New York Times Tries Desperately to Clean Up For Hillary and Huma

The NYT, in trying to clean up for Hillary and act as if she is distancing from Huma even if she isn’t, is diving into the sexual scandals engulfing Anthony Weiner, and spreading the scandals around. They even cited the email after midnight in which Hillary tells Huma to knock on her door if it’s closed “for a chat.” Lol — “for a chat”? How do they know?? How do they know why Huma came to Hillary’s bedroom after midnight? It could have been to give her pyridium, but they had to tell us rubes that it was “for a chat.” How do they know??? Afraid we’ll think something else when we hear about a knock on the door to Hillary’s bedroom late at night? If Hillary wanted to chat, she could call, but no…It could have been paperwork that Hillary wanted to show Huma, but noooo, they must tell us it was for “a chat”! Don’t go anywhere in your mind, people!!!

What I don’t get is how Hillary Clinton can be Secretary of State and not just taking, but even forcing money — shakedowns — out of foreign governments, and determining the direction of companies such as LaFarge, like Scarlett O’Hara saying, “You’re going to buy lumber, Frank.” This should surprise people, and just the line about “bringing down the Libyan government” should be all that anyone is talking about. We fight about whether a foreign government should influence our election or vice versa, while out of nowhere she decides to take down a government in the Middle East, destroy a country, which has subsequently created a huge problem — that stuff usually bubbles up on its own from religious unrest or other causes; we’re lucky there’s a leader who controls the people, and we look the other way as long as it’s not Hitler. Look how long we never wanted to incite any unrest there ourselves — clear back to that plane crash over Lockerbie, Scotland. We let them give up nuclear weapons we didn’t even know they had, and Hillary turns around and brings down their government? Now we know. Why isn’t that devastating?

Are her actions legally justifiable? Even if Russia monkeyed with Libya or Syria over in her own sphere, what’s it our business, unless our ally Israel is threatened or our interests endangered in some other way. Russia always had client states, and we’re talking about an established government in Libya, not some series of coups. Is this about oil? Trump is right that she really built ISIS, the way Saddam may have built al Qaeda (see the work of Laurie Mylroie).

Bill Clinton officiated the marriage of Wiener and Abedin: right from the beginning, it was marked.

“A Scandal Too Far? Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton, and a Test of Loyalty,” by Amy Chozick and Mark Landler, New York Times, October 29, 2016

In the summer of 2013, Hillary Clinton had just left the State Department and returned to New York. She planned a quiet year, basking in sky-high approval ratings and enjoying a respite from the media spotlight as she laid the groundwork for a second presidential run.

Then Carlos Danger happened.

Anthony D. Weiner, the husband of Mrs. Clinton’s closest aide, Huma Abedin, was running for mayor of New York when news broke that he had continued to exchange lewd messages with women online after the practice cost him his congressional seat. This time, he used the embarrassing Spanish-inspired moniker.

The tawdry story line and Ms. Abedin’s closeness to Mrs. Clinton made the events explode far beyond New York, dragging Mrs. Clinton’s name into messy headlines about penis pictures, Mr. Weiner’s descriptions of his sexual appetites and his online paramour named Sydney Leathers.

Now, with Mrs. Clinton seemingly on the cusp of winning the White House, Mr. Weiner, who once described himself as “a perpetually horny middle-aged man,” has pulled her into another drama. Federal investigators looking into his sexual messaging with an underage girl stumbled upon thousands of emails potentially pertinent to the F.B.I. inquiry into Mrs. Clinton’s private email server.

Graphic | What We Know About the Investigation Into Hillary Clinton’s Private Email Server The F.B.I. recently uncovered new emails potentially related to the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server.

The jolting development highlighted not only the intersecting lives of Mrs. Clinton, Ms. Abedin and Mr. Weiner, but also the pattern that has characterized the Clintons’ relationships with the sometimes oddly behaving inhabitants of their insular world: Even amid accusations of sexual or financial impropriety, the Clintons’ first instinct is to hunker down and protect those in their orbit, sometimes leading to more ugly eruptions later and, eventually, to messy public breakups.

On Friday, several of Mrs. Clinton’s friends and allies suggested she distance herself from Ms. Abedin, a painful prospect given that Mrs. Clinton has described Ms. Abedin as a surrogate daughter and has relied on her more than anyone else during her nearly two-year pursuit of the White House.

The two women’s closeness has both intimidated those in the Clinton circle of status-conscious advisers and caused envy. Even as Mrs. Clinton learned on Friday that the F.B.I.’s interest in her email server, which she thought had ended in July, had reignited, Ms. Abedin was by her side as she prepared to make a statement to the news media in Des Moines.

