Quotes from Jonathan Allen

She'd gone on the attack against a better-liked rival whose platform more closely mirrored the values of the party's base, creating a boomerang effect on her personal standing. Perhaps

Podesta had just left the Peninsula for the Javits Center. He went over because the campaign's contract expired at 2:30 a.m., which was nearing, and there was still no decision from Hillary on what she wanted to do, other than avoid giving a public concession speech that night.

Both archetypes were familiar in Clintonworld: the cold-eyed, self-serving strategists who build up themselves by building up one Clinton or both and the sycophants who prove their loyalty to a Clinton by devoting their entire lives to the family. Hillary wanted them to coexist. But

But the idea burned into her mind as much as anything else was that she had lost because she'd hired people who put their own interests above getting her elected. The

And she didn't want the first major address of what could be a history-making campaign to be set against a minimalistic backdrop like some farmer's back porch.

The group's lists had value, and lawyers for Ready for Hillary and the Clinton campaign would spend weeks planning how they could legally transfer all the data from the super PAC to the campaign. In

Nor was anyone empowered to both enforce Hillary's will and tell her when she was wrong without fear of reprisal.

As she had at State, Abedin concerned herself with elements of the operation for which she had no credentials. But

If something does not directly differentiate you from your competition and drive business value creation, see if there is an AWS building block that can take care of it for you. There probably is. Then use that building block instead of wasting your time and effort recreating something that is a utility.

If Hillary was a candidate often isolated from her formal campaign—and she was—Abedin was the croc-filled moat encircling her. The

Eleven stories above Brooklyn Heights in a 659,000-square-foot building that also housed Morgan Stanley and the United States Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York, Hillary's top aides were as miserable as midlevel bureaucrats in an agency with no clear plans for how to attain its mission. They

Throughout the primary, he'd report back from the field on what he was hearing at campaign events and from friends across the country. Mook's response was always a variation on the same analysis: the data run counter to your anecdotes.

Mook was already operating inside a framework first developed for Hillary by David Plouffe, President Barack Obama's longtime strategist, who had put together a preliminary memo for Hillary in December 2013. As Obama's campaign manager in 2008, Plouffe had despised Clinton; that he was now advising her was an important signal of just how completely she would co-opt the Democratic establishment even before she began running. Plouffe

within twenty-four hours of her concession speech. Mook and Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn't entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.

Ultimately, it was a battle between those who believed that it was folly to think Hillary could show up in lower-population areas and change hearts and minds and those who believed, just as firmly, that politics and Hillary's path to victory were fundamentally about doing just that. That elemental split hung over nearly every internal skirmish over strategy and tactics—from

In the summer of 2008, years before her private e-mail server became a campaign issue, Hillary learned about the power of digital snooping. At the time, she was conducting an autopsy of her failed bid against Barack Obama, and she wanted an honest accounting of what had gone wrong. So she instructed a trusted aide to access the campaign's server and download the messages sent and received by top staffers.

She believed her campaign had failed her—not the other way around—and she wanted "to see who was talking to who, who was leaking to who," said

After years of watching adversaries comb through her public records for any hint of a scandal, and after accessing her own aides' e-mails, Hillary well understood the danger of exposing her own private thoughts to scrutiny. And that was reason enough to want them shielded from political enemies, journalists, and the public.

Hillary's campaign was so spirit-crushing that her aides eventually shorthanded the feeling of impending doom with a simple mantra: We're not allowed to have nice things.

The candidate would blame her staff for failing to contain the damage, and, privately, they would fault her for failing to take the steps necessary to do that.

For Biden, as for other Democrats who had considered running in 2016, Hillary's ability to co-opt the major institutions, political leaders, operatives, and financiers of the Democratic Party was deeply frustrating.

Hillary began to home in on one line of inquiry. Do I have to build a big national footprint or can I rely on the Democratic National Committee, state parties, and outside groups to shoulder some of the burden?

Clinton's aides didn't know that batches of Podesta's e-mails would be released day after day from October 7 until November 7, the last day before the election. Nor could they have imagined that the intelligence finding of Russian interference in the election would so quickly get drowned out by the combination of the Trump Access Hollywood video and the Podesta e-mails.

On the hop from Manchester to New York, she and Bill settled into adjoining seats at the front of the jet. They fell asleep, her head on his shoulder and his head propped against hers.