 Former Congressman Anthony Wiener last week pled guilty to a charge of distributing obscene material to a minor that carries a sentence of up to 10 years in prison. He is also now a registered sex offender. But a new report this week from Who What Why suggests Wiener may have been the victim of a political setup. How much should Anthony Wiener, sharing his laptop with Clinton aide Huma Abedin, shape the outcome of last November's presidential election? We are joined by Jonathan Allen, co-author of the best-selling book Shattered Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign. Thank you so much for being with us. It's my pleasure to be here, I think. Oh, great. Are you tired of talking about Anthony Wiener? I know you've covered him extensively. Yeah, I've covered him extensively since he was a member of the House of Representatives. For reporters, somebody who was quick-witted and sometimes really thoughtful about policy issues and has, over the last five or six years, created an endless amount of copy. Some of it is sad to watch. There's a level of sort of personal destruction there that I have some sympathy for knowing him, but it is fascinating, obviously, to a lot of people and certainly people who don't like Democrats or who hate Democrats, you know, watch it as they're sort of shredding for an unhappy time. Right. I was at the Philadelphia Convention working with Triumphy and Sulcomic Dog and I saw Anthony Wiener. He was wearing a purple shirt, checked pants, this fishing hat. He wanted to be noticed. I thought, well, this guy's just an exhibitionist. He just wants to be noticed. I have a theory about Huma. I want to ask you about Comey and the emails. By the way, let me say it's interesting you say that because then I wrote a sort of day-no-mott story for his departure from Congress after it was first revealed that he was sexting with women way back when and I think the leader of that story was Anthony Wiener, exactly where he's always wanted to be in the spotlight. And he could have made a good, I thought, I thought being mayor of New York City would have been right for him. He had that kind of Ed Koch quality except for the celibacy. But let me. Right. Yeah, you might, you might, you might not pronounce it Koch. So here's my crazy theory about Huma. I think she was Hillary's favorite, not despite Anthony Wiener being her husband but because Anthony Wiener was her husband. I don't, I want to get all house of cards on you but I honestly believe the Clintons needed Anthony Wiener near the White House to distract from Bill that Anthony Wiener was a useful degenerate and that the Clintons are playing chess and there are six moves ahead and thought we need Anthony Wiener around us so Bill goes unnoticed. I disagree with you and I'll tell you why. The reason is that Huma, Huma Abedin has been with Hillary Clinton for her entire adult life, for Huma Abedin's entire adult life and it was a White House intern, not the Monica Lewinsky stuff, White House intern, but with the White House intern, you know, around that time period of Lewinsky and is much closer to the Clintons than her husband is. Okay. And do you want to take that call? For the ADD crowd, phone calls ringing in the background. How bad was it for Huma to be sharing her laptop with Anthony Wiener? I mean, in the normal context, it's not that bad. I mean, my family has computers, my wife uses my laptop. Sometimes I use hers. I don't have classified information that I'm not sure about my laptop, although after this campaign, who knows? So, you know, I mean, obviously for a normal couple, I don't think it's unusual to share laptops. I think the unusual thing here was that Hillary Clinton had a private email server that had classified information on it and was emailing back and forth on non-classified systems with classified information. Now, it's important to know that just for a substance check here that you can't email classified emails from the classified system to the non-classified system. So somebody has to accidentally or potentially intentionally put classified information into a non-classified email for it to transfer back and forth. And a lot of things are classified like the existence of a drone program, for instance, is classified. So if you mentioned a drone program and an email between the Secretary of State and her aide, technically they're moving classified information, everybody knew we had a drone program. But some of the things were much more serious than that. I think what the FBI concluded is that there wasn't an effort here, there was no intent to make classified information vulnerable and that they couldn't show any intent to do that. The reason that she set up the server was to keep her email private. I think that's why you didn't see a prosecution. Two important things. One is there has to be intent to reveal classified information. So there was no intent, might have been sloppiness, but you're pointing out that if it's really important, these documents never get transferred through ordinary email. That's what we learned, right? Right. It's complicated, but the government has a classified system and that has multiple levels