Legal. “Some days, yeah, it completely chews me up.” Others, “despite the fact that I live in this” — in work that now revolves again and again around the loss — “I don’t really think about it.”There’s a whole lifespan that America has had with Hillary Clinton as a political candidate, and for all the things that entailed — for admirers, for detractors, and for Russo — it has ended.At just 30 years old, Rob Russo has been one of Hillary Clinton’s closest aides for a decade, organizing and drafting her political and personal correspondence. The atmosphere, though, is not dark. When he learned that it had been the Clintons’ dining room table in Arkansas, he was stunned.
“This place does not make me sad. The former secretary of state’s sworn written answers were “incomplete, unhelpful, or cursory,” Royce Lamberth says. . He remembers leaving around 4 a.m., because he took a cab, “which I never do.” He remembers dressing in black the next morning — a dark gray “H” T-shirt, a black cardigan, his only pair of black pants — because he has worn black clothes almost every day since. Heilig tweeted Clinton's mailing address early Wednesday morning, and her tweet alone has a several thousand "likes" and retweets already.
Rob Russo has spent the six months since Election Day reading, sorting, and answering each one — a job still months from completion — as the staff around him has dwindled steadily to the small cadre of aides who preceded the campaign, working once again out of Clinton’s old personal office in Midtown Manhattan.Looks like your browser doesn't support JavaScript.The space is clean and nondescript and more or less what you’d expect of a big office building above a Bobby Van’s Grill on 45th Street: the shaded glass entryway, the reception desk, the hallway of gray carpet, the line of adjacent offices.
After the election, his job changed as thousands of strangers started writing to Clinton. Undeterred by critics, Hillary won many admirers for her staunch support for women around the world and her commitment to children’s issues.After graduation, Hillary advised the Children’s Defense Fund in Cambridge and joined the impeachment inquiry staff advising the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives. And there’s no one they can say it to.”Russo, slim with a small swept-back pompadour and a neatly trimmed beard, has made a decade-long study of Clinton’s paper process — aka “her paper,” aka “the flow of paper” — passing every draft to his boss in shared “To Sign”/“To Read” folders, then internalizing each one of her edits until writing in “her voice” became something close to “second nature.”When he got up, “it sort of became a dream.
The “Thank You Project,” as it became known internally, ended with a total of 16,054 letters.
And something broke.
“It was silent.
(“I’m here to help,” Russo told her in one reply.
She went on to become a U.S. Secretary of State and U.S. Box 5256.
A Tuesday of catharsis for Donald Trump voters turned into an evening of rage for Hillary Clinton.
But handling Clinton’s paper is a job that has also been fundamentally altered by that night in the Javits Center. “There are people for whom I am their connector to Hillary Clinton. Hillary’s childhood in Park Ridge, Illinois, was happy and disciplined. The mystery of Hillary Clinton, milk-carton missing on election night, appears solved.
It’s a memory, it’s fleeting, it’s ephemeral.” When it ends, “you don’t have anything to latch onto.”Russo put off the writing as long as he could.
FBI agents were stunned to find thousands of Hillary Clinton’s private emails while examining Anthony Weiner’s electronic devices for explicit …
Most of us are doing the best we can to find whatever the right balance is . “A piece of history,” he said back then. Every letter Clinton receives now reflects the loss. She wrote a weekly newspaper column entitled “Talking It Over,” which focused on her experiences as First Lady and her observations of women, children, and families she has met around the world. But when he thinks about his options, “I’m having a hard time getting excited about the idea of anything else,” finding something “as rewarding and exciting and relevant.” For the time being, Russo admits, “the answer is that maybe there is nothing.”For all his actual, rare proximity to Clinton, Russo still regards his boss and her world with the reverence and humility of the 18-year-old amazed to have a seat at her dining room table. A successful lawyer in her own right, she married Bill Clinton and became First Lady of the United States from 1993 to 2001. They’re someone’s relationships.”“It’s like they have so much to say. He has a law degree, has passed the bar. In the crowd, excitement turned to anxiety, then to shock, then to tears. The vast majority come from members of the public: people who want to say something to Clinton, to vent or to tell her a story or to give advice.This phase of his work, he knows, is now something of the past.He treats his entry into Hillaryland as a series of sacred memories, still preserved in sharp, perfect detail. And in a way,” he says, “I think in what we’ve written, we’ve addressed that.”Most of the letters are like that: positive, gentle.