Hillary Clinton Was Given Access to Classified Iraq WMD Intelligence in 2002 and Never Bothered to Read It.

Hillary Clinton’s vote authorizing war on Iraq in 2002 is viewed as one of the biggest blunders in her career, and has hurt her political standing ever since. It was one of the major points Obama used in the 2008 primary race to get voters to pick him over her. Her defense was that she acted in good faith in trusting George W. Bush and in her book she wrote that she “made the best decision I could with the information I had.” The first excuse may be true, the second one is clearly a lie.

Prior to Clinton’s October 10, 2002 speech from the Senate floor explaining her Iraq vote, the Bush administration sent over two documents to the Senate for review. The first was a 92-page, classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The second was a five-page, unclassified version. The unclassified version declared that the intelligence community possessed “high confidence” that “Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding, its chemical, biological, nuclear and missile programs.” The longer, classified version, had an extremely different tone, pointing out objections raised by the State Department, and especially the Department of Energy, to claims that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear-weapons program. According to Senator Jay Rockefeller, “the NIE changed so dramatically from its classified to its unclassified form and broke all in one direction, toward a more dangerous scenario.”

The classified report’s differences were so stark that senior Senators Bob Graham and Patrick Leahy would later say that reading the classified version helped convince them to vote ‘No.’ Two days before Clinton’s speech, House Intelligence Chair Bob Graham “forcefully” urged his Democratic Senate colleagues to read the classified report and see why he was voting no before they cast their own votes, but few did. Using logs of who entered the secure room where the classified NIE was kept, The Washington Post reported that only six senators read it. When The Hill newspaper later polled senators, 22 said they had.

Clinton has never claimed she read any of the intelligence. When asked directly on Meet the Press in 2008, she sidestepped the question, declaring, “I was fully briefed by the people who wrote that.”

Would reading the classified NIE have changed Clinton’s vote? Maybe not. After all, Senators Rockefeller and Dianne Feinstein still voted to authorize war after reading the material. And some intelligence analysts familiar with the classified NIE claim it was a biased, shoddy document that also bent over backward to prove that Iraq was pursuing WMD. Perhaps most importantly of all, Clinton’s own national-security confidantes — including Iraq expert Kenneth Pollack — believed the WMD claims. It’s hard to imagine she would have overruled them, even if the classified NIE had given her pause. The classified NIE was kept in a separate building and senators who wanted to read it had to leave their staff outside and not take notes. Was it laziness? Or blindly trusting the opinions of advisors who hadn’t seen the actual classified material in question?

Still, Clinton’s failure to read the document means her book’s claim that she “made the best decision I could with the information I had” is probably untrue. It’s uncharacteristic of her, since Clinton was famous for being a policy wonk who did her homework, but in this case she absolutely did not. In the 2008 primary, Obama called her out on this.

I watched her speak at a nearby university in 2002, when the imminent vote was on everyone’s minds. She tried addressing both sides, talking about dealing with the threats of WMDs and regime change but also expressing sympathy for anti-war sentiment and healthy skepticism of Bush’s claims. She was clearly trying to hedge her bets. At the time, Democrats were afraid the war might be a huge success like the first Gulf War and they’d look unpatriotic or foolish by opposing it. (Senator John Kerry opposed the war and got a lot of political backlash when it succeeded and the public supported the victory) So they voiced some loud fears and cast their votes in favor of the war. While many Congressmen changed their opinions on the war as soon as WMDs were not discovered, Clinton tried defending her vote, claiming it was wonderful the dictatorship was over. She stood with the Democratic establishment and didn’t want to be branded unpatriotic and criticizing Bush as the war went on without end. As things deteriorated in Iraq and the war got more and more unpopular, she tried blaming Bush and apologized for her vote, but wrote in her book, “and I wasn’t alone in getting it wrong.”

In 2008, Clinton’s advisors feared that if she called her Iraq vote a mistake, Republicans would savage her for flip-flopping, as they had done to John Kerry four years earlier. So even after John Edwards apologized for his Iraq vote, she refused to. In the book, Her Way, the authors quote Clinton’s chief strategist, Mark Penn, as insisting that, “It’s important for all Democrats to keep the word ‘mistake’ firmly on the Republicans.” Now eight years later, Iraq is hardly a high-priority topic to American voters, so she’s apologizing for her vote and calling it a mistake in hindsight. It looks like an easily preventable mistake in foresight, too.