and you can't email down, you can't email from the top level, the lower level, you can't email from a lower level to non-classified. And but what you can do is you could create classified information, so to speak. You could take something that was classified, you personally could take something that was classified, email it to me on my Gmail and suddenly we are trafficking and classified information. But they were not able to, you know, they weren't emailing her from the classified system, they were just emailing her from their regular State Department accounts which are not classified. However, some of the information in those emails was classified. We're talking with Jonathan. I know it's confusing. No, it's not, it's not confusing. I think we all do things and if somebody's a snake in the grass looking to catch us, they can find something. I'm told that every American violates about three federal laws a day. So we can all be arrested for something. We're talking with Jonathan Allen. He's the co-author of the best-selling book Shattered Inside Hillary Clinton's Doom campaign. Was Comey stuck between a rock and a hard place when he went before Congress and said the investigation is still going on at the 11th hour with Hillary? He was because he told them that it was over and he said he would update them on any new information. And so, you know, you can see how from moment to moment, you can sort of see how his thinking goes and him trying to do the right thing in various places and obviously angering just about everybody. I think he was in a tough spot. Now, he chose the spotlight when Loretta Lynch met with Bill Clinton on a tarmac in Arizona right before this decision was being made and then essentially accused herself. He decided to step into that breach and not only say he was not going to recommend a prosecution, but then essentially read the indictment against Hillary Clinton highly unusual. For those who believe that Jim Comey is a big factor in this election, I think he's certainly a factor in the election. But you have to remember, none of this happens unless she sets up this email server. So it is incomplete for her to say Jim Comey was a factor at the end of the election and not point back to her own culpability. We're talking with Jonathan Allen, best-selling author and he also moonlights as a clown at Chuck E. Cheese's. Where are you? Did Comey think this is how I read it? I think Comey figured Hillary was going to win and he prides himself in being nonpartisan. He stood up to Gonzales at Ashcroft's hospital bed. He wouldn't sign the the fees of warrants. He's pretty objective. Was he polishing his image by standing up to Hillary because he thought she's going to be president? I'm going to have to investigate her. I better show that I'm objective and I'm not under her thumb. I mean, his friends have essentially said as much. I mean, that this is somebody who believed that if she's going to be president in the United States, it's going to have to look like he had done due diligence and that he did do due diligence and that the FBI did do due diligence and that it was important that the public know that. I think reporters followed the campaign in a similar way. They thought that she was going to be president. So they did a pretty hard vet of her. I think they tried at times to do as hard of a vet on Donald Trump and were not as successful at doing that vet. Although, I would point out, David Ferrick, hold of the Washington Post won Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on Donald Trump's sort of fake charity and foundation that didn't actually give out its own money to anybody or gave out to very few of the people that they know that it was giving money to. So there was certainly some scrutiny of him and his business ties and obviously his the allegations of sexual misconduct against him. But I think because reporters felt like she was going to win, they did the real full vet on her. We practically knew everything about Donald Trump before the election. But the only thing that stuck was the the two pays stuck. Everything else we just accepted. We knew he was dirty. How big a liability was Bill Clinton? At some point, you must have figured she was going to be president. Bill Clinton meets with Loretta Lynch, the new attorney general on the tarmac. What did he say? Do we know what he said and how stupid was that? Well, we didn't get anything more than what, you know, what was reported essentially at the time that they talked about their families and, you know, sort of nice soft stuff like that. But Bill Clinton is smart enough to know that just just making his presence known to the attorney general, whom he once hired as a as a federal prosecutor, you know, has an effect or could have an effect. And certainly smart enough to know that if it became public, it could be a problem. The response that we understand was sort of universal in the White House and in the Clinton campaign was WTF. You know, that's what people said. They're like, how could these people not understand that this could be a problem? How could Bill Reynolds be dumb enough to get up, you know, to go talk to Bill Clinton on