http://www.newyorker.com/news/benjamin-wallace-wells/the-trouble-with-doug-band

The Trouble with Doug Band

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells
The New Yorker
November 1, 2016

In November, 2011, some employees at the Clinton Foundation told Chelsea Clinton about an alarming situation in what she has called “my father’s world.” The concerns were complicated and Chelsea wasn’t sure which ones were true, but they orbited around one of her father’s senior aides at the Clinton Foundation, Doug Band, and a more junior one, Justin Cooper. Chelsea’s informants thought that Band and Cooper were leveraging their connections with Bill Clinton for their own profit, and Chelsea herself seemed to agree.

Chelsea Clinton, when roused, seems a formidable adversary, not just because she is connected but because she is a sharp observer of systems gone awry. (This, at least, is the version of her that comes through most clearly in the e-mails from Hillary Clinton’s circle which have been made public during the past year.) In a series of e-mails, she had alerted her parents and their closest advisers about the accusations, and the law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett began a corporate review of the Clinton Foundation. On November 16, 2011, Band, the main target of Chelsea’s outrage, wrote a twelve-page memo to defend himself.

Band, who has remained at the center of questions about the Clinton Foundation, has had a fascinating career, not least because he has moved so fluidly between the most mundane political roles and the most expansive ones. In 1995, at the age of twenty-two, Band began to work as an unpaid intern in the White House, eventually becoming Bill Clinton’s body man, and he continued to work with the former President as he set up the Clinton Foundation. Band had the idea to develop the Clinton Global Initiative, an annual conference that kept Bill Clinton in a comfortable role: onstage, defining global problems for the powerful. In 2009, hacked e-mails show, Band was still setting up phone calls for the former President. But, by 2011, Band had struck out on his own, as a founding partner of a new consultancy, called Teneo, whose clients overlapped with the Clinton Foundation’s donors. “Doug is very transactional,” an unnamed senior Clinton adviser told Alec MacGillis for a profile of Band, published in The New Republic in 2013.

In the e-mails from November, 2011, Chelsea Clinton laid out what she had heard about her father’s longtime aide and his partners. Band and Teneo had been giving their clients free memberships to the Clinton Global Initiative and “‘hustling’ business” at the conference, she said. Band himself had called Bill Clinton’s speaking agency and tried to take control of his engagements, according to Chelsea. Band’s allies were accused of taking “significant sums of money from my parents personally” and of referring to her father “in very derogatory ways.” When Bill Clinton and others raised some of these issues with Band, Chelsea wrote, Band “yelled and screamed at my Dad about how could he do this to Justin and him, he would be nothing without him”—that is, that the former President would be nothing without Band. Chelsea was particularly distressed that this happened on the same day as the death of her grandmother, Dorothy Rodham. “All of it makes me very sad,” she wrote. But that doesn’t seem to be her only emotion. She was also, and more obviously, pissed.

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