Pressed by a reporter there about the emails’ having been discovered during the investigation into Mr. Weiner’s sexting, Mrs. Clinton dismissed the reports as “rumors.”

“We of course stand by her,” her campaign chairman, John D. Podesta, said on Saturday when asked whether Ms. Abedin would step down from the campaign.

Mrs. Clinton has always been circumspect about Mr. Weiner and her feelings toward him. She has steadfastly supported Ms. Abedin, 40, as the younger woman stood by her husband, despite the public ridicule and career damage that resulted from his behavior. The Clintons have never publicly criticized Mr. Weiner.

It was only two months ago that Ms. Abedin announced that she was separating from her husband, after she learned that The New York Post planned to publish a story reporting that Mr. Weiner had sent a picture of his crotch to a woman online as he lay next to the couple’s 4-year-old son in bed. Mrs. Clinton was vacationing in the Hamptons at the time and stayed away from the story.

Privately, aides to Mrs. Clinton suggested on Friday that Ms. Abedin would remain alongside Mrs. Clinton for the final, breakneck stretch of the campaign. But some senior Democrats are now wondering whether, if Mrs. Clinton is elected, she will be able to bring Ms. Abedin along with her for what was once widely expected to be a senior role in the White House.

Mrs. Clinton’s loyalty to Ms. Abedin (and vice versa) stems from the decades they have spent working closely together, beginning when Ms. Abedin was a 19-year-old intern to the first lady in the 1990s.

At the State Department, Ms. Abedin served as deputy chief of staff to Mrs. Clinton. Emails released by the State Department captured the closeness of their relationship. A jet-lagged Mrs. Clinton once emailed Ms. Abedin at 12:21 a.m. to take her up on an offer to come over to Mrs. Clinton’s house for a chat. “Just knock on the door to the bedroom if it’s closed,” she wrote.

Ms. Abedin’s loyalty and strong identification with both Clintons was conspicuous at the State Department. At a staff meeting in early 2009, she was going through a list of requests from “the president.” When others in the room looked at her in puzzlement, Ms. Abedin clarified: “Not President Obama. Our president: Bill Clinton.”

Ms. Abedin’s high profile and proximity to Mrs. Clinton also brought her scrutiny. Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has questioned Ms. Abedin’s arrangement to earn income privately while she worked for Mrs. Clinton at the State Department. In addition to being on Mrs. Clinton’s personal payroll, Ms. Abedin received money from the Clinton Foundation and Teneo, a consulting firm co-founded by Douglas J. Band, a former senior aide to Mr. Clinton. And some of Ms. Abedin’s emails on Mrs. Clinton’s private server led to accusations that foundation donors had received special access to the State Department.

Through it all, Mrs. Clinton and her longtime adviser Philippe Reines have fiercely protected Ms. Abedin.

Mrs. Clinton played a part in introducing Ms. Abedin and Mr. Weiner, then a brash and outspoken Democratic congressman from New York. In August 2001, the young congressman asked Ms. Abedin, then an aide to Mrs. Clinton in the Senate, if she would go out for a drink. Standing behind Mrs. Clinton, Ms. Abedin waved her arms at her boss and shook her head “no.” “Of course all you young people should go out,” Mrs. Clinton said.

Mr. Weiner eventually won Ms. Abedin’s affections in January 2007, when he sat between Mrs. Clinton and her rival, then-Senator Barack Obama, at President George W. Bush’s State of the Union address. “I appreciate you looking out for my boss,” Ms. Abedin texted him. They went out for coffee and were married in July 2010; Mr. Clinton performed the ceremony.
Slide Show | On the Trail: Week of Oct. 23 Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump campaigned in swing states, and Mrs. Clinton turned 69 on Wednesday, two days before the F.B.I. added a chapter to her email case.

Ms. Abedin and Mrs. Clinton’s personal lives have in some ways taken parallel tracks, with each woman choosing to forgive her husband’s humiliating transgressions.

Others close to Mrs. Clinton have not been as understanding. On a campaign conference call the day that Mr. Weiner admitted he had continued to engage in online liaisons, Mr. Reines berated him, yelling that he would “reach through the phone” and “rip out” his throat, adding an expletive.

On Saturday, Ms. Abedin was working from the campaign’s Brooklyn headquarters rather than traveling with Mrs. Clinton on a campaign swing in Florida. Mr. Reines, who is not officially on the campaign’s staff, was, however, accompanying Mrs. Clinton….