The Clintons sure do love to paint inconsistent pictures of their electronic correspondences.
As The Atlantic points out, former President Bill Clinton insisted at a global tech conference back in 2011 that he “sent a grand total of two e-mails as president,” the first of which being that to astronaut John Glenn in 1998 and the other being a message to “our troops in the Adriatic.”
However, there exists evidence that his claim was to some extent untrue.
John Gibbons, who served as director of White House Science and Technology Policy during the Clinton administration, recalled Clinton’s first e-mail quite differently in a 2006 interview.
Gibbons told the Miller Center:
Moreover, public records also show that Clinton — the first U.S. president to send an electronic message from the White House — sent an e-mail to then Prime Minister of Sweden Carl Bildt back in 1994 regarding his decision to lift the trade embargo on Vietnam. It was a response e-mail, but an e-mail nonetheless.
There’s also confusion as to whether Clinton’s “first” e-mail — the one he claims to have been to John Glenn — even qualified as an actual e-mail.
From a 2004 Reuters article:
“The only two he sent,” Skip Rutherford, president of the Clinton Presidential Foundation, which is raising money for the library, said on Monday.
One of them may not actually qualify for electronic communication because it was a test to see if the commander in chief knew how to push the button on an e-mail.
So, was it two e-mails? Three? Four? One?
Whatever the number, Bill probably deleted them.
H/T The Atlantic