the plane? How could Bill Clinton be dumb enough to do that? And yet, you know, this sort of sets Jim Comey in motion. Had she won, they'd be impeaching her right now. There's no question that she herself is her own liability because of the political climate. It would be difficult to impeach her without specific impeachable charges related to things that she had done in the presidency. So you sort of have to wait to find out if there's, you know, high crimes or misdemeanors with the Justice Department. Having said that, you know, controversy was not prosecutable. I think it would be hard for Congress to impeach her on that. Certainly the House could impeach her over the wall because it only takes a majority vote to get those articles of impeachment passed, but to get two thirds of the Senate to remove a president from office is a pretty high bar. The only person, Andrew Johnson, came one vote short of being removed from office. Bill Clinton obviously was not removed from office. And Richard Nixon would have been removed from office, but facing that decided to resign. So it's a pretty high bar to actually get it done. It's interesting. We have Cory Brett Schneider on the show today. He's a constitutional law professor at Brown University, author of When the State Speaks. He says on today's show that the only way to impeach is pretty much through the conflation of politics and a possible violation of the law. But politics is what moves an impeachment. That's why I walked away from that interview with Cory Brett Schneider thinking that if Hillary were president, the politics are there to just destroy her, that she would be immediately crippled by a Republican House. And Bill Clinton, how big a liability do you think he would have been? You never know what Bill Clinton's going to do. So, you know, I think it potentially could have been a liability. I think on a policy level, he's probably an asset. I think on a political level in terms of persuading politicians to do things, I think he's probably an asset, but certainly his foundation activities and the sort of cloud of sexual misconduct around him is something that has to be considered in terms of the politics. And I agree with the professor. I mean, impeachment or removal from office is a political act. It is not a legal act. There is no real definition of high crimes and misdemeanors. So, it's basically you've got two-thirds of the Senate willing to get rid of a president and a majority of the House, you know, the presidency is over. But those people don't want to be seen as acting purely on a political basis, so they need to have some real reason to do that. And I actually think that's why, in large part, the Clinton impeachment did not succeed in the Senate, that basically the Senate's decision was, you know, having sexual relations with an intern and even lying about it were not strong enough reasons for Democrats in the Senate to vote to get rid of them. I think that their constituents didn't feel that way. I've always said that Donald Trump is pretty much safe unless he drops to 25 percent approval, because it's got to be at the point where Republicans feel like it's more dangerous to them to stand by him than to back away from him. And he's not at that point right now. How much did Bernie move Hillary Clinton to the left? Would she have been a progressive president? I think she would have been a progressive president, because I think she was always a little more progressive than her husband. I think that where she falls on the spectrum is close to him, but a little bit to the left of him. And I certainly think that she was reflective of a Democratic party that was moving to the left. And you could see that in her close attention to various Democratic constituencies, you know, when you're talking about going back on the sort of tough-on-crime Bill Clinton days of the early 90s to now talking about getting rid of mass incarceration, maybe talking about LGBT issues, this is somebody who was campaigning far to the left of where her husband campaigned to the left of where she was in 2008. And I think Bernie Sanders did pull her to the left a little bit on some issues. But I would say this, I think she was always cognizant of and perhaps in many ways to her detriment cognizant of the plausibility of doing things that she promised on the campaign trail as president and tried not to get into a place where she was promising things that she didn't think she would be able to deliver on. What she probably has found by now, after watching Barack Obama defeat her, after watching Bernie Sanders come close and watching Donald Trump defeat her, is that it is a lot easier on the campaign trail to promise whatever you need to to win. And you know, we've seen President Trump has done some things that are consistent with what he promised on the campaign trail and backed away from some of the others. Haven't we found that presidents Trump, notwithstanding, do keep or at least try to keep their promises that they make on the campaign trail? A candidate says, I believe in Medicare for all. They're going to try to implement that their first 100 days in office. Broadly presidents try to