Hillary Clinton reportedly went through her campaign staffers' emails to figure out why she lost the 2008 primaries
Clinton, who was the Democratic Party's nominee for president in the 2016 election, blamed her failure in 2008 on her campaign staff and wanted to know "who was talking to who" and "who was leaking to who," a source familiar with the operation told Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes in their new book "Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign."
In the summer of 2008, Clinton was "conducting an autopsy of her failed bid against Barack Obama, and she wanted an honest accounting of what had gone wrong," Allen and Parnes wrote in the book. As part of this effort, Clinton "instructed a trusted aide to access the campaign's server and download the messages sent and received by top staffers."
Clinton found that her political director Guy Cecil talked to members of the media and surmised that chief strategist Mark Penn was a "tyrant." She also discovered that "far too many" of her staffers were more interested in furthering their own careers than in getting her elected. Neither Cecil nor Penn worked on Clinton's 2016 campaign, despite Cecil long being considered as a top candidate for campaign manager.
Clinton later met with campaign staffers who, "apparently unaware that she had access to their emails, were amazed that a woman who had been traveling the country in pursuit of the presidency had such a detailed grasp of the machinations at the campaign's command center in the Washington suburbs," Allen and Parnes wrote.
One aide told Allen and Parnes that they were "struck by how good of a sense she had ... of the problems that were going on."
"She had a mosaic pieced together that if you read a transcript of it, you would have thought it was someone who had sat at headquarters every day, and it was remarkably accurate," the aide said. "She had it pegged."