The First Family Detail Page 2

  Without the football and the appropriate codes, it “doesn’t matter if we’ve got a thousand missiles verified inbound to the United States, we would be unable to launch a retaliatory strike,” General Hugh Shelton, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in his book Without Hesitation: The Odyssey of an American Warrior. “If our survival depended on launching a preemptive strike, without the president’s having [the football and authentication codes], such a strike would be impossible.” He adds that it is “crucial” that they “remain within very close proximity to the president at all times.”

  Agents believe Biden insists on only two vehicles in his motorcade in Delaware because he wants to maintain his image back home as a regular Joe. But besides rendering the country potentially defenseless in the event of a nuclear attack, “he is making the agents vulnerable by not respecting what they need to do and making him more vulnerable in case of an attack on him,” an agent says. “If the bad guy knows that they’re rolling up there short and there’s only two vehicles, it’s easy to spot, and it’s easy to take him out. He would be a sitting duck.”

  Thus, according to Secret Service agents, Biden seems to care more about his image than carrying out the only significant responsibility required of him as vice president: to launch retaliatory strikes in the event of a nuclear attack. That dwarfs the only duty the U.S. Constitution assigns to him—choosing whether to vote in the Senate to break a tie.

  Yet despite the obvious danger to the country, no one in Secret Service management has blown the whistle on Biden.

  “We drive the vehicle with the military aide,” an agent says. “If the president goes down and we can’t locate the military aide to take military action, that’s on us. We don’t have the backbone to say, ‘Mr. Vice President, we can’t separate the control vehicle with the military aide and the doctor from you.’ ”

  As a result, “unfortunately what’s going to happen is either you’re going to have a dead vice president in Delaware or you’re going to have agents killed in Delaware because Secret Service management refused to stand up to the vice president and say, ‘No sir, we can’t roll with this many assets short,’ ” an agent notes. “He wants to be Joe, and he does not want the vehicles around him. The situation is alarming, but the culture of Secret Service management is to go along, in hopes of getting a high-paying job in the private sector.”

  If Biden’s actions are irresponsible, his behavior with agents is equally telling about his character. Unlike Hillary Clinton, Biden treats agents with respect and goes out of his way to spend time with the agents’ kids when they visit the White House. Jill Biden—code-named Capri—is equally gracious with agents. But routinely, the vice president thoughtlessly decides to go to Wilmington or elsewhere without giving agents any advance notice.

  “Biden or his staff continually change the schedule, and that’s a grueling four years for agents to be assigned to his detail because of travel back and forth to Delaware, last-minute movement, and no set schedule,” an agent says. “Sometimes he gives literally a few minutes’ notice that ‘Hey, we’re going to Wilmington.’ ”

  Because Biden is so unpredictable and his personal trips so frequent, the Secret Service rents more than twenty condominiums in Greenville for agents who must accompany him when he returns to his home state.

  “It’s tough on people’s family lives and marriages,” an agent says. “Because of the fluid schedule, we don’t have the manpower to allow any time for firearms requalification or physical fitness training.”

  Behind the scenes, Biden’s behavior is even more bizarre. The vice president’s residence is a handsome 9,150-square-foot, three-story mansion overlooking Massachusetts Avenue NW. Complete with pool, pool house, and indoor gym, the white brick house was built in 1893 as the home of the superintendent of the Naval Observatory. In 1974, Congress turned it into the official residence of the vice president and gave it the address One Observatory Circle.

  Biden’s seven-thousand-square-foot home in Greenville, the hometown of many Du Pont family descendants, sits on four acres on a lake. Like the vice president’s home, it has a pool. Biden also owns a small carriage house on his property, where his widowed mother, Jean, lived until she died in 2010. The Secret Service now rents it from Biden for $2,200 a month.

  Agents say that, whether at the vice president’s residence or at his home in Delaware, Biden has a habit of swimming in his pool nude. Female Secret Service agents find that offensive.

  Because of Biden’s lack of consideration as evidenced by that habit and his refusal to give agents advance notice of his trips back home, being assigned to his detail is considered the second worst assignment in the Secret Service after being assigned to protect Hillary Clinton.

  “Biden likes to be revered as everyday Joe, and that’s his thing,” an agent says. “But the reality is no agents want to go on his detail because Biden makes agents’ lives so tough.”

  2

  HILLARY

  If Joe Biden is inconsiderate with Secret Service agents, Hillary Clinton can make Richard Nixon look like Mahatma Gandhi. When in public, Hillary smiles and acts graciously. As soon as the cameras are gone, her angry personality, nastiness, and imperiousness become evident.

  During the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, a Secret Service uniformed officer was standing post on the South Lawn when Hillary arrived by limo.

  “The first lady steps out of the limo, and another uniformed officer says to her, ‘Good morning, ma’am,’ ” a former uniformed officer recalls. “Her response to him was ‘F— off.’ I couldn’t believe I heard it.”