keep their promises and they will measure themselves against their promises. But oftentimes they will promise more than they know they can deliver. And at times we'll get to places where they're promising things that are pretty clearly more than they can deliver. But I think the aspiration matters to voters. I think it tells voters who they are, what they really believe in. It might not tell them exactly what priorities will be emphasized, but it does give the voter a sense when you're out there a little stronger of what your core values are. And I think that's been a problem for Secretary Clinton. She's somebody who would, you know, rather than saying I'm against the trans-persistent partnership, she would say I'm against the trans-persistent partnership, which by the way I negotiated. But here are the conditions under which I could accept it. And I think voters are looking for I'm against this or I'm for this. They want a clean break. They want something new. That's why up until recently we rarely had senators making it to the Oval Office. We wanted governors because they didn't have a paper trail. We wanted fresh eyes in the Oval Office. There's something unattractive about a candidate who's a victim of her own expertise. What do you think her core value was? My core value is Medicare for All. I believe that when you look at all the issues facing this country, we need Medicare for All. That is the thing that I would get up every morning and fight for. Why was she running? What did she stand for? What was her unifying theory that would bring her to the Oval Office? It's interesting. We talked about this in the book at length. You know, even her own campaign age had difficulty figuring out what was her one big idea. You know, there were a million different things on which she had a position, but no one big unifying idea. No, it's the economy, stupid. No, America first. You know, this was this was a candidate who I think struggled to tell the American people what she was going to do for them that was bigger than her, you know, that was more about them than about her gaining power. And that doesn't mean to say she doesn't believe in all the things that she or most of the things that certainly that she proposed on the campaign trail. But just that she had trouble with that one big idea. And in fact, one of her top aides said to me, my co-author Amy Barnes, I would have had a reason for running or I wouldn't have run. And what do you think that reason was in your gut? Yeah, I mean, I think it was that she believed she would be the best person to handle all of the various crises that you handle as president of the United States. I think she thought she would be a good president. And which, again, is is about her more than it's about other people or more than more than about, you know, about more than delivering some some particular policy. And then that's where people got lost. And not everybody. I mean, obviously, 65 million people voted for her. There were a lot of people who supported what she was what she was about. But for what ended up being the swing constituency, the you know, the working class white voters in in the Rust Belt, they wanted to hear a little bit more about how she was going to make their lives better in a pretty easy to grasp way. And she failed on that on that score. Trump is a victim of leaking. You live off leaks. How much leaking would be going on in a Clinton Oval Office? I would assume a lot because I don't think she instills loyalty. What was one of the things that allowed us to do this book is that her campaign really didn't leak a lot during this particular election cycle. She put an emphasis on not having people that she thought would leak on having people who would when they ran up ideas up the flagpole and ran into resistance would not go to the press. And I think it's one of the reasons she probably didn't correct for some of the errors is that she wasn't reading them on the front page of the nation's newspapers because her campaign was insisting all the time that everything was hunky-dory and go and fly. What is the danger to a leader who isn't porous, somebody who is Nixonian, who doesn't allow the leaks? The danger is they operate in a bubble. Is that what you're saying? Exactly. You're saying that leaks actually help a president. I'm saying they can. I think that the ability to have things aired out a little more than they can near enough circle, the ability to hear what some of your detractors from inside your own camp would say to a reporter about what you're missing, I think it's important to get part of that. That doesn't mean that every week is good for a president or that everything is leaking that's good for a president. I think there's a balance, but I do think it's important to be able as a candidate to hear some ideas that people might not tell you to your face. A president like Obama just talks to Valerie Jarrett and assumes that everybody else is leaking. A lot of the weeks, I think the Obama White House was very good at the sort of weak on offense, if you will. They were very good at constructing narratives and putting them out as sort of an offensive weapon. The way