RUTHFULLY YOURS

If not a smoking gun, veteran journalist Edward Klein exposes a smoldering pistol in his new book about Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton. Unlikeable: The Problem with Hillary cites three of her former State Department colleagues who saw Clinton weave her diplomatic duties with her financial interests in the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative. They also report that Clinton let her foreign-policy responsibilities take a back seat to her presidential ambitions. These three sources insisted on anonymity.

“The Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative have very distinct logos. . . . Often, when I went into the secretary of state’s conference room, I saw those logos on papers that were strewn all over the big table,” one of Clinton’s college interns told Klein.

This observer’s low rank gave him surprisingly high-level exposure to Clinton and her confidantes. “It was like I was the invisible man,” he said. “Nobody gave me a second look. They obviously didn’t think it mattered what a young intern saw, so they didn’t make an effort to hide anything from me.”

What the intern observed was chilling.

“They were fund-raising papers with the names and dates of contacts on them. There was no mistaking the fact that Hillary and her closest advisers at State were working on foundation and Global Initiative business.”

The intern recalled one of Hillary’s conversations from late 2012. Soon after she visited Russia, “Hillary came into the office wearing one of those Russian fur hats,” the intern said. “That was the day I overheard her talking on her cell phone, discussing a contribution to the foundation from a Russian guy. I knew he was Russian because she turned to Huma and said, ‘The f***ing translator is so goddamn slow with the Russian.’”

The intern also remembered standing in Hillary’s office while she was on the phone and especially grumpy.

“The one thing I heard her say was, ‘Bill, I won’t do that. I won’t say that. You tell the president you don’t want to see him, if that’s how you feel.’” The intern added, “The last thing I heard was Hillary saying, ‘Oh, f*** off, Bill!’ and then she threw the cell phone on the floor and it bounced off the rug.”

One Foreign Service officer with more than two decades at State found Clinton — to be diplomatic — distracted.

“In 2012, her priorities were first, raising money for her presidential run; second, raising money for the Clinton Foundation; and third, tending to the business of foreign policy,” the FSO said. Clinton “had to meet with foreign ministers and other dignitaries, but those meetings seemed rushed and pro forma,” the FSO added. “Her real passions were the Clinton Foundation and talking to political strategists like John Podesta, James Carville, Paul Begala, and others. She met in her seventh-floor office with political bundlers, and she had long conversations on strategy with Bill.”

“In my time at State, I never saw a secretary so disconnected from her job,” the FSO continued. “She seemed to consider the running of U.S. foreign policy a side job. She was focused on getting the big job — the White House. Everything was about keeping information about her campaign plans from leaking back to the Obama White House. She didn’t trust anybody but her small inner circle. She was completely paranoid, whispering, covering her mouth in case somebody could read lips.”

“When she flew on her Air Force C-32,” another career Foreign Service officer remembered, “Hillary took along stacks of papers in manila folders that were marked ‘CF’ and ‘CGO’ — the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global initiative. They had dividers labeled ‘Donations,’ ‘Fund Raising,’ ‘AIDS/HIV,’ ‘Haiti,’ and so forth.”

“She didn’t try to cover up her involvement with the foundation,” the FSO added. “In her mind, there was no conflict of interest.”

Edward Klein is an alumnus of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and was a foreign correspondent with United Press International. He was Newsweek’s assistant managing editor for one year, its foreign editor for seven years, and a Vanity Fair contributing editor for 26. He has written nine other non-fiction volumes, three novels, and an anthology.

Despite such glistening mainstream-media credentials, Clintonites trivialize Klein’s work because he often cites anonymous sources. Of course, they hold liberal-establishment journalists to a lower standard while also holding them in higher esteem.

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein relied largely on one anonymous source, code-named Deep Throat, and they are lionized for prying Richard Nixon from the Oval Office. Perhaps Edward Klein can use three such unnamed voices to bar Hillary Clinton from the White House.

— Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.