Hillary Clinton is trying to build a disciplined and loyal campaign team that can avoid one of the very things that plagued her last presidential bid: unflattering leaks to the press.

Reporters covering Clinton’s 2008 White House bid relished the dirty laundry her senior staffers dished about each other as then-Sen. Barack Obama surged ahead of the pack.


Now, as Clinton blends longtime loyalists and Obama campaign alumni to staff what’s expected to be her next presidential run, a major question surrounding the efforts is exactly how to minimize the damage from inevitable press leaks while maintaining focus on her overarching, still-TBD campaign message.

“The test of a good campaign is how it deals with adversity and whether people pick each other up, support each other or whether they start leaking on each other and trying to purge each other,” David Axelrod, the former top Barack Obama campaign strategist, said last week on MSNBC’s “Hardball.” “That’s what plagued their campaign the last time.”

Leaks are a challenge for any major presidential bid, but the stakes are especially high for Clinton as she takes the early 2015 pole position in a diminished Democratic primary field. Her early dominance of the race carries an enhanced risk of leaks: So many high-profile Democratic operatives will be jostling for influence in her inner circle that they may be tempted to make their disputes public.

Clinton loyalists insist that if everything goes smoothly and she wins Iowa next year, she will enjoy a largely leak-free run to the nomination. But if the campaign hits a speed bump or two?

“When things go south, leaks come out, many of them not even truthful, as everyone is trying to get out of the way of the loss,” said a former senior Clinton political aide. “When things go north, leaks are fewer because everyone is jockeying for the win and so the penalty of leaking is greater.”

Clinton has shown in recent years she can run a leak-free operation. Her tenure leading Obama’s State Department, covered by the diplomatic press corp rather than political reporters, didn’t include many front page stories detailing tensions with the White House. But a presidential campaign in today’s hyper-caffeinated, Twitter-obsessed media environment is an entirely different beast, and interviews with more than a dozen Clinton veterans who span her career as first lady, New York senator, presidential candidate and secretary of state suggest a slew of obstacles for someone who in the past has had many more self-destructive moments than other top-tier politicians.

For starters, Clinton’s campaign is expected to mix some of her closest allies with Obama veterans and less experienced operatives. The approach sounds similar to her 2000 Senate bid, which had its rocky moments but successfully incorporated veteran Clinton hands like campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle, deputy campaign manager Neera Tanden,and strategists Harold Ickes and Mark Penn alongside native New Yorkers like communications director Howard Wolfson and Bill de Blasio, now the city’s mayor. But just on sheer numbers alone, her presidential campaign will be much larger, much more competitive and much more at risk of leaking.

“The bigger they get the more difficult it is to keep the information in house,” said Tad Devine, the former Al Gore 2000 and John Kerry 2004 senior adviser who is helping Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders consider his 2016 presidential campaign options. Devine added that if Clinton’s campaign “is shooting itself in the foot, that’s obviously beneficial to [a possible Sanders] campaign and to all her other opponents.”

Team Clinton also by its nature is prone to leak — with friendly, authorized exclusives and the more feisty variety. As experienced staffers explain it, survival in their cutthroat world requires not just loyalty to the boss but also a certain cachet in the political press that showcases proximity to the inner circle. Veteran Clinton aides also say they are especially worried that staffers from “evil Hillary world” — people who have sniped to the press in the past over internal tensions — are already gunning to get close again and potentially create the kind of toxic environment prone to media backbiting.

“That’s not an issue that’s going to go away,” said a source who has known both Bill and Hillary Clinton for years. “It’s going to be worse. When she ran last time it was 30 years worth of people. Now there’s 40 years worth of people. A whole State Department. There are just so many people in her and his orbit.”

Another concern expressed by Clinton loyalists involves the message discipline of Obama campaign veterans eager to sign onto her presidential team. Many of these people have lengthy careers ahead of them thanks to their résumés helping elect the country’s first African-American president. And while Clinton can benefit by bringing aboard Obama staffers who, upon their arrival in Chicago, had drilled into them the mantra “snitches get stitches” — they also worry that some of these people will also have little to lose in 2016 by chatting up reporters who will be all too eager to chronicle the internal workings of the race for Obama’s successor.

“Can they be controlled?” a former Clinton aide asked of the Obama alumni.

Another big challenge for Clinton will be keeping together a cohesive team during what will inevitably be some tough times. Scores of reporters are already dedicated solely to the Clinton beat. Partisan outfits are on the hunt for dirt, too, with Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus telling Bloomberg last week that the GOP has stationed a small team of researchers in Little Rock, Ark., to work on a Clinton book. With every morsel of Clinton minutiae on track for media consumption, experienced Democratic campaign hands say it’s just a matter of time for the internal bickering to make the news.

“Campaigns are different because it brings out the worst in people’s instincts,” said a former Clinton State Department official.

