They had to turn over every password for every social media account for every member of their families.

They had to list every piece of property they’d ever owned, and copies of every résumé that they’d put out for the past 10 years. Every business partner. Every gift they’d ever received, according to those familiar with the details of the vetting process.


For the finalists in the hunt to be Hillary Clinton’s running mate, it was five weeks of questions and follow-up, and follow-up to the follow-up questions, starting from when they were summoned one-by-one to meet with campaign chairman John Podesta and lawyer Jim Hamilton and told to bring along just one trusted person who’d serve as the point of contact.

Last Friday was interview day at Clinton’s D.C. home, the final exam that some of the VP candidates had spent weeks with their staffs preparing their pitches for. Clinton, with Podesta seated nearby as the only other one in the room, would start the session by talking them up.

Then she’d ask: “Why do you want the job?”

It was a simple end to a complicated process, one that concluded with Clinton tapping Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine as her choice for the Democratic vice presidential nominee.

She didn’t call all the finalists herself last night, once the decision was made and the meticulous plans were put into action. Some got word from Podesta, who’d only say that they’d decided “to go in a different direction.” He called the congressional leadership to tell them it was Tim Kaine. And he called Bernie Sanders. She didn’t.

Kaine also made a call to Sanders.

The Virginia senator was never on the Friday schedule for the meetings with the others. The night before, after the pair had campaigned together in Northern Virginia, she’d invited him back to her house for what her campaign calls an “informal” conversation, but that 90 minutes together served as the interview—and Saturday, he and his wife headed to the Clintons’ Chappaqua, New York, home for lunch with all the Clintons to see how they’d all get along.

Kaine wasn’t the only one to make the trek to New York. When Tom Vilsack flew in to see her in Chappaqua the day after Kaine, both Hillary and Bill Clinton walked out to greet him as his car pulled in the back gate.

The Agriculture secretary and former Iowa governor was an old friend, and he’d shot up in consideration right at the end, as Clinton considered the advice President Barack Obama gave when they’d talked about the decision.

Ignore the people telling you to worry about winning a state or a particular group, according to White House aides, go with the person that you’d want to turn to for advice in the Oval Office. And the president never hid how much he liked Kaine—eight years ago when he was on Obama’s shortlist, David Axelrod remembers the Virginia senator telling him and David Plouffe, “I'm flattered to be considered, but if I were Barack, I wouldn't pick me. We're too much alike."

Kaine later made the same point directly to Obama. “We’re the same person,” he joked. And not just because both their mothers were from El Dorado, Kansas.

Meanwhile, Labor Secretary Tom Perez stayed in the mix as an unlikely short-lister, helped by the relationship that he’d built up with both Clintons over the past year and by the interest in him among senior aides at Brooklyn headquarters, including Robby Mook, Clinton’s campaign manager. Like Mook, who helped win Clinton family friend Terry McAuliffe the 2013 Virginia governor’s race by changing the pool of voters they chased, Podesta talks often about rebuilding the Obama coalition for Clinton. Perez would have helped on that score.

Podesta was the most partial to Perez of the small circle making the decision: besides Bill and Hillary Clinton, it was former State Department chief of staff Cheryl Mills, Hamilton, and closest aide Huma Abedin, with a consult from Podesta’s wife. Other top aides Jake Sullivan and Jennifer Palmieri weren’t involved in the deep discussions but were being kept up to date. And Chelsea Clinton—who, with her husband, joined her parents and the Kaines for their Chappaqua lunch last Saturday—also had a say.

The former president, according to an aide, wasn’t backing or pushing for anyone, leaving the decision to his wife, though he kept sounding people out for opinions.

But the efforts to make sure focus never slipped from Kaine were well underway. McAuliffe, who speaks to Bill Clinton several times a week and sometimes several times a day (as well as staying in touch with Mook), tried to patch over the fact that the Clintons barely know her new running mate by emphasizing the transitive property.

“He used every bit of his influence on Senator Kaine’s behalf during this process,” said one person familiar with the process.

McAuliffe wasn’t the only trusted hand making a push. Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, another close Clinton friend, was pushing Vilsack. Multiple sources say that James Carville was going hard for Elizabeth Warren.

"I like Kaine, too,” Carville said Saturday morning.

Others tried less direct ways of lobbying themselves. Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper got himself as far as one of the interviews after spending the spring on a book tour. His near constant presence in Washington even put him meeting with former Congresswoman and longtime Clinton supporter Jane Harman at the Wilson Center to talk foreign policy, and hiring a New York-based public relations firm that urged reporters to interview him about gun control and terrorism.

“Governor John Hickenlooper of Colorado, who is still dealing with the fallout from the 2012 mass shooting in Aurora, is disturbed by [Donald] Trump’s comments about Orlando and is available to discuss it,” read one emailed pitch.

Hickenlooper got invited to Clinton’s Washington house last Friday, as did Julián Castro, the Housing and Urban Development secretary. So did Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, who were told that losing their Senate seats to a Republican governor’s appointment was a huge concern. Perez got to go last.

Podesta’s leak-protection plan assigned each candidate a different additional lawyer to handle the vetting. The 150 questions on the first part of the questionnaire were standard, with an addendum based on their individual histories that surprised some of the candidates with how much they’d already been vetted before they knew that the process had actually started. Round after round came back with more follow up questions, swamping aides for weeks.

