For Hillary Clinton, the scandal involving her conducting official government business exclusively from a private email account when she served as secretary of state doesn’t appear to be going away, even after she lightly touched on the issue Wednesday evening.
In a tweet that put the burden on the State Department, Clinton said: “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.”
Absent from Clinton’s 130-character message is any mention of the fact that the only emails in the State Department’s possession are the ones that her team reviewed and approved for transfer. Her tweet says nothing of the emails that her aides decided not to hand over to the State Department.
“One learns to read Clinton statements for what they exclude, rather than what they reveal,” Republican strategist and media consultant Rick Wilson said Thursday morning.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post had this to say Thursday: “Hillary Clinton’s tweet isn’t going to solve her e-mail problem. Not even close.”
“Clinton’s attempt to tweet her way out of this problem — she did this so people can’t accuse her of ignoring it entirely — suggests that she (or her team or both) don’t grasp the extent of the damage this could do to her,” the Post’s Chris Cillizza said.
And for the Post’s editorial board, the email scandal and Clinton’s handling of it reflects “poor judgment.”
“Ms. Clinton essentially privatized her e-mail, reserving to herself the decision of what should be in the record. Ms. Clinton’s spokesman said she followed the ‘letter and spirit of the rules.’ The letter, perhaps, was followed, but certainly not the spirit,” the editorial board said. “If people aspire to public service, they should behave as stewards of a public trust, and that includes the records — all of them. Ms. Clinton’s use of private e-mail shows poor regard for that public trust.”
Elsewhere, the Daily Dot was equally unimpressed with Clinton’s meager response to the email scandal, saying in a headline: “Hillary Clinton’s email-transparency promise is an empty gesture.”
In short, it appears Clinton’s tweet did little to shake off reporters and pundits who continued to follow the story Thursday, with many asking difficult questions with serious implications, even as Clinton’s damage control teams, including the nonprofit Media Matters and American Bridge, continued to run defense for the former secretary of state.
“I don’t think she was operating without oversight. What we know here is that the relevant statutes were complied with. The state department said yesterday that 55,000 pages of emails were turned over late last year in compliance with that law,” Media Matters’ David Brock said in an interview Wednesday.
“And the vast majority of those emails the State Department had access to for years. So, there’s really not a question of proper oversight here. Everything was done properly. The problem we have is a manufactured controversy in the media, which started with yesterday’s New York Times and continues with some of the media reports today, unfortunately” he said.
Separately, Emily’s List spokeswoman Jess McIntosh echoed Brock’s arguments during an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, adding also that Republican governors have used personal email accounts.
“Every secretary of state prior to Hillary Clinton used a private account for their emails,” she said. “I think more importantly, can you possibly imagine any American family, at any kitchen table across the country, sitting down and saying, ‘Wow, I am concerned that she used private accounts instead of state accounts. And where was the server located?’ No! Because there are major economic questions that Americans are facing.”
“Lots of public officials have set up their own servers, Jeb Bush did the same thing,” McIntosh said.
The same day that Brock and McIntosh appeared on cable television to defend the former secretary of state and brand the email scandal as a nonstory, National Review obtained 17 pages worth of talking points from a pro-Clinton group distributed to reporters covering the story.
The document includes many of the same talking points used by McIntosh and Brock, including that many Republican governors have also used personal email accounts.
But these talking points seem to have done little to dissuade curious pundits and reporters from tracking the story, with many television personalities, including MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, suggesting on air that the former secretary of state may have a major problem on her hands and that her 26-word tweet does nothing to settle the issue.
“The statement that she put out last night, the tweet, such absolute nonsense, insulting the intelligence of everybody saying ‘I am asking the State Department to release my emails,'” he said Thursday. “They don’t have them! She has them! They have 55,000 emails that she and her staff parsed through and decided to give to them and she’s saying to the State Department, ‘I am asking you.'”
“That’s like me telling you, ‘Willie [Geist], I am asking you to release my son from captivity. You don’t have him! I got him!” he said. “I mean, how stupid — and this is a question I have asked of the Clintons since 1992: How stupid do they think we are?”
“How stupid do they think we are?” he repeated.
Also, Clinton email-related coverage on cable and network television has been enormous, with networks across the country dedicating hours of programming to the issue:
And as coverage of the problem doesn’t seem to be going away, and as the talking points appear to be falling flat, some are now theorizing that Clinton’s course of action will be to wait out the storm, allowing for the story about her questionable “homebrewed” email account to die out on its own.
“[B]ig pro-[Hillary Clinton] lines have been: A) She’s a known quantity/emails don’t change that. B) No one will remember this in 20 months,” Politico’s Gabriel Debenedetti said.
At an upcoming event honoring journalism that is scheduled for later in March, Clinton will appear to deliver prepared remarks. She reportedly won’t be taking any questions.
