The New Yorker has a pretty big piece coming out by Dave Remnick in the Sept. 27 issue about the new Hillary Clinton memoir, titled What Happened. Remnick’s piece has an interview with Hillary Clinton, as well as the book itself to draw from. The tone is set in the title of the article: “Hillary Clinton Looks Back In Anger.”
One of the many highlights is Clinton’s assertion that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, probably best known around these here parts for being epically awful, put partisan politics in front of national security interests when it came to our intelligence community’s assessment of ongoing hanky-panky between Russia and our elections.
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“I feel we sort of choked,” one senior Obama Administration official told the Washington Post. Another former Administration official said that national-security people were feeling, “Wow, did we mishandle this.” Clinton, in her book, gingerly “wonders” what the effect might have been had Obama gone on national television in the fall of 2016 “warning that our democracy was under attack.” I asked her whether Obama had failed—whether the issue should have been treated less as a narrowcasted political problem and more as a grave national-security threat.
“Well, I think that I’m very understanding of the position he found himself in,” she said. “Because I’ve been in that Situation Room, I know how hard these calls can be. And I believe that they struggled with this, and they were facing some pretty difficult headwinds.” She was less restrained in her description of the Senate Majority Leader’s behavior. “Mitch McConnell, in what I think of as a not only unpatriotic but despicable act of partisan politics, made it clear that if the Obama Administration spoke publicly about what they knew, he would accuse them of partisan politics, of trying to tip the balance toward me,” she said. “McConnell basically threatened the White House, and I know that was on the President’s mind. It was a predicament for him.” She also lambasted James Comey, the former F.B.I. director, who “refused to publicly acknowledge that there was an investigation, and, with the height of irony, said, ‘Well, you can’t do that so close to the election.’ ” (Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the investigation had not progressed to the point where disclosure would have been appropriate.)
Those are the facts. You can read back when then Sen. Harry Reid explained this very same scenario. You may not like Clinton, and you may not believe that a statement to the American people by the president and a unified legislative branch would have made a difference in the November results. But that does not change the nature of McConnell and the Republican Party’s betrayal of America’s trust.