Campside media.
In American politics, one family used to be so politically powerful that everything seemed
to orbit around them.
They had this gravitational pull.
From Wall Street to Washington to foreign leaders, everyone wanted a piece of them.
I'm working all the time with Democrats, Republicans and independents.
Sometimes I couldn't tell you for the life who I'm working with because we focus on solving
problems and seizing opportunities and not fighting all the time.
Unity is better than division.
Empowerment is better than resentment and bridges are better than walls.
We believe that we're all in this together is a far better philosophy than you're on
your own.
This was Clinton World.
And it really was a world.
There was this entire ecosystem of money and insiders and employees who just kept the
whole thing going.
And for a while, the guy who held the keys to that world was Doug Band.
Band's price for access has become a political hot potato in the campaign home stretch.
Mr. Band, call the arrangement unorthodox.
The rest of us call it outright corrupt.
On campsite media and Sony Music Entertainment, this is infamous and I'm Vanessa Grigory-Hoddess.
This week Gabe is going to be telling a story about a guy named Doug Band.
He was the right hand man of the southern drawing 42nd president of the United States,
Bill Clinton.
Bill Clinton served two terms, from 1993 to 2001.
By the end of his presidency, his reputation was tarnished by his affair with Monica Lewinsky.
Doug Band figured out a way to burnish that reputation again, to get Bill back on a global
stage.
And he got incredibly rich doing it.
Doug Band is living in just a political apartment overlooking Central Park South.
President Clinton's business arrangements have yielded more than $30 million for him personally.
But Doug, it seems, flew a little too close to the sun.
He found himself at the center of a civil war within Clinton Worlds.
A complete hit job making all this stuff up.
Yeah.
To this day, none of it ever turned out to be true.
I thought I was going to say that you've the pot, like the getting blow back from Clinton
World wouldn't bother you.
Yeah.
You've already gotten it.
Yeah.
I could care less.
I mean, none of that has abolished me.
Before he talked to Gabe, Doug Band hadn't given a lengthy interview to a reporter.
And the story he told was one that reveals how actual politics go down, whether it's
uranium mining deals or hostage negotiations.
It also peels back the curtain on one of the most influential political dynasties in America,
a dynasty in decline.
If you think of a figure out of House of Cards, that's what I think of Doug Band as.
From the time I spent with Doug, I really got an inside look on how he created the Bill
Clinton that we think of in the post presidency.
He monetized Bill Clinton's status as an ex president to basically create a philanthropy
and business empire and then take a small cut for himself.
So how did he get on-train into Clinton World?
So Doug Band started as an intern in the White House Counsel's office part way through Clinton's
first term.
And he's very good about making relationships.
Doug is savvy about recognizing where power is.
And he navigated himself so that when Bill Clinton won a second term in 1996, he needed
a body man.
And Doug was willing to carry the bag and the hand sanitizer and do the grunt work because
you're with the president.
And who knows where that will lead?
I mean, a lot of people don't like being the body man because it is such a degrading
position.
But I think Doug had the foresight to see that he could use it for other things.
I've heard this term a lot, but like, what is a body man?
A body man is, I guess it depends on the politician.
I think in Bill Clinton's case, a body man meant that you had complete control over who
had access to Bill Clinton.
Bill Clinton famously didn't use email or carry a cell phone, which meant that if you
wanted to talk to Bill Clinton, you had to talk to Doug Band.
It's fascinating that Bill Clinton didn't do email.
This was one of Doug's, I think, most profitable insights is that Bill Clinton was just legendarily
disorganized.
Couldn't keep a schedule, couldn't communicate with email, would show up late to every meeting
and Doug realized that if he could get Bill Clinton to where he needed to be on time and
communicate for him, that Bill Clinton would come to rely on him because he could do what
Bill couldn't.
And so I think if Doug Band less as a body man, that was his position, but he almost was a
businessman who said, I have access to a former president.
What are all the opportunities that I can get for him?
And he used that gatekeeper status to amass power for himself.
And that's part of the controversy around him was that critics in Clinton world believe
that he leveraged his proximity to Clinton to promote himself.