that they leaked to reporters is to tell them the story, they give them the backstory about what's going on, give them some inside details from inside a room and keep them pretty well said. And then there were leaks that Obama didn't want. His agencies would leak stories about what he was saying no to, which by the way is normal that happens in the presidency. Usually the people leaking are the ones who lost the argument and they think they have a better idea and so they go talk to reporters about it so that it's a public airing and if the president is wrong or the public isn't with the president there may be some pressure on him to listen again to the people that lost the argument. In 2008, Hillary lost to Obama. Is it partly because the people who work for Obama loved him and the people who work for the Clintons are there for transactional reasons? It's for their resume and they can make money and they can move on. Is that what separates the Clintons from the Obamas? Don't you think the only people who work for the Clintons are loyalists who know that there's a big paycheck coming their way and that the Clintons have something on them to keep them in line? I mean I think there's a mix. I think that that loyalty is huge in Clinton world and that's and that there are a lot of people who are loyal because this is where the paycheck has come from or what they thought would come from in the future, a plumb white house job, etc. But I think there are also people who simply believe in their style of politics who are essentially democratic centrists and pragmatists and transactional themselves. So I don't think that this is you know I don't think Clinton world is devoid of people who actually have a belief in Hillary Clinton or that Hillary Clinton would be the best president. At the same time I think that there is a stronger affinity for a Barack Obama or a Bernie Sanders or even a George W. Bush who goes out there and sort of says here are my values and here is my ideology and that can be a much stronger pull when you identify with somebody that way. I think that can be something that's a lot more inspiring. We've been talking with Jonathan Allen he's the co-author of the best-selling book Shattered Inside Hillary Clinton's Doom campaign. Before you go we've heard the hand-wringing of the perpetual permanent campaign that the minute the president or a congressperson sets foot in their new office they're running for reelection. I want to ask if you're a liberal or ignorant or whatever you call the other side but I want to get rid of Trump. Is the permanent campaign a virtue in that Congress even though they're Republicans have to pay attention to the polls and they have to get rid of Trump because he's dragging them down. Is that why Goldwater went in to the Oval Office and told Richard Nixon you got to go? Is it because of the permanent campaign? I mean I think that you know the founding fathers wanted certainly the House of Representatives to be pretty close to the electorate to win and lose based on the popular sentiment changes. Donald Trump's already campaigning for reelection. We've seen him you know relatively recently that he was in Harrisburg Pennsylvania basically do a campaign rally. We are in a permanent campaign the number of months of the year or the biennium I guess that are sort of reserved for politics versus policy have expanded so it's almost always all politics now but I think that's just a sort of a function of the way we operate. I don't think it's bad that numbers of Congress are attentive to politics. I mean our system is set up with the idea that the people are right. I you know I covered the campaign. I was on the trail with Trump the encyclomic dog. Notice the gravitas? I was going to say were you the executive producer or were you the gopher for the dog? I cleaned up after the dog and I walked away from this campaign thinking go big or go home if you're going to run for president go big or go home that the American people we like to think we're always frightened but when it comes to electing presidents we're fearless you know Obama was a fearless choice even Trump was a fearless choice it's a pretty brave electorate. Bernie was go big or go home and 2020 vision but had the Democrats gone big and trusted the electorate and went with Bernie I think he'd be president right now I think the American people aren't as frightened as the Washington establishment bets on. I think you're right about that you know I think Hillary Clinton twice ran campaigns once in the primary against Barack Obama and once it gets Donald Trump saying you should be frightened about what this person intends to do they don't know what they're doing they're promising too much and uh twice was rejected in that theory that she espoused. Yeah well anyway thank you. And by the way at the same time made her the status quo carry with two elections in a row. This is a country that is constantly reinventing itself well thank you for your time I hope you come back Jonathan Allen is the co-author of the best-selling book Shattered inside Hillary Clinton's doom campaign I know how busy you are thank you for your time. It's my pleasure