In 2008, the internal strife inside Clinton’s camp really started to become front-page fodder as Obama surged ahead in Iowa — ruining the perception that the New York Democrat was a lock to succeed her husband in the White House. Two months after losing that state’s caucuses, and just two days after Clinton won Ohio and Texas to breathe new life into her campaign, a Washington Post story published with the headline ‘Even in Victory, Clinton Team Is Battling Itself” described a bitter fight between some of Clinton’s top staff and chief strategist Penn.

Campaigns are different because it brings out the worst in people’s instincts.

Washington lawyer Bob Barnett, a trusted Clinton confidant, seethed after the Post story in an email to the senior ranks of Hillary Clinton’s staff, with the subject line: “STOP IT!!!!”, according to a September 2008 postmortem analysis of her campaign in The Atlantic.

The former Clinton senior political adviser said her 2008 troubles weren’t so much about leaks “but about folks trying to get their spin out through anonymous dings.”

“The real issue is how to eliminate the anonymous backstabbing in these campaigns even when the going gets tough,” the source added. “For now, it is a hazard of the campaigns and expect to be pilloried and live with it.”

Obama veterans who prided themselves on the image of running a largely leak-free campaign — there are exceptions, notably when digital director Teddy Goff in 2012 was forced to apologize after getting caught talking with a reporter — say Clinton will need to build a loyal team that still allows her campaign staff to maintain what in some cases are decades-long relationships with reporters.

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But they also caution that Clinton needs to establish some structure in her campaign’s press operations — by making sure her communications staffers stay on top of stories the media is working on and designating which campaign officials are authorized to speak on the record. Clinton should limit the information she shares with her aides, slicing it into silos among small batches of trusted aides. And she needs to define who are official campaign advisers and make sure people who say they are close to Clinton but aren’t in the know get called out quickly before their views gain traction.

“There will be a lot of people who claim that [campaign] title who don’t deserve that title, who the communications shop will need to work to ensure that title isn’t bestowed,” said Ben LaBolt, the Obama 2012 campaign’s top spokesman.

Democratic press strategists advise Clinton’s campaign to show discipline by enforcing a no-unauthorized leak policy that sends flagrant violators looking for another job. Locating her campaign headquarters far from Washington — POLITICO in November reported Clinton is looking into New York or the surrounding region — would also suggest she will be hiring a dedicated band of loyal aides while putting them some distance from scoop-hungry political reporters back in the Beltway.

Referring to Obama’s campaign based in the Chicago loop, LaBolt noted, “You got a different level of commitment.”

And by placing senior Obama White House counselor John Podesta atop the campaign hierarchy, Clinton is also sending a strong signal that she won’t tolerate leaks. The former Bill Clinton White House chief of staff, who is set to leave Obama’s White House next month, is known in Democratic circles for running a disciplined staff.

Former Obama White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, appearing last week alongside Axelrod on ‘Hardball’, said Podesta will be the grownup in the room who can stop internal staff “sniping” while also providing critical “backup” for Robby Mook, the likely campaign manager, to handle rogue aides who try to sidestep the chain of command to connect with Clinton.

“He may want some of the North Korean phone-jamming equipment as well,” Axelrod joked.

Clinton’s office declined to go into detail on the potential strategy she would deploy as a presidential candidate in addressing leaks. “Explaining how a no-leak operation would run should she decide to run seems to be a little too laced with irony for me, so I think we’ll respectfully sit this one out,” spokesman Nick Merrill wrote in an email.

Since leaving the State Department, Clinton has largely avoided any big leaks to undercut a potential White House run. A chapter of her 2014 book ‘Hard Choices’ about her response to the 2012 attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, surfaced in POLITICO right before the book’s official publication date, allowing her to get a jump on Republican attacks. ABC News last November revealed details on a private email chain organized by Mook and Marlon Marshall, another senior Democrat said to be under consideration for a top Clinton campaign job, citing as its source a Clinton supporter who didn’t want either of the men to get the most senior leadership slots.

Other leaks that appear to have come from sources well outside Clinton’s orbit include stories in POLITICO about placing Podesta atop the campaign team and several other early staff hires, from an article in the Wall Street Journal about Coca-Cola Co. marketing specialist Wendy Clark coming on board for youth voter outreach and a Washington Post story detailing the addition of Obama’s 2012 senior media strategist, Jim Margolis.

Sources close to Clinton have responded to the stories about potential staffers by saying that not every name floated in the media has been accurate. While recognizing leaks happen, they’ve made the strategic decision not to litigate details in every single article.

Paul Begala, the former Bill Clinton campaign adviser, noted the irony in a reporter seeking his comment on how Clinton could avoid damaging leaks in 2016. “There is something meta about a story about leaks, isn’t there?” he wrote in an email, adding: “When you ask me how I feel about a campaign without leaks I recall Gandhi’s response when he was asked what he thought about Western civilization: ‘I think it would be a good idea.’ ”

Hadas Gold contributed to this report.

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