Hillary Clinton’s email woes began March 2, when the New York Times first reported her exclusive use of a personal email account. The story sparked outrage, even though it did not include any mention of the private server she set up at her Chappaqua, New York, home to house the entire email network. News of the “homebrew” server emerged in an Associated Press report two days later.
But Clinton refused to acknowledge the burgeoning email controversy until March 10. Her intentional delay drew fire from some of her own supporters, many of whom had wanted a full-throated defense of the server to put the story to bed.
Instead, Clinton said several things in that crucial first press conference that were quickly or eventually proven to be misleading, if not blatantly false. Her three-minute monologue and brief question-and-answer session that day have become the blueprint against which all developments in the email scandal are compared.
First, she said she set up the private email network for “convenience,” thus allowing her to carry just one device for all her emails. Reporters uncovered, within hours of the press conference, pictures and past comments that indicated she regularly used at least a Blackberry and an iPad.
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Clinton assured the public unequivocally that “there is no classified material” among the 55,000 printed pages of emails she gave the State Department in December 2014. Not counting the batch of records released at the end of September, 188 emails from Clinton’s collection have been classified, with hundreds more expected to be similarly upgraded in the coming months. Two inspectors general argued in a July 14 memo “that it is more likely than not that information classified higher than secret is present” within Clinton’s emails.
The former secretary of state changed the wording of her explanation to accommodate the new discoveries, first noting that nothing she sent or received was classified at the time it was written and then insisting nothing she transmitted was then “marked” classified after the intelligence community inspector general revealed emails that should have been classified “when originated.”
The State Department, which has served as a staunch defender of Clinton’s email use even as the controversy threatens to overshadow its current work, maintains that nothing Clinton sent or received should have been considered classified at the time and argues that, in all 188 cases, unrelated circumstances that developed after Clinton left office created reasons for classifying the emails retroactively.
Clinton’s grip on the email narrative loosened further on July 24 when the Times reported that a pair of inspectors general had referred the matter to the Justice Department for a criminal investigation. Her team lashed out at the paper for printing an “erroneous” story, characterizing the probe as a routine “security inquiry” that in no way targeted Clinton herself.
But the FBI’s involvement in the scandal forced Clinton to hedge on yet another statement from her seminal March press conference. Clinton then insisted her private server “will remain private,” maintaining that defiant stance amid congressional calls for a third-party probe of the device.
After the FBI physically took the server into custody Aug. 12, Clinton immediately changed her tune by framing the episode as further evidence of her commitment to transparency. The present version of her email defense celebrates the fact that she submitted the server to investigators and that she handed over her work-related emails, even though both occurred under intense pressure from federal agencies.
For all her maneuvering this summer, Clinton has struggled to explain a pair of more recent revelations that threaten to undermine the core of her email explanation.
After the Washington Post revealed the State Department, in a surprising reversal of its earlier statements, had given a conflicting account of how it first asked for Clinton’s emails, the Democratic candidate couldn’t square her story with the new information.
John Kirby, State Department spokesman, said Sept. 22 the agency had only requested Clinton’s emails when it discovered she had never used a government account in the course of responding to document requests from the House Select Committee on Benghazi. Clinton had characterized the document request as a routine housekeeping inquiry that was extended to all former secretaries of state. She could not initially answer questions about why she had begun combing through her emails 10 months before handing them over to the State Department after months of suggesting she undertook the review of her records only in response to the agency’s mundane letter in October 2014
The Post story broke just as Clinton walked into an editorial board meeting with the Des Moines Register Sept. 22. Ambushed by questions about the newly-uncovered facts, Clinton said she couldn’t answer to the discrepancies. A week later, when asked about the same story in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Clinton had prepared a more thoughtful reply that glossed over the fact that she and the State Department could not possibly be telling the truth with different versions of the same event.
Clinton also brushed off the discovery of undisclosed emails that indicate she did not turn over all her work-related emails, as she has repeatedly assured inquisitors.
