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“The way the Obama government works, everything important in foreign policy comes from the White House. And Valerie [Jarrett] pretty much runs the show down there. You’ll feel Valerie breathing down your neck all the way to Tokyo. She’s going to have a lot to say about howyou represent our country in Japan, and believe me, she won’t be shy about it.”

    Hillary had extracted a promise from Obama that she would be free to choose her own deputies, but that was not how things worked out.
    With Obama’s approval, Jarrett insisted that Hillary hire James Steinberg as her deputy secretary of state. Although Steinberg had once worked in the Clinton administration, Hillary did not like him. But the White House left her no choice, and she brought Steinberg on board as her deputy.
    Hillary and Steinberg often clashed on major issues of policy. He seemed to enjoy thumbing his nose at Hillary. In the end, however, she won the bureaucratic wrestling match. The unhappy Steinberg lasted just two years at Foggy Bottom before he handed in his resignation and became dean of the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.
    The Steinberg episode was just one in a multitude of humiliations inflicted on Hillary by the White House.
    For example, Hillary would be summoned to the White House for a meeting only to discover when she arrived that the meeting had been canceled without anyone bothering to tell her.
    â€œI arrived for the 10:15 mtg and was told there was no mtg,” she e-mailed aides in 2009. “This is the second time this has happened. What’s up???”
    Other times, she was left in the dark about the timing of cabinet meetings.
    â€œI heard on the radio,” Hillary wrote in an e-mail on June 8, 2009, “that there is a Cabinet mtg this am. Is there? Can I go? If not, who are we sending?”
    Old State Department hands said they had to reach far back in their memory to recall a relationship between the White House and State Department that was so one-sided in favor of the president. They concluded that only Richard Nixon’s secretary of state, William Pierce Rogers, had been shafted as badly as Hillary.

CHAPTER 10 CHAPTER 10
    DOUBLE DIPPING DOUBLE DIPPING
    It would have been perfectly logical if [Huma Abedin] had said, “I’m out of here.” Any woman could have understood that.
    â€”Huma Abedin’s friend Rory Tahari
    I t was the spring of 2012 and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was on a late-night flight to Beijing.
    As always, Huma Abedin, Hillary’s longest-serving aide, was close at hand.
    Huma was an attractive and stylish woman with a murky personal background. She was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and moved to Saudi Arabia with her Muslim parents when she was two years old. She grew up speaking English, Urdu (a language associated with the Muslim region of Hindustan), and Arabic.
    She didn’t return to America until her late teens, when she was admitted to George Washington University. There, she became amember of the executive board of the Muslim Students Association, which was founded by the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical Islamist group whose stated goal was to instill the Koran and Sunnah (a major source of Islamic law) as the “sole reference point for . . . ordering the life of the Muslim family, individual, community . . . and state.”
    As a college intern in 1996, Huma was assigned to the first lady’s office in the Clinton White House, where she immediately came to the attention of Hillary.
    For the next twelve years—from 1996 until 2008, when Hillary ran for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination—Huma wore two hats: she was Hillary’s “body woman,” her do-it-all personal assistant, and she was the assistant editor of the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs . Her connection to that publication raised eyebrows in conservative circles, because the Journal was founded