Hillary Clinton unleashed a “fuck-laced fusillade” on aides in a 2016 debate prep session, according to a new book about the presidential campaign by New York Times journalist Amy Chozick.

The candidate was squirming with frustration over lingering concerns about her “authenticity” and racked with loathing for Donald Trump she was determined not to vent in public.

“Aides understood that in order to keep it all together onstage, Hillary sometimes needed to unleash on them in private,” Chozick writes in Chasing Hillary: Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns and One Intact Glass Ceiling. “‘You want authentic, here it is!’ she’d yelled in one prep session, followed by a fuck-laced fusillade about what a ‘disgusting’ human being Trump was and how he didn’t deserve to even be in the arena.”

Rife with such anecdotes, Chozick’s book, a copy of which the Guardian obtained from a bookseller in New York, is released on Tuesday. It comes hard on the heels of the current politics blockbuster, A Higher Loyalty by James Comey.

The former FBI director devotes a chapter of his book to his handling of the Clinton emails investigation, which the candidate and her team still blame for her loss. Chozick captures the reaction in the campaign’s Brooklyn headquarters to what they saw as Comey’s reckless and misguided behavior.

“Brooklyn is freaking the fuck out,” Chozick recalls telling an editor.



Eleven days before the election, Comey had written a letter informing Congress that the FBI was investigating emails that had turned up on the computer of Anthony Weiner, the disgraced estranged husband of top Clinton aide Huma Abedin. Chozick reveals that an unnamed top Clinton donor had previously confronted Abedin, pleading with her to step aside for Clinton’s sake in 2013, when a second sexting scandal involving Weiner broke out.

“I’m good at what I do and that’s Hillary’s decision,” Abedin replied.

The struggle inside the Clinton campaign for message clarity is starkly illustrated by Chozick with a three-page section listing 84 possible slogans the campaign considered but discarded. Rejects included “You’ve earned a fair chance”, “A new bargain we can count on” and the succinct “No quit”.

Apart from issues with authenticity and messaging, the campaign struggled with an internal generation gap that spawned disagreements on everything from basic strategy to the question of how to handle Trump’s attack over sexual assault allegations against Bill Clinton, Chozick reports.

Campaign manager Robby Mook, who was 36 years old on election night, “always listened patiently, respectfully” to the two-term president talk about campaign strategy, Chozick writes. “But [Mook] mostly saw in the former president a relic, a brilliant tactician of a bygone era.

“Behind his back, Robby did a Bill impersonation (‘And let me tell you another thing about the white working class …’) waving a finger in a Clintonian motion.”

Hillary Clinton reportedly “erupted” when Chozick reported in January 2016 that the actress and writer Lena Dunham, a prominent supporter and 29 at the time, told a Manhattan dinner party “she was disturbed by how, in the 1990s, the Clintons and their allies discredited women” who had accused Bill Clinton of misconduct.

The former president, meanwhile, was painfully aware of Trump’s potential appeal in territory he thought of as his own, Chozick reports.

“By late February,” she writes, “Bill went red in the face on almost daily conference calls trying to warn Brooklyn that Trump had a shrewd understanding of the angst that so many voters – his voters, the white working class whom Clinton brought back to the Democratic party in 1992 – were feeling.”

But Hillary Clinton failed to collect many of those voters, skipping their states as she made campaign stops and alienating some with her grouping of certain Trump supporters in a “basket of deplorables”, a line Chozick reports the candidate liked and deployed at big-ticket fundraisers from New York to Los Angeles.

“In the Hamptons, Hillary felt loved,” Chozick writes. Clinton, however, grew weary of hearing pollsters report on her lagging favorability.

“Oh what’s the point? They’re never going to like me,” she told a friend at one point, according to Chozick.

In the end, nearly 3 million more voters liked Clinton’s message – the slogan the campaign went with was Stronger Together – than Trump’s promise to Make America Great Again. But it wasn’t enough to win.

