A batch of 296 emails from Hillary Clinton’s private server provide a narrow glimpse of the internal deliberations that took place within the State Department’s top ranks in the wake of a 2012 terror attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi.
Key aides, including Cheryl Mills, Philippe Reines, Jake Sullivan, Caroline Adler, Thomas Nides and Patrick Kennedy, discussed at length strategies for dealing with the fallout from the death of four Americans in the media firestorm that followed.
One email shows Sullivan and Clinton discussed a Clinton Global Initiative speech just 11 days after the Benghazi terror attack.
Some information was redacted from the records the State Department released Friday that had appeared in the emails the New York Times produced just one day earlier.
For example, after Sidney Blumenthal, an informal adviser to Clinton, sent her a link to a Salon article that suggested the GOP was planning to exploit Benghazi in order to weaken Obama’s presidential campaign, Clinton told Sullivan to “be sure Ben knows they need to be ready for this line of attack.”
Clinton could have been referring to Ben Rhodes, the White House’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, who crafted Susan Rice’s widely criticized response to the attacks in television interviews days after the attack.
But that line, which showed Clinton’s personal involvement in the political posturing that followed Benghazi, was stripped from the emails the State Department posted Friday, raising questions about the validity of the heavy redactions the agency made throughout the documents.
The emails demonstrate the intense attention Clinton’s staff paid to her image in the press.
In a message sent Oct. 11, 2012, Reines described an interview Clinton gave to Wall Street Journal reporter Monica Langley in which he said the reporter sat too close to the secretary.
“Was like the dental hygienist rolling around the floor to get the best access to your mouth depending on what tooth she was trying to get access to,” Reines wrote. “I don’t even think you see that behavior among any type of mammal.”
“I may go and throw up since I am laughing so hard,” Nides said.
“This will be exciting when it’s FOIA’d,” Adler wrote.
A number of the emails that contained substantive intelligence were contained in the 349 pages of emails involving Sidney Blumenthal that the New York Times released Thursday.
“The emails we release today do not change the essential facts or our understanding of the events before, during, or after the events,” the State Department tweeted before publishing the records trove.
The agency also said it had given all 296 emails to the House Select Committee on Benghazi in February.
Clinton discussed Benghazi intelligence on her private server that has since been classified, the Associated Press reported just minutes before the State Department published the cache of emails online.
State Department officials told the AP Clinton’s emails from Nov. 18, 2012, mentioned several suspects that had been arrested in Libya in connection with the attacks.
Twenty-three words were redacted from the email, as published on the State Department website.