Lesser known candidates were encouraged to get themselves out in the media, as Brooklyn watched for the kind of responses they generated—with particular attention on Kaine, when his record on abortion and in taking gifts as governor came up.

But they also focused on how candidates fared among the Sanders devotees. That hurt Castro, who’d been speculated on early as a favorite but rankled Clinton allies with the shadow campaign he’d launched for the job a year earlier. By the time the real process got underway, he’d faded from top consideration.

As for Obama, he “was thrilled about the pick,” a White House aide said late Friday. “Felt it said a lot about how Clinton approached the selection. Kaine is the guy you want to turn to in the Oval Office. Excitement in the White House about it.”

The president called Kaine right away Friday night to congratulate him, White House officials confirmed. They connected on the way as Clinton aides were driving him to the airport for his surprise flight to Miami.

From an initial group of what the campaign says was 24-deep in April, less than a dozen final reports were prepared for Clinton. She read them under the cloud of Orlando, Dallas, the attacks in Iraq and Europe, and as her campaign prepared a line of attack against Trump all about how he’s unprepared to lead the world. The interviews at her house on Friday came as reports were still streaming in from the truck attack in Nice.

"People have anxiety about the world and terrorism today, so she wanted someone more seasoned, more ready to be commander in chief,” said a person close to Clinton. “Without question, the idea of national security was very important for her at this uncertain time.”

Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., left, accompanied by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, right, speaks at a rally at Florida International University Panther Arena in Miami. | AP Photo

The truth is, Kaine doesn’t have much foreign policy experience himself. He’s been in the Senate for three and a half years, and serves on both the Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees, but that’s it. In that time, though, he got deeply enough involved on the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) and Iran debates that some speculated he might have been a contender for secretary of state if he hadn’t been the running mate pick.

But compared to the rest of the options—who tried to convince Clinton that foreign policy and national security were the areas she had covered from her own time at State, and she needed the help instead on domestic politics and making people think she’d take chances—Kaine was way out ahead.

What the campaign didn't do at any point in the process was get anyone to make the affirmative case for Kaine, letting him languish under the almost universal media dismissal that he's boring. There wasn’t a whiff of the expansive argument Clinton made for him in his Saturday rollout, that he deepens the contrast she's trying to make to Trump (rather than balancing her, like a traditional running mate pick). That he and his biography fit into her campaign like a jigsaw puzzle piece, right down to the Marine son who's about to deploy to NATO, is something that largely remained unnoticed before he took the stage in Miami.

The morning after Clinton cleaned up in primaries in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland and Pennsylvania (it was the week after the New York primary, when the steam came out of the Sanders campaign and he only won in Rhode Island), Kaine was tapped to join Madeleine Albright on a call with reporters attacking Trump on foreign policy.

It helped Kaine’s case with Clinton that after strategically rushing to be the first major politician to endorse her (he’d pulled the same move with Obama eight years ago, backing him before anyone other than home state Gov. Rod Blagojevich), he’d made another strategic decision to let the Clintons come to him, gambling that this would be the smarter play.

“There wasn’t, ‘Let’s get a bunch of people lobbying or calling,’” said one person close to Kaine. “The more high-profile others got, the more he put his head down.”

The Clinton campaign, which provided traveling reporters Friday night with a press release in background, bullet point form about the process, was carefully nudging narratives throughout. In late June, they purposefully seeded the same story to multiple reporters that the shortlist was Kaine, Warren and Castro—though they’d already all but ruled out Warren and Castro—in a successful effort to get stories out about the different possible factors that might make the decision, and to see the response those generated.

Extremely sensitive to foreseeable attacks that Kaine’s not liberal enough for progressives, a battle plan was in place to stress his credentials as soon as the word officially went out. They noticeably leaked right away that he’d told Clinton Friday he’d reread the Trans Pacific Partnership deal and decided to be against it, though he was speaking positively about the trade agreement just the day before. The “Progressive Groups Praise Kaine Selection” press release went out before they’d gotten the new joint logo to attach and, not coincidentally, his underappreciated lefty credentials were the main theme of the email Obama sent out from the DNC about him Saturday morning.

“There is not a lot known about Kaine, but he is a huge progressive. And POTUS will make that argument,” the White House aide said.

For months, though, Clinton’s been pretty explicit in private about how much she likes Kaine according to a friend, and talked glowingly of him in very small private fundraisers since early summer, according to multiple top donors.

"Kaine was definitely the wire-to-wire leader,” one Democrat familiar with the search. “Some leaks had more to do with them being sensitive about looking boring than people being under serious consideration."

Even so, the Clinton campaign kept them guessing until the very end. Members of Kaine’s usual inner circle were left waiting in suspense as the sun began to set last night, though Podesta and a few aides had already sneaked off to intercept him in Rhode Island, where he was for a fundraiser.

Kaine himself didn’t realize how much of it had been cooked around him until Clinton let him in on it at the end of their call Friday.

“I don't mean to alarm you,” she laughed, “but John Podesta is outside your building right now."

Burgess Everett and Annie Karni contributed to this report.