Bill Clinton is so into intimacy.
It's one of the things we know about him, right?
He has really weird bad boundaries.
So I mean a body man you think of Gary on Veep, right?
I'm next to the Veep more than any other human being.
You are distantly orbiting her.
I'm her moon.
It's just like a completely self-effacing character who carries your lip gloss and some
tissues and basically whispers in the politicians ear and is like, over there, Mr. Rockefeller
on the left.
And then meanwhile you have Doug Band, who's risen to such prominence that one of the
only things I knew about this guy is he lives.
He bought himself a 20 million dollar apartment from David Rockefeller.
Unbelievable, right?
It's unbelievable.
This is the guy who's supposed to be carrying the Vaseline to moisten the lips of Bill Clinton.
He went to work for me when he was in his early 20s and still a law student.
And we did a lot of work and I will always be grateful for that.
So I think it helps to just rewind.
When Bill Clinton left the White House in 2001, his life was complete in shambles.
He was a disgraced ex-president not only from the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
Potentially, damaging cloud is hanging over the White House this morning.
Whitewater Council Kenneth Starr has been granted permission to expand his investigation.
He will be looking into new allegations that President Clinton had an affair with a former
White House intern and then urged her to lie about it.
I did not have sexual relations with that woman.
But you know, as he left office, he pardoned a whole bunch of people including Mark Rich,
the exiled Swiss financier.
Well Mark Rich was a Clinton confidant who was on the FBI's 10 most wanted list because
he had a habit of trading with regimes that were under US sanctions.
And so Bill Clinton left office and he was toxic amongst Democrats.
Al Gore didn't want anything to do with him, blamed him in fact for losing to George W.
Bush.
Just moments ago, I spoke with George W. Bush and congratulated him on becoming the 43rd
President of the United States.
So anyways, Bill Clinton moves back to Chappquah and wears Hillary Clinton.
Well she's in Washington as a newly elected Senator from the State of New York.
I mean obviously they were legally still married but you know she was in DC with Huma and Bill
was in New York.
So he's disgraced and lonely and Doug Mann goes with him to basically be his body man
in the post presidency when in fact it was basically just Doug and Bill hanging out in
Chappquah.
And from that a sort of father-son relationship developed because Doug was loyal and was the
only one hanging around Bill.
And I think Bill Clinton will always be grateful for that and Doug was savvy enough to use that
relationship then to further his own career.
The toxicness of Bill Clinton was directly related to the Monica Lewinsky affair.
Right.
So the Democrats were unwilling to let bygones be bygones.
Yeah, I mean I think it really wasn't until the Clinton Global Initiative started in 2005
that Bill Clinton started to get a platform again.
For the next four years after his presidency he was kind of persona non grata.
He gave speeches to like foreign dictators but he wasn't really a player in American
politics until he devoted his life, his public life to philanthropy.
So I think that was you know part of Doug's genius was to recognize that you could use
philanthropy to repair Bill Clinton's damage brand.
One year ago a white man came to a supermarket in Buffalo, New York and murdered 10 black
people.
And the shooting was live streamed on-
Not far away a cheer squad.
Almost all black girls had to figure out how to go on.
But I wanted the win for them more than anything this season.
Listen now to the latest series from NPR's Embedded Podcast.
We all have questions that keep us up at night.
The self help industry tells us they have answers.
As a journalist and a skeptic I'm not so sure.
So I've set out to talk to people who have gone to radical links to find answers.
I'm Katherine Roland.
From something else and Sony Music Entertainment, this is Seeking.
On season one we're diving deep into the portal of plant medicine and psychedelics.
Listen to Seeking wherever you get your podcasts.
You're listening to infamous from campsite media.
The Clinton Global Initiative was founded on commitment.
We're excited to announce our commitment.
Our commitment commitments.
The commitment we are all making here today.
So basically Doug, you know, Doug has a sort of taken credit for starting the Clinton Global
Initiative.
Does he also take credit for starting like the Clinton Foundation?
Yeah, I mean I think both of those things I think were from Doug's point of view, you
know, his brainchild's.
