Ronald Kessler: The First Family Detail

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 morning, 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.”