A miscommunication between former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her top aide Huma Abedin led to a brutal grilling in her first national TV interview at the beginning of her campaign for president, Business Insider reported Tuesday.
It was May 2015 when her aides wanted to know who Clinton would like to have interview her. Communications director Jennifer Palmieri asked Abedin to find out — Abedin told Palmieri "Brianna," which she thought meant CNN anchor Brianna Keilar.
However, Clinton actually said "Bianna," referring to Bianna Golodryga of Yahoo News, married to Peter Orszag who worked for the administration of former President Bill Clinton before becoming budget director for former President Barack Obama.
The error was detailed in the new book, "Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign" by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes.
"By the time the mistake was realized, it was too late to pull back," Allen and Parnes wrote.
During the interview, Keilar mentioned a poll showing that people didn't trust Clinton. She then became defensive and said, "People should and do trust me," and blamed the polls on a "barrage of attacks" from Republicans.
Her defensiveness helped to solidify the perception that she was secretive and didn't like the press. And, the authors said she was incensed at her staff over the incident.
"If the interview was meant to show Hillary at ease with the press and confident that her email scandal wouldn't hurt her, it failed," Allen and Parnes wrote.
Allen and Parnes are experienced political journalists. In a review of the book by The New York Times, it called the portrait of the Clinton campaign "a Titanic-like disaster: an epic fail made up of a series of perverse and often avoidable missteps by an out-of-touch candidate and her strife-ridden staff that turned 'a winnable race' into 'another iceberg-seeking campaign ship.'"
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