Report: Hillary team spiked negative story

Sen. Hillary Clinton

Sen. Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign demanded GQ magazine kill an article unflattering to the New York Democrat or it would lose access to former President Clinton, according to Politico.

The Capitol Hill Internet publication, citing sources familiar with the situation, said despite internal protests, GQ editor Jim Nelson met the Clinton campaign's demands, which had been delivered by Bill Clinton's spokesman, Jay Carson.

The former president is to appear on the cover of the magazine's December issue in which it names a "Man of the Year."

Nelson, without providing details, confirmed to Politico a piece on Sen. Clinton – written by Atlantic Monthly staff writer Josh Green – was spiked.

"I don't really get into the inner workings of the magazine, but I can tell you that yes, we did kill a Hillary piece," Nelson said. "We kill pieces all the time for a variety of reasons."

The Politico said Nelson did not respond to follow-up questions, and a Clinton campaign spokesman declined to comment.

The piece reportedly was about tensions within the campaign that have widely circulated among reporters.

Earlier this month, a writer and producer of ABC's "The Path to 9/11" claimed the DVD version of the miniseries has not been released because of pressure from Sen. Clinton's presidential campaign.

Cyrus Nowrasteh said he was told by a top executive at ABC Studios that "if Hillary weren't running for president, this wouldn't be a problem."

In an interview with WND just before the miniseries aired in September 2006, a former military aide to President Clinton who claims he witnessed missed opportunities to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, disclosed Nowrasteh came to him in frustration after network executives began pressing for script changes.

Politico commented the spiked GQ story "shows how the Clinton campaign has been able to use its access to the most important commodity in media – celebrity, and in fact two bona fide celebrities – to shape not just what gets written about the candidate, but also what doesn't."

The senator's team has been "unusually aggressive in moving to smother potentially damaging storylines," Politico said, as last spring when aide Howard Wolfson and others targeted an unflattering book by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr.

Politico noted the author of the GQ piece, Green, was not a particular favorite of the Clinton campaign. Green took the assignment after an unflattering 13,000-word profile in the November 2006 Atlantic Monthly, which concluded Clinton is a timid, calculating pol.

"Today Clinton offers no big ideas, no crusading causes – by her own tacit admission, no evidence of bravery in the service of a larger ideal. Instead, her Senate record is an assemblage of many, many small gains. Her real accomplishment in the Senate has been to rehabilitate the image and political career of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Impressive though that has been in its particulars, it makes for a rather thin claim on the presidency. Senator Clinton has plenty to talk about, but she doesn't have much to say," he wrote.

In the spring, Green began digging into the story on tensions within the campaign – a subject, according to Politico, "notoriously difficult to report from a political circle known for keeping internal disputes inside the family."

Soon after Green approached the campaign to discuss details of the story, Carson, who is now Hillary Clinton's traveling press secretary, told GQ the former president would not cooperate with the planned December profile if the magazine ran Green's piece.

Previous stories: