Questions swirl over Clinton emails as she prepares for 2016
Hillary Rodham Clinton answers questions at a news conference at the United Nations Tuesday.
Hillary Rodham Clinton answers questions at a news conference at the United Nations Tuesday.
Hillary Rodham Clinton answers questions at a news conference at the United Nations Tuesday.
WASHINGTON – Questions about Hillary Rodham Clinton’s email practices in government haven’t gone away with her news conference on the subject, even as she tries to get her preparations for a presidential campaign back on track.
Her mea culpa Tuesday, acknowledging she should have used a government email address while secretary of state, satisfied some campaign-focused Democrats while others fretted she had yet to put the issue to rest. Among Republicans in Congress, plans were discussed to call her before a House committee to face questions about her use of a private email account and how that might play into the enduring debate over the deadly 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya.
The committee’s chairman, Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, said Wednesday he wants an independent review of the private server Clinton used for emails while she was secretary. That set up a possible confrontation with Clinton, who said she will not give up control of the server although she wants the emails she turned over to the State Department to be released.
Gowdy said neither Clinton nor the committee should determine which emails are made public. “Let a neutral, detached, disinterested observer make that call,” he said. “Somebody’s going to have to have access to her server. You don’t get to grade your own papers in life.”
Also Wednesday, the Associated Press filed a lawsuit against the State Department to force the release of email correspondence and government documents from her tenure as secretary of state.
The lawsuit, which follows Freedom of Information Act requests that went unfulfilled, seeks materials related to her public and private calendars, correspondence involving longtime aides likely to be prominent in her expected campaign, and Clinton-related emails about the Osama bin Laden raid and National Security Agency surveillance practices.
The focus on Clinton’s emails jumbled what was expected to be a smooth glide toward the kickoff of her presidential campaign next month. The former secretary of state had planned to spend March promoting her work on women’s equality, a top issue for someone who could become the nation’s first female president.
Instead, questions about Clinton’s email habits dominated her activities in the past week, following revelations she used a personal email account at the State Department and did so via a private server, altogether a striking departure from the norm for high officials.
While Democrats dismissed the notion that Clinton’s emails are something voters will care about come Election Day 2016, her silence – aside from a late-night tweet sent last week – led several of her former colleagues in the Senate to urge her to tell her side of the story.
During a news conference Tuesday, Clinton pledged all her work-related email would be made public. But she also acknowledged she deleted messages related to personal matters.
She refused calls from Republicans to turn over the email server to an independent reviewer.
Some Democrats said the news conference did not mean the end of the matter.
“This is something that is going to be discussed until the State Department releases the emails,” said Boyd Brown, a Democratic National Committee member from South Carolina.
“Then House Republicans will have a study committee to look at them, and then that will turn into an investigatory committee,” Brown said. “Folks are going to be Clinton weary, and that’s the point of this from the Republican standpoint, to make people tired of hearing about Hillary Clinton.”
The State Department’s internal watchdog, in a report Wednesday, found many department employees have not been preserving emails for the public record as required by the government. That could mean a substantial amount of government information lost to history.
The inspector general’s office said in 2011, when Clinton was secretary of state, department employees wrote more than 1 billion emails but marked only 61,156 for the public record.
Even fewer were marked for public records, 41,749, in 2013, the year she left the department.
Clinton said Tuesday she exchanged about 60,000 emails in her four years as President Barack Obama’s top diplomat, about half of which were work-related. None contained classified information, she said, and her private email system did not suffer any security breaches.
But since the emails were sent to and from her personal server, there is no way to independently verify her assertion they were, as she said, “within the scope of my personal privacy and that particularly of other people.”
Clinton insisted she did not break any rules, but she does appear to have violated what the Obama White House called “very specific guidance” officials should use government email to conduct business.
Karen Kaiser, AP’s general counsel, said of the lawsuit: “After careful deliberation and exhausting our other options, the Associated Press is taking the necessary legal steps to gain access to these important documents, which will shed light on actions by the State Department and former Secretary Clinton, a presumptive 2016 presidential candidate, during some of the most significant issues of our time.”