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Ed Klein: Obama Administration Looking to Stop Hillary's WH Bid
Saturday, March 14, 2015 10:33 PM
By: Todd Beamon
Veteran journalist Ed Klein said on Saturday that the Obama administration "is up to its eyebrows in efforts to stop" Hillary Clinton from running for the White House — including six investigations launched by longtime presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett involving Clinton's years as Secretary of State.
"This administration, the Obama administration, will do virtually anything to prevent Hillary from becoming president," Klein told renowned economist Larry Kudlow on his WABC radio show. Kudlow is also a Newsmax columnist and works for NBC's business channel, CNBC.
"It's their view that if she does become president — like her husband, Bill — she will govern from the left of center and not be a true liberal," Klein said, "and will, therefore, compromise with Republicans like Bill did when he was in office, and will undo a lot of the Obama legacy.
"They are determined to stop her — and, of course, it's not going to be easy," he said.
Klein, who worked as the editor of The New York Times Magazine from 1977 to 1987 and as an editor for Newsweek, has written several books critical of Bill and Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama
His most recent book, "Blood Feud," was released last year and detailed the longstanding rift between the Obamas and the Clintons. It topped No. 1 on the Times' best-seller list.
Klein's previous work, "The Amateur," was about Obama's first term in office. It was released during the 2012 presidential election and remained at the top of the Times' list for six weeks.
He told Kudlow that Jarrett, who is a close Obama family friend, began six investigations of Clinton's years at the State Department — and that his reporting had discovered that the White House was behind the leak of Clinton's use of emails to The Times, though he is not sure of Jarrett's role in the leak.
The inquiries surrounded "the use of her expense account," Klein said, "the disbursement of funds, her contact with foreign leaders, her possible collusion with the Clinton Foundation — and of course, first and foremost — her use of emails."
He added that "the White House knew, from the time Hillary became Secretary of State, that she was using these private emails and warned her against them.
"We find it hard to pin down Valerie Jarrett per se as the person who leaked this story," Klein told Kudlow. "It was, in fact, the White House behind this leak — and they used six degrees of separation so that they couldn't be identified between them and the person who actually leaked the story to The New York Times."
The Times reported March 3 that Clinton had used the private email account during her entire term as the nation’s top diplomat. Other reports later surfaced that the account was hosted from a private server at the Clinton home in Chappaqua, N.Y.
Clinton admitted on Tuesday that she should have used a government email account for her official emails, as well as a separate mobile device for her personal correspondence.
She said that most of her correspondence went to employees using government addresses — and those were automatically preserved. She told reporters that she provided the State Department with all of her emails that could possibly be work related for archiving purposes.
"I saw it as a matter of convenience," Clinton said at a news conference that came more than a week after The Times’ original report. "I now, looking back, think that it might have been smarter to have those two devices from the very beginning."
Republicans and Internet experts have raised security concerns and have attacked Clinton for possibly shielding important facts about her tenure from the public. Democrats are also wary that the party's likely presidential front-runner could be tarnished.
Klein said that investigations spearheaded by Jarrett are "still informal" at this point. "My understanding is that tons and tons of papers are being taken from the archives of the State Department and are being examined as far as Hillary's conduct is concerned."
He told Kudlow that Jarrett also has been holding "secret meetings" with two likely Democratic presidential challengers, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley — "both of whom, I think, are going to have a hard time taking the nomination away from Hillary."
Regarding Clinton's news conference, Klein told Kudlow that "Hillary did not carry it off very well at all. She looked defensive. She looked uncertain about how to answer the questions. She had to read from the talking points. She had trouble looking people in the eye.
"This is a woman who has been in the public eye … for 30 and more years and is still not able to connect well with her audience.
"I think she is a very vulnerable candidate — and it's now up to the Republicans to put somebody up who can beat her," Klein said. "I think she's very beatable."
