[caption id=”attachment_93075″ align=”aligncenter” width=”703″]Hillary, scheming. (Via “Charlie Rose”)
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Remember when it was 3 a.m. and your kids were asleep and there was a phone in the White House and it was ringing? That was supposed to be the Democratic Party’s (if not the country’s) reason to support Hillary Clinton. She had the relationships. She had the knowledge and the experience. She had the credibility to be the Leader of the Free World.
Seven years on, having been rejected for president but deputized to deal with those overnight crises, we have another reason to trust her when most everyone else (at least on Eastern Time) is sleeping: She’ll tweet her commitment to transparency. When Clinton conducted official business as Secretary of State by email, much of it doubtlessly sensitive, she did so exclusively with a private account. We’re told this is relatively common practice for a cabinet secretary. We’re told the procedure during her time at State was that private email was acceptable, so long as the department made the effort to preserve her messages.
Media outlets requested the release of her emails. State told them no or that it didn’t have any records.
The Secretary of State conducted official business by private email, but it was fine because protocol was in place to preserve her messages, except those messages haven’t been released upon request, or haven’t been kept, or at most have been released piecemeal to federal investigators. But despite all this dense fog, everything is well — Clinton tweeted, at 11:30 p.m. Wednesday, after having a spokesperson defend her practice, that she asked the State Department to release her emails, because she “wants the public to see” them.
The emails in question: As CNN notes, a selection that was vetted and provided to the department by Clinton’s team, since her emails ran through her own private server. (No word from her camp on whether or not that’s relatively common practice for a cabinet official, too.)
I want the public to see my email. I asked State to release them. They said they will review them for release as soon as possible.
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) March 5, 2015
“As far as I am aware, no other Cabinet secretary in history has ever called for the release of his or her emails — in their entirety and throughout his or her tenure,” Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) said in a statement on Thursday, per The Hill.
But this is no remarkable act of transparency. Gawker asked for records and was denied, conservative groups asked and were denied, the AP asked and didn’t receive a response and now it is threatening to sue. The stonewalling has protected a private email account and experts have questioned its security, and we’ve been hearing about foreign governments sending money to the Clinton Foundation while Clinton was Secretary of State, and the House is still investigating the 2012 Benghazi attack, and it all causes an odorous situation to become pungent. Enterprising reporters, partisan media or watchdogs check it out when it sniffs the former. The press at large is all over it when it’s the latter.
The New York Times‘ investigation has been central to this story. Coincidentally, it has been one of its stars, James Risen, who has called the Obama administration the “greatest enemy” of press freedom in a generation. Hillary Clinton was President Obama’s Secretary of State.
But all will be well. When it’s bedtime and the federal government continues to obscure its activity from public view, Hillary Clinton will be there to publish a tweet.