As he tells it, Doug went to Davos to the World Economic Forum with Bill Clinton.
Mr. President, it's a great pleasure to welcome you back to Davos.
And he would see these billionaires and former heads of state want to, you know, hang out
with Clinton.
I mean, Clinton is a legendary kibbitzer, right?
He loves to just talk and gossip and he has a photographic memory and he's just a great
dinner party guest.
And so Doug's like, well, these people want to hang out with Bill.
Why are we doing it to help, you know, Klaus Schwab or, you know, the guy, people who
ever runs the World Economic Forum?
Let's do our own World Economic Forum in New York.
And that was the brainchild that became the Clinton Global Initiative.
And now the Clinton Foundation was the philanthropy, was the organization that allowed Bill Clinton
then to use the money raised at CGI to like then help, whether it's, you know, AIDS in
Africa or rebuilding in Haiti and all the other causes he was involved in.
I mean, this is just what presidents do, right?
They start philanthropic organizations and they, you know, run around the world and they make
money giving speeches.
I mean, there was nothing sort of out of the ordinary or was there?
Well, I think if, you know, a lot of presidents, like, well, Jimmy Carter, you know, Bill
Touses, right?
Habitat for Humanity.
You have presidents who set up presidential.
Yeah, presidents in the post presidency, they'll set up a presidential library or they'll
go sit on the board of a private equity firm.
But what Bill Clinton did, which was unique, was that he used a foundation to build these
relationships with business titans and billionaires and investment bankers.
And I think the idea was that yes, they were doing a lot of good, but how was Bill Clinton
worth suddenly $109 million after leaving the White House when he left the White House
in debt from all of his legal bills, right?
And so the idea was being, you know, companies and billionaires were giving Bill Clinton money
for something.
And what was that something?
It was his access to people in Washington.
So, you know, Doug Band basically looked to cultivate relationships with billionaires that
could fly Bill Clinton around the globe.
And one of those billionaires was Jeffrey Epstein and critics of Doug Band and Bill Clinton
say, you know, these unseemly relationships were emblematic of a sort of a transactional
favor trading that took place in Bill Clinton's post presidency.
But I asked Doug numerous times about this and he said that he saw no evidence of Jeffrey
Epstein in underage girls and, you know, it was a completely transactional relationship
that Epstein had a jet.
Bill Clinton wanted to go to Africa and that's what happened.
I mean, I will say that having been a reporter at that time, I do remember in my, like, you
know, the bottom feeding worlds of New York, meaning like the nightclubs and page six,
the models and the bottles.
I am a financial analyst.
If there's a night, the night that we bowl, I mean, we go top down models and bottles.
For those people who don't know, models and bottles was a scene that like, I ended up
spreading all over the country.
That is what you see at like, Tao in Las Vegas, which is the idea that like in order
to sit down at this nightclub, you need to buy a table and to buy a table, you need to
buy bottles of alcohol.
So like bottle of vodka, bottle of tequila, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and
that'll be come to your, to your table and you control who can sit there and at like high
end nightclubs in New York, they were sort of brought there en masse to hang out and be wallpaper
at the nightclub and dance and look pretty.
But they were also sort of shuttled into certain people's tables, right?
Where would be like, Oh, cool.
Why don't you hang out with my friends, X, Y and Z, who happened to have paid $10,000
for this table.
And you could just hang out with these dudes all night and you'd have like, obviously,
ex president Trump at these nightclubs.
You would have Steve Bing at these nightclubs.
You would have, you know, not Jeffrey Epstein, interestingly, because he was such a germaphobe.
He would never go, right?
But you know, that was sort of the scene.
And then there were a lot of celebrities involved.
And the name that I heard back then over and over about a guy you needed to know was Doug
Band, right?
Like Doug Band was supposedly dating Naomi Campbell, which is a pretty hardcore name to
throw out.
And if you wanted to be part of that Clinton scene, Doug was a real good guy to know.
No.
I mean, he was the ultimate fixer.
Right?
He could get you the reservation at whatever restaurant you wanted to.
He could broker a meeting with a former prime minister.
I mean, if you were one of the most powerful people in the world and you needed something,
you call Doug Band.