  Everyone on her detail recalls the fate of Christopher B. Emery, a White House usher who made the mistake of returning Barbara Bush’s call after she had left the White House. Emery had helped Barbara learn to use her laptop. Now the former first lady was having computer trouble. Twice, Emery helped her out. For that, Hillary Clinton fired him. Emery, the father of four, could not find another job for a year.

  According to W. David Watkins, a Clinton presidential assistant in charge of administration, Hillary was also behind the mass firings of seven White House Travel Office employees. The move had been initiated by Catherine A. Cornelius, a third cousin of Bill Clinton’s who wanted herself placed in charge of the Travel Office, and by Bill Clinton friends who had been seeking the travel business for themselves, according to a General Accountability Office report.

  In a memorandum intended for Thomas F. McLarty, who was the White House chief of staff, Watkins wrote of the firing that “we both know that there would be hell to pay” if “we failed to take swift and decisive action in conformity with the First Lady’s wishes.”

  When she was in the White House, “Hillary was so mistrustful and vengeful,” a former agent says.

  One afternoon, Hillary found a White House electrician changing a lightbulb in the residence. She yelled at him because she had ordered that all repair work was to be done while the first family was out.

  “She caught the guy on a ladder doing the lightbulb,” says Franette McCulloch, who was then the assistant White House pastry chef. “He was a basket case.”

  “We were basically told, the Clintons don’t want to see you, they don’t want to hear you, get out of the way,” says a former Secret Service agent. “If Hillary was walking down a hall, you were supposed to hide behind drapes used as partitions. Supervisors would tell us, ‘Listen, stand behind this curtain. They’re coming,’ or ‘Just stand out of the way, don’t be seen.’ ”

  Hillary had a “standing rule that no one spoke to her when she was going from one location to another,” says former FBI agent Coy Copeland. “In fact, anyone who would see her coming would just step into the first available office.”

  An agent working with Copeland for independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s investigation of the Clintons’ investments in the Whitewater real estate development did not know the rules: He made the mistake of addressing Hillary, saying “Good m
orning, Mrs. Clinton” as she passed him in a corridor of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

  “She jumped all over him,” Copeland says. “ ‘How dare you? You people are just destroying my husband.’ It was that vast right-wing conspiracy rant. Then she had to tack on something to the effect of ‘And where do you buy your suits? Penney’s?’ ”

  For weeks, the agent told no one about the encounter. “Finally, he told me about it,” Copeland says. “And he said, ‘I was wearing the best suit I owned.’ ”

  Far worse, FBI agents assigned to Starr’s investigation found that, a week before White House deputy counsel Vince Foster committed suicide on July 20, 1993, by shooting himself at Fort Marcy Park along the Potomac River, Hillary had attacked and humiliated her mentor from their former Rose Law Firm in front of other White House aides.

  As reported in my book The Secrets of the FBI, Copeland says that those who attended the meeting on health care legislation told FBI agents working for Starr that Hillary violently disagreed with a legal objection Foster raised at the meeting and ridiculed him in front of his peers. Copeland was Starr’s senior investigator and read the reports of other agents working for Starr. He says Hillary then proceeded to further humiliate her friend Foster.

  “Hillary put him down really, really bad in a pretty good-size meeting,” Copeland says. “She told him he didn’t get the picture, and he would always be a little hick-town lawyer who was obviously not ready for the big time.”

  Based on what “dozens” of others who had contact with Foster after that meeting told the agents, “The put-down that she gave him in that big meeting just pushed him over the edge,” Copeland says. “It was the final straw that broke the camel’s back.”

  But what has never come out previously is that Hillary went so far as to blame Foster for all the Clintons’ problems and accuse him of failing them.

  “Foster was profoundly depressed, but Hillary lambasting him was the final straw because she publicly embarrassed him in front of others,” says former FBI supervisory agent Jim Clemente, who was also assigned by the FBI to the Starr investigation and who probed the circumstances surrounding Foster’s suicide. Speaking about the investigation for the first time, Clemente says, “Hillary blamed him for failed nominations, claimed he had not vetted them properly, and said in front of his White House colleagues, ‘You’re not protecting us’ and ‘You have failed us.’ That was the final blow.”

  Family members, friends, and aides told FBI agents that after the meeting, Foster’s behavior changed dramatically. His voice sounded strained, and he became withdrawn and preoccupied. At times, Foster would tear up. He talked of feeling trapped and told his wife, Lisa, he planned to resign.

  Foster was already depressed, and no one can explain a suicide in rational terms. But the FBI investigation concluded that it was Hillary’s vilification of Foster in front of other White House aides, coming on top of his depression, that triggered Foster’s suicide about a week later, Copeland and Clemente both say.

  Starr issued a 38,000-word report, along with a separate psychologist’s report on the factors that contributed to Foster’s suicide. Yet Starr never mentioned the meeting with Hillary, leaving out the fact that his own investigation had concluded that Hillary’s rage had led to her friend’s suicide. Why Starr chose not to reveal the critical meeting and his own investigators’ findings remains a mystery.

