They thought she’d changed. They thought maybe she’d picked up a little bit from them about how people respond to awkward secret arrangements and contrived ways of not telling the full story.

This has been a surprising two weeks for aides in President Barack Obama’s orbit as they’ve watched Hillary Clinton’s email mess unfold.


It isn’t that Obama and Clinton like or don’t like each other, or that their aides still have hard feelings left over from the 2008 primary campaign. In the White House, as conversations with current and former aides make clear, they want her to win — after all, so much of what they’ve achieved depends on her getting into the Oval Office to keep it going. The Democratic nomination is all but hers, the Republican field still looking weak to them, and they’re counting on her.

And now?

To sum up the feelings, all the way up to the highest levels: What. The. Hell.

With so much on the line, with so much time to prepare, she’s back to classic Clinton? She’s flubbing a campaign kickoff eight years in the making because she somehow thought that no one would ever care that she set up a secret email server? That anyone would then accept her word that it was OK that she deleted 30,000 emails even though the State Department had been asking for some of them? And then go silent again?

After all, 2008’s “Change you can believe in” campaign slogan wasn’t just a reference to George W. Bush. It was also about her, and the uneasy feeling many people had that with Clinton, something else was always going on.

Obama aides had had that feeling themselves, even after she joined the administration and their staffs tried following Obama’s and Clinton’s leads in building mutual trust, almost to the point of suspension of disbelief.

“You never feel like you’re quite getting the full story, because everyone’s got some side deal or some complicating factor,” said one former Obama aide, reflecting on dealing with Clinton and her circle. “I don’t think there was a conscious effort to watch out for scams. It was more just, you know who you’re dealing with.”

Obama put the priority on keeping clear records when he issued guidelines about using official email accounts, one White House aide noted after Clinton’s news conference, while obviously the former secretary of state determined her priority was something else.

Say what you will about the Obama White House — and there is a lot to say, from what allies gripe is a disregard for any political interests other than the president’s, to a stumbling learning curve for how things actually get done in Washington — but the scandals of Obama’s past six years have never been about personal gain.

Political malpractice, ridiculous management failures, an often insistently tin ear for what Americans say they want to hear out of their leaders, sure. As much as critics complain that Obama’s not running the country or the world well, no one’s said that he or the people close to him are putting money in their pockets, or cutting a corner or fudging the rules out of “convenience,” or because technically it’s allowed, or because no one specifically told them no.

Rewind to the 1990s and it’s almost amazing to think about: More than two years into Obama’s second term and more than two months into Republican control of Congress, there still hasn’t been a special prosecutor. The situations that seemed like they were getting close— the supposed IRS investigation into tea party groups, probably most of all — have fizzled under more scrutiny and information. The Veterans Affairs scandal, the only one that got so bad he had to toss out a Cabinet secretary over it, has stabilized enough that Obama’s comfortable making a special trip Friday to the Phoenix facility that sparked the outrage to brag about how much his administration’s gotten changed. And nothing shook the West Wing like the Obamacare website launch, that still, no one’s really been able to explain how it went that wrong.

Republican rhetoric has burned hot: “This looks an awful lot like Iran-Contra,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), then-chairman of the Government Oversight Committee, said at one point about the “Fast and Furious” gun operation. “This makes Watergate look like child’s play,” then-Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) said about Solyndra. Also said to be worse than Watergate over Obama’s time in office: Fast and Furious, national security leaks, the efforts to keep Joe Sestak out of a 2010 Pennsylvania Senate primary, and, of course, Benghazi.

But no charges ever stuck, and Benghazi is the only one that’s drawn a special House committee to investigate. It’s the only one that continues to unspool new questions. But that one is about Clinton, not Obama — and has stayed alive not because anyone has yet found anything actually wrong but because there keeps being just enough there to raise more questions about what exactly she was up to.

A lot of this has to do with what Obama aides refer to as a culture clash. The Clintons look for loopholes, they say, while Obama takes a special pride, particularly on transparency issues, in sticking to the letter of the law: a combination of cockiness that he’s right, so why not let everyone see how he got there, as well as a background awareness that any scandal would be a scandal for the first African-American president.

“The president has been willing to say and implement provocative policies to shake up Washington,” said one current White House aide. “Willingness to send those signals is a good way to make clear to people that this is the way we’re going to do business: differently.”

Still, Obama aides make sure to acknowledge, Clinton is, of course, held to a different standard: Her email’s a major scandal, while no one except the people sending out pro-Clinton talking points pays any attention to Jeb Bush’s or Scott Walker’s.

What’s confusing to them is how she didn’t acknowledge that herself, or care. They don’t like to admit it around the West Wing, but as a former first lady and Obama’s main opponent in 2008, Clinton did get more latitude than other Cabinet secretaries in all sorts of decisions, from staffing on down. They’re just hoping that this email server — “the president 100 percent would not have done it this way,” the former aide said, “this is such a clearly nontransparent way of going about it” — is the extent of the latitude she took that they didn’t know about.

Then again, the White House didn’t know she deleted 30,000 emails until they watched her announce it at her news conference on Tuesday. And aides acknowledge that they don’t know how much more they don’t know.

For now, they’re holding off on their complaints. Dismissive of the actual importance of the email flap and sensitive to how rough the past two weeks have been for Clinton, current and former aides say they want to avoid piling on.

And in the West Wing, they say they feel satisfied with this test run of how the dynamic between the White House and the Clinton campaign is going to work.

“There are going to be other issues that crop up,” the current White House aide said, “and we want to maintain the kind of relationship that will allow us to coordinate our efforts effectively.”