I mean, that's like, it's like, you know, the ultimate Amex concierge service.
And I think, you know, from the time I spent with Doug Band, he carries himself like he
almost is a billionaire, right?
He used to the Jets and the car services and the David Rockefeller townhouse.
But he was, you know, he's a law student.
He went to Georgetown Law at night and was, you know, carrying Bill Clinton's bag.
It's one of the most incredible, you know, not rags to riches story because he didn't
grow up dirt poor, but, you know, the most, one of the most incredible social climbing
stories that I've ever covered.
But Doug was about to climb a little too high.
That's coming up after the break.
A famous mustache, Saturday Night Live sketches, a college professor who's a doge cat fan.
What do these three things have in common?
They're all part of the wild world of Jeopardy.
On the brand new podcast, This is Jeopardy, the story of America's favorite quiz show.
We're taking you behind the scenes of the game that's kept us guessing, laughing, and
cheering for more than 60 years.
Posted by me, Buzzy Cohen, find and listen to episodes now wherever you get your podcasts.
In the years after Clinton's presidency, Doug banned worked hard to get Bill to make
the most of his connections, both in the world of politics and the world of business.
Some of these connections would take Doug and Bill to some pretty crazy places, among
them, North Korea.
So Kim Jong-il wanted to meet Bill Clinton.
Just because?
Yeah, these dictators and these foreign heads of state, they love that he's a great bullshitter.
They just love to hang out with him.
I think for Kim Jong-il, the PR benefit of getting a former president to come visit you,
you're this Pariah regime.
Doug basically handled all the logistics for this secret meeting of getting Bill Clinton
to North Korea and getting Lisa Lang's sister, Laura Lang, who was a journalist imprisoned
in North Korea home.
Journalist Laura Lang and Unilee were working on a documentary when they were taken prisoner
by North Korean soldiers.
Laura faced a 12-year prison sentence and brutal treatment from her captors.
Doug called Steve Bing, the Hollywood movie producer, Bill Clinton's billionaire friend.
And it was fine.
I called Steve and he was in Cuba filming a movie with Bill Murray.
I said, Steve, we need to play it and I can't tell you where we're going.
And then next week, he was like, okay.
Yeah.
Which is sort of a billionaire response, I guess.
And then what happened?
So these kinds of high stakes international heads of state meetings are like every little
detail has political significance.
And I think this is, again, what I took from it was like Doug is such a student of power.
He told me how they're at this dinner.
Kim Jong Il has dinner with Bill Clinton and Doug.
And Kim Jong Il says, after dinner, I'd love the former president to come hear some music.
And, you know, I heard from our agents and people just whispering around that they had
100,000 people in the stadium waiting.
There's just no way we could do it.
And I kept saying to him, sorry, we can't go.
The president's tired.
We've progressed.
We got a trip.
We got a good morning.
And they kept pushing it and kept flying without call, flying without call.
They kept having this incredible wine.
It was the head of the tour.
They had the feet.
Amazing.
It stakes.
I mean, it was just kept coming and coming and coming.
And he just stalled for time and ran out the clock until the dinner was over and ended
up preventing Bill Clinton from getting caught up in some international scandal where he's
photographed at this mass rally.
And a mass rally with everybody like saluting the leader.
Yeah, the dear leader, exactly.
Yeah.
And also the hostages come home.
So he gets them.
Yeah, he gets the hostage home and it's, you know, this great made for TV moment.
Four year old, Hannah, about to see her mother for the first time in nearly five months.
Ladies and gentlemen, please help me in welcoming home, Loyaling.
Where Steve Bing's private jet lands in LA and the door opens and the women come off
the plane.
Then applause as former president Bill Clinton walks out of the plane.
And so, you know, I think for Bill Clinton, it was clearly a win.
So what were some of the deals that they were doing at that time?
Well, the most controversial one, which was written about, was his relationship with the
Canadian mining magnet, Frank Justre, right?
And Bill Clinton gave a speech in Kazakhstan and famously was photographed with Frank Justre,
the mining mogul.
This already sounds terrible.