  While the Clintons claimed Starr was out to get them, Clemente says that as his staff changed, Starr vacillated between pursuing the investigation aggressively and pulling his punches. For example, the former FBI agent reveals that Starr refused to allow him to try to interview Hillary about her commodities trading. For reasons still unknown, in her first commodity trade in 1978, Hillary was allowed to order ten cattle futures contracts, which would normally cost $12,000, although she had only $1,000 in her account at the time, according to trade records the White House released.

  Hillary was able to turn her initial investment into $6,300 overnight. In ten months of trading, she made nearly $100,000. She claimed she made smart trades based on information from the Wall Street Journal. The question, Clemente says, was why she was allowed to make investments while ignoring normal margin calls that require traders to cover any losses incurred during the course of trading.

  “Starr didn’t want to offend the conscience of the public by going after the first lady,” Clemente says. “He said the first lady is an institution. He acted most of the time as a judge instead of as an investigating prosecutor, and then he hired attorneys who went to the other extreme.”

  Neither Starr nor a spokesman for Hillary Clinton had any comment.

  If Hillary turned on her friend Vince Foster, she is also nasty to the little people she professes to care about. Accepting the Century Award from the New York Women’s Foundation when she was secretary of state, Hillary paid tribute to institutions and individuals who convey “kindness and caring.”

  “All of us can perhaps find a moment in every day when a kind word can make a difference, when a supportive pat on the shoulder can really speak volumes,” Hillary said. “Because in today’s world, which is so complex, so stressful, people need each other more than ever.”

  In contrast to those comments, “Hillary was very rude to agents, and she didn’t appear to like law enforcement or the military,” says former Secret Service agent Lloyd Bulman. “She wouldn’t go over and meet military people or police officers, as most protectees do. She was just really rude to almost everybody. She’d act like she didn’t want you around, like you were beneath her.”

  Publicly, Hillary courted law enforcement organizations; privately she had disdain for police.

  “She did not want police officers in sight,” another former Secret Service agent says. “How do you explain that to the police? She did not want Secret Service protection near. She wanted state troopers and local police to wear suits and stay in unmarked cars. If there were an incident, that could pose a big problem. People don’t know police are in the area unless officers wear uniforms and drive police cars. If they are unaware of a police presence, people are more likely to get out of control.”

  “Hillary didn’t like the military aides wearing their uniforms around the White House,” another former agent recalls. “She asked if they would wear business suits instead. The uniform’s a sign of pride, and they’re proud to wear their uniform. I know that the military was actually really offended by it.”

  At the 2000 Democratic National Convention at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, Secret Service agents were told that the Clintons had issued instructions that agents leave their posts and, as if they were criminals, step around corners to hide as the Clintons approached.

  “We were told they didn’t want to see us,” an agent on the detail says.

  “Hillary never talked to us,” says another agent who was on her detail. “Most all members of first families would talk to us and smile. She never did that.”

  “Hillary would cuss at Secret Service drivers for going over bumps,” former agent Jeff Crane says.

  “When she’s in front of the lights, she turns it on, and when the lights are off and she’s away from the lights, she’s a totally different person,” says another agent who was on her detail. “She’s very angry and sarcastic and is very hard on her staff. She yells at them and complains.” For example, Hillary will complain that the hotel chosen for her by her aides is a dump. “She is a totally different person behind the scenes than what you see when she is being interviewed.”

  In her book Living History, Hillary Clinton wrote of her gratitude to the White House staff. The truth was, says a Secret Service agent, “Hillary did not speak to us. We spent years with her. She never said thank you.”

  Hillary’s relationship with her husband is equally phony. The current location of the president is displayed by an electronic box at key offices in the White House and at the Secret Service. He is listed as POTUS, for President of the United States
. Called the protectee locator, the box also shows the location of the first lady (FLOTUS), the vice president (VPOTUS), and the president’s and vice president’s children. If they are not in Washington, the locator box displays their current city. In addition, uniformed officers stationed at the White House update one another by radio on the location of the president and first lady within the Executive Mansion.

  When the Clintons were in the White House, “it was funny, because on the radio you’d hear that she went somewhere, and then you’d hear that he went to the same location, and every time he went to her, she would go somewhere else,” a former uniformed officer says.

  Secret Service agents assigned at various points to guard Hillary during her Senate campaign were dismayed at how two-faced and seething with anger she was. It was the same hypocrisy she later admitted to when she said in a meeting with President Obama and then defense secretary Robert Gates, according to Gates’s memoir Duty, that she had opposed the troop surge in Iraq for purely political reasons.

  “During the listening tour, she planned ‘impromptu’ visits at diners and local hangouts,” recalls a Secret Service agent then on her detail. “The events were all staged, and the questions were screened. She would stop off at diners. The campaign would tell them three days ahead that they were coming. They would talk to the owner and tell him to invite everyone and bring his friends. Hillary flew into rages when she thought her campaign staff had not corralled enough onlookers beforehand. Hillary had an explosive temper.”