Emails made public by WikiLeaks on Saturday exposed the moment Hillary Clinton’s campaign learned, in late February of last year, that the New York Times was preparing a story about Clinton’s private emails.
Campaign staff and Clinton’s attorney, David Kendall, did not appear to grasp just how much damage the story would ultimately do to her image when they concluded that the reporters “sniffing around” her private email use would not find anything.
The exchange, obtained from campaign chair John Podesta’s inbox and given to WikiLeaks earlier this year, was the first of many miscalculations Clinton’s aides made as they worked to contain a controversy they didn’t fully understand.
With 10 days to go before Election Day, the Democratic nominee’s campaign finds itself in much the same position: struggling to explain the FBI’s renewed interest in Clinton’s emails without knowing what, exactly, they agency has found.
On Feb. 27, 2015 — three days before news of Clinton’s emails broke in the Times — Kendall emailed Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s former chief of staff and a current board member at the Clinton Foundation, to inform her that the Democratic staff director on the House Select Committee on Benghazi had tipped him off to the fact that “NYT was sniffing around, maybe to do a story on State production to Committee or on our production to State.”
Kendall was referring to the 296 Benghazi-related emails the State Department provided to the Benghazi Committee. That production alerted Rep. Trey Gowdy, Republican chairman of the committee, to the private address Clinton had used to send all of her correspondence on Benghazi.
Kendall assured Mills he had “said nothing on background or on record” to the Times reporter.
“I didn’t feel he had anything,” Kendall added.
Mills pressed Kendall on what “angle” the reporter could be pursuing.
“I couldn’t tell what his likely angle was (and even if he had one),” Kendall said.
A little more than two weeks later, with the published story already focusing intense scrutiny on the Clinton campaign, spokesman Nick Merrill wrote to other high-level aides that the Times reporter had returned with questions about “what appear to be summaries of some of the exchanges in the 300 emails the committee has.”
Jennifer Palmieri, the former White House communications director who had recently joined the Clinton campaign, admitted that the reporter’s question were “no bueno,” which is Spanish for “not good.”
“This is some kind of bulls—-,” Palmieri wrote. “If Gowdy is doing selective leaks, we are in very different kind of warfare.”
Ultimately, the leaks did not appear to be selective, as the Times published all 296 emails the State Department had provided the Benghazi Committee.
But that did not stop Merrill from attempting to convince the Times reporter, Michael Schmidt, that the information he had obtained was “cherry-picked BS.”
Podesta, Mills and other senior aides discussed a strategy that involved pushing the State Department to release all the Benghazi-related Clinton emails in order to defang one of the Times’ top lines of inquiry: that Clinton had regularly sent work-related emails to her staff’s private accounts, thereby cutting the agency out of the loop and undermining her core argument that she complied with the rules by corresponding with staff on their “state.gov” accounts.
The State Department seemingly complied with the Clinton campaign’s request by releasing all 296 emails in May.
Other emails made public this week by WikiLeaks suggested Clinton had concealed the “depth” of the email controversy from members of her campaign before the Times ran its first story on the emails.
Robby Mook, Clinton’s campaign manager, told Podesta in early March 2015 he had no idea about the private server use before he saw the article.
“We brought up the existence of emails in reserach [sic] this summer but were told that everything was taken care of,” Mook added.
WikiLeaks has released thousands of Podesta’s emails in 22 batches posted since Oct. 7. The website claims to have up to 50,000 Podesta emails in total.
