Hillary Clinton didn’t know her own voting record from her time as a U.S. senator from New York, according to an email included among the 7,000 pages released by the State Department Monday evening.
At the end of December 2010, as a debate loomed about whether Congress should raise the debt ceiling, Clinton asked Miguel Rodriguez, her deputy assistant secretary at State, to comb through her Senate record for debt-related votes.
“Can you pls tell me how many times I voted against raising the debt limit?” Clinton asked Rodriguez, indicating she had little recollection of her own record.
Rodriguez soon revealed Clinton had voted against raising the debt ceiling four times and abstained from voting on two other occasions when the issue was brought up in the Senate.
Democrats fought Republicans mightily in 2010 and 2011 in an effort to increase the debt limit over GOP insistence that any increase had to be accompanied by substantial spending cuts. However, a number of Democrats, including Clinton and President Obama, opposed raising the ceiling when President George W. Bush was in office.
The thousands of records published by the State Department Monday contained 125 emails that were marked classified, raising further questions for Clinton’s campaign.
Clinton has battled perceptions that she is out of touch and overly calculating as scrutiny of her private email arrangement has heated up.
