It has been just over a year since the Hillary Clinton camp, so confident that it would steamroll into the White House, was, instead, crushed by then-candidate Donald Trump. Reading about the Clinton team’s various exploits during the last year, one may be thankful that she is not running the country.
Here is what seven of the people who wanted to take America’s reins are up to now:
Hillary Clinton
The woman who once claimed that questioning the legitimacy of the election was “horrifying” has spent much of the last year questioning the legitimacy of the election. After a lengthy tour in which she blamed an exhaustive list of people/events/countries for her failure (and repeated ad nauseam the same joke about drinking Chardonnay), she launched her campaign post-mortem, What Happened.
The 500-page book reads less like a sober analysis of the campaign from a seasoned political veteran and more like the pained ramblings of a bitter loser who preferred to blame everything from Russia to misogyny for her defeat. After the book launched, she went on another book tour, where she continued to question the legitimacy of the election. To quote Mrs. Clinton herself, it’s “horrifying.”
Now, with the 2010 Uranium One scandal back in center stage, and congressional lawmakers eyeing investigations, Hillary’s 2018 may not be much better than her 2017.
Bill Clinton
Just more than a year since left-wing pundits were salivating over having a former president back in the White House as a first husband, Bill’s once-untouchable record among Democrats is undergoing some serious re-evaluation. Bill’s record in office came under surprise scrutiny during the 2016 campaign as Black Lives Matter activists protested against his measures to crack down on crime and drugs in the 1990s.
But, in 2017, the former president’s record of sexual impropriety came back into the spotlight in the wake of a number of sexual harassment scandals bringing down a number of politicians, Hollywood celebrities, and journalists. With the Clintons far from power, left-wing pundits have started to re-examine the left’s dismissal of the importance of past allegations against Clinton. Both New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) have said that Clinton should have resigned.
A year from the time he was supposed to be America’s first husband, Clinton is now increasingly looking like a pariah, even within his own party.
Huma Abedin (and Anthony Weiner)
Huma Abedin and husband Anthony Weiner were once near the center of Hillary Clinton’s orbit. Bill Clinton married the pair, and Weiner — a former New York congressman — once looked set for presidential ambitions. But a series of sexting scandals relegated Weiner to the sidelines. Abedin, however, remained a close Hillary confidante in 2016.
Weiner’s sexting with a 15-year-old girl helped doom Hillary’s presidential hopes when FBI Director James Comey announced he was reopening the probe into her email use after agents investigating the sexting case found emails on one of Weiner’s computers. Clinton has blamed the “Comey letter” for her loss to President Trump.
A year later, Weiner is now in jail, serving a 21-month prison sentence for his crimes. Abedin has filed for divorce from Weiner and has, so far, kept a low profile. However, according to the Washington Free Beacon, as of late October, Abedin was one of a number of former campaign staff still being paid.
John Podesta
Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair was the public face of her defeat last November when he came out on Election Night and told followers that Clinton would not make a public appearance in front of her stunned supporters.
A year later, things have not gotten much better for the Democratic mastermind. Podesta, whose emails were dripped out as part of a WikiLeaks leak in the days leading up to the election, pushed the Russia collusion narrative in the days after the failed campaign.
But now the Podesta Group, which John founded with his brother Tony but later divested from, is being subpoenaed as one of six lobbying firms who worked on a campaign between 2012 to 2014 to get the Ukraine into the European Union. The New York Times reported last month that employees were told they may soon stop receiving paychecks, as the group has “withered” under scrutiny. Tony Podesta also stepped down from the group as scrutiny intensified.
Robby Mook
Former campaign manager Robby Mook, the man who had been hailed as the mastermind of the Clinton campaign’s strategy (before the campaign lost), has spent much of the last year on the defensive. Campaign tell-all book Shattered painted a picture of an arrogant, power-hungry Mook, who was obsessed with data at the expense of everything else.
Since then, he has been fighting with former Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair Donna Brazile, who pointed the finger at the Clinton campaign in her latest book. Mook has denied that the campaign’s base in Brooklyn held sway over the DNC and was “anemic” and a boys club. It seems like the post-mortem for Mook’s running of the doomed campaign is far from over.
Mook has also been pushing the Russia hacking narrative, working with Republicans on a bipartisan Defending Digital Democracy (DDD) project, to protect America’s elections from cyberattack. He is also a commentator at CNN, where lucky CNN viewers get to see him dismiss Brazile’s accusations as “laughable.”
Donna Brazile
In the fall of last year, Donna Brazile was an interim in charge of the DNC, likely to hold significant influence as head of the dominant party in America if the Democrats had taken the Senate and the White House.
A year later, and the Democrats are reeling after she decided to detonate a political bomb within the party with the release of her book Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House. In it, she claimed the DNC nomination process was rigged in Clinton’s favor and makes a number of devastating claims about how poorly the Clinton campaign was run.
A year after she was attempting to bring the party together, Brazile is now fueling a raging civil war in the Democratic Party that looks unlikely to be resolved by 2020.
Elizabeth Warren
The hard left’s favorite 2020 candidate was somewhat in Hillary Clinton’s shadow a year ago. Today, little has changed as Hillary seems intent on holding onto the spotlight as long as she can. However, Pocahontas is continuing her strategy of being a vocal Trump opponent with often outlandish statements while gearing up for her 2018 re-election campaign before she makes a decision on 2020.
Adam Shaw is a Breitbart News politics reporter based in New York. Follow Adam on Twitter: @AdamShawNY.
Photo Credits
Top (left to right): AP Photo/Matt Rourke, Arne Dedert/Pool Photo via AP, MPI122/MediaPunch, AP Photo/Mark Lennihan
Bottom (left to right): AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez, AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster
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