And the, and Kazakhstan's strong man president.
So basically Bill Clinton had dinner with a dictator and a mining mogul.
And two days after that dinner, Justre gets a lucrative mining contract in, in Kazakhstan.
And then several months after that, Justre makes a $31 million donation to the Clinton
Foundation, right?
So just monies flying around, the Justre is getting the mining contract.
Bill Clinton's getting $30 million for his philanthropy.
Whether or not the underlying details are, you know, explicit and everyone involved in
eyes that there was a quid pro quo, it just looks terrible, right?
It looks awful.
And I think that is the criticism is that, you know, Doug Band had all these relationships
that essentially looked like he was monetizing Bill Clinton's post presidency.
And he has this idea that he can basically do for CEOs everything he had done for Bill
Clinton.
He part, conciglier, part fixer, part wingman.
And so he teams up with a PR executive named Declan Kelly to start a strategic advisory
firm called Teneo, which in Latin means I possess.
And you can fill in the blank of what he possesses, right?
What Teneo does is help bring tomorrow's logic to today's challenges.
The idea for Teneo is that it would be this advisor to CEOs and billionaires and they would
pay them like a monthly retainer of, you know, six figures or even more than a million dollars
to basically have Doug Band on speed dial.
But when he said this point also working for Clinton, why does he have to have this outside
consultancy?
I know.
Well, it's like, again, I think Doug's blind spot is that things that are just such obvious
conflicts of interest, like he just finds a way to rationalize or talk his way in circles
around.
Like, yes, it would, it seems totally unseemly that he could be running a for profit PR firm.
And then also involved in a philanthropic foundation that has ties to the secretary
of state of the, I mean, just the levels of right, right, right.
But yes, but Teneo was, was Doug wanted out of Clinton world.
And I think partly Bill Clinton is to blame here.
He's so conflict diverse.
And he just thought it was easier.
Well, I don't want, I need Doug in my life and I don't want to force a hard decision.
So, you know, we know that, you know, morally and ethically, Bill Clinton is flexible.
So I think he allowed Doug to maintain these murky relationships.
So how did things start going awry for Doug?
Things started to, to go south with Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign.
I announced today that I'm forming a presidential exploratory committee.
I'm not just starting a campaign though.
I'm beginning a conversation with you, with America.
Suddenly, reporters were digging into the finances of the Clinton Foundation and looking
at ways in which people were trying to maybe influence Hillary.
Then Hillary becomes secretary of state.
And again, now it's like people are digging into these relationships.
Actually bragging about being able to shape down foundation clients for Bill Clinton
money.
Doug Ben is bragging about it.
And it's not like Doug Ben dreamed this up on his own.
He was doing his boss's bidding.
And then when Hillary leaves the Obama administration and comes back to New York and takes up her
place at the Clinton Foundation, that's really where Doug's position in Clinton world starts
to be squeezed because now it's no longer these parallel lives, right?
Bill and Hillary Clinton aren't living these two separate lives.
They're living together.
And the foundation is their foundation together.
She moves to New York and suddenly Doug is caught between Bill and Hillary and now Chelsea
because the Clinton Foundation is renamed the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation.
And so now if you're Doug Ben, you're like, I single-handedly helped build this thing
with Bill Clinton.
And now Bill Clinton's wife and daughter are parachuting in and taking advantage of all
of my work and pushing me aside.
And I think that's where the Civil War inside the Clinton family and surrogate family started.
That Civil War began as a private family matter, but it would end up on full display before
the media.
And it would leave Doug Ben on the outside for good.
That's next time on Infamous.
Infamous is created, executive produced and hosted by Gabriel Sherman and me, Vanessa
Grigoriades.
Shoshish Malavitz is our managing producer and editor.
And this episode was produced by Rajiv Gola, production support by Grace Huriman, Willie
Houston Smith and Natalie Robamed.
David Devarro is our sound designer.
E. One lie, Tremun is our recordist.
Doug Ben spoke with Gabe for a Vanity Fair magazine feature where some of this reporting
appeared, but he was not interviewed again for this episode.
Thanks so much for listening.
See you next week.
Bye.