warren Buffett her whole lunch period. She also met frequently with Sanford Weill, former Citigroup bigwig and major Clinton campaign donor, who appears to have worked Clinton in concert with George Soros, pushing development in Central and Southeast Asia.
3. She Argued With Ben Affleck About Africa: We already knew that Affleck had Hillary Clinton’s private email address in his contacts list, but it seems the Hollywood actor also scored a meeting with the Secretary of State in March of 2009. She sat down with the most recent Batman for a half hour, ostensibly to “talk shop.”
By 2012, Affleck would persuade Clinton, through email, to devote more time to conditions in Congo, even getting the Secretary to speak at a gathering in Washington, D.C., to raise money for Affleck’s Eastern Congo Initiative (it’s also probably no surprise Affleck has “maxed out” this cycle, donating to Clinton’s campaign).
4. She Met Privately With Key Reporters: In the summer of 2010, Clinton was hoping to revive the Middle East peace process, begging some of the world’s biggest leaders, including former British PM Tony Blair, to return to the region to help negotiate terms between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
But she was also firming up cozy relationships with prominent foreign policy columnists, meeting them for an off-the-record lunch on August 17, 2010. On the guest list, Christiane Amanpour from CNN, Tom Friedman from the New York Times, David Ignatius from the Washington Post, DeWayne Wickham from USA Today, and Fareed Zakaria from Newsweek. A month later, she met behind closed doors with New York Times publishers and editors.
5. Cultivating Corporate Sponsorships: On a September 2009 trip to the New York Stock Exchange, Hillary Clinton gave the public a glimpse of how connected she is to Wall Street and corporate bigwigs.
In the course of a single day, she met with the chair and co-chair of the NYSE, as well as leaders from the Blackstone Group (who gave Clinton $43,000 in the second fundraising quarter of 2016 alone), Loews Corporation’s James Tisch (whose cousin held a $33K-per-plate Hamptons dinner for Clinton last month) and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz (who is so close to Clinton he was rumored to be on her Veep shortlist).
Citizens United and Judicial Watch have both filed Freedom of Information Act requests for more of Clinton’s schedules, as well as more of her daily emails. We’ve certainly only scratched the surface of this weird, incestuous relationship Clinton cultivated while serving her dual masters, the Clinton Foundation and the State Department.
