Huma Abedin has had a front-row seat to some of the biggest, and most tragic, political stories in recent history. She was vice chair of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign for president as well as deputy chief of staff during her time as secretary of state, and though she wasn’t at the White House when Benghazi happened, she was on staff for the event and remembers it vividly.
It was “the most shocking, harrowing night,” she tells host Molly Jong-Fast on this bonus episode of The New Abnormal. That, and when her ex-husband—disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner—put her career and life in the spotlight in the worst possible way, with far-reaching implications she could have never imagined.
She shares those experiences in detail in her new book Both/And: A Life in Many Worlds, and with Molly.
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On her relationship with the Clintons, she’s clear about her place in “Hillaryland,” as she calls it, but isn’t perplexed as to why Republicans have latched onto Benghazi the way they have, especially after Jan. 6. She notes in the book that she clearly remembers back then Kevin McCarthy claiming it was purely a “political move.”
“The Republican party today, isn’t the Republican party that I remember,” she tells Molly. “[Democrats] are sometimes almost too polite, too kind. And the other side is just, not.”
And of course, there’s the Anthony Weiner scandal, in which her ex-husband and father of her child became a convicted sex offender after he got caught sending explicit texts to minors.
“I lived in anger and bitterness and kind of devastation for a period of my life,” she says of the experience and aftermath.
She felt this way through Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election campaign and subsequent loss, with the latter becoming her rock bottom.
“Carrying the guilt of the election loss, not understanding Anthony’s behavior, carrying so much anger and bitterness and resentment towards him for, you know, the devastation that his actions caused. And I went to a very low place after the election. And one day felt really hopeless. That’s the only word I can think of. And the moment I realized I was getting to a place I didn’t recognize myself, [and] said I needed help,” she explains.
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