Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton held a press conference on Tuesday to deliver her first public remarks about a scandal that has suddenly cast a dark shadow over her presidential aspirations.
In contravention of State Department and Obama administration policy, federal records regulations and lawful fulfillment of the Freedom of Information Act, Clinton conducted all government business using a private email housed in a server in her own home, over the contents of which she exercises complete control.
The press conference revealed important inconsistencies in Clinton’s story. For example, her excuse for using all-private email for government business was that she didn’t want to carry two devices. Yet in a recent softball interview at the Watermark Silicon Valley Conference for Women, she jokingly called herself a “hoarder” and confessed to having “an iPad, a mini iPad, an iPhone and a Blackberry.” Did it suddenly become easier to carry two phones and four devices after she left office, or is the explanation from her press conference as implausible as it sounds?
Another inconsistency from the Tuesday press briefing was that she referred to private emails on her server, including “personal communications from my husband and me.” But just moments before her press conference began, the Wall Street Journal talked to a spokesman for Bill Clinton. The light-hearted story that resulted took on a sudden importance minutes later because it stated that the former president has only sent two emails in his life – both of them during his presidency. So the nation’s “two for the price of one” power couple doesn’t seem to have gotten its story straight in this regard. She says the private emails were with her husband, but her husband is letting it be known that the last time he used email was in the 1990s.
In addition to inconsistencies, Clinton equivocated in ways that point to deliberate deception. The most important came when she tried to defuse the issue of the insecurity of her email server, which was apparently misconfigured and therefore vulnerable to any reasonably skilled hacker.
“I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email,” she said.
Obviously, a Cabinet secretary doesn’t just go around attaching classified documents to emails. But did she ever conduct any sort of deliberative discussion, or communicate decisions to staff, or receive briefings that were based on classified or sensitive information? Even a message as simple as, “Please call an immediate meeting about the Iran situation” could be extremely valuable in the hands of a foreign intelligence service.
If Clinton is telling the whole truth, then whenever the government releases the emails that she was kind enough to hand over to the State Department, there should be absolutely no redactions for reasons of national security. Does anyone believe this will be the case?
Clinton also said that a “vast majority” of her emails went to government employees and were therefore archived (although, of course, they wouldn’t be if everybody followed her lead and set up private email accounts). But that still leaves open the possibility that thousands were not. A statement released by Clinton’s office said that, “her email account contained a total of 62,320 sent and received emails from March 2009 to February 2013. Based on the review process described below, 30,490 of these emails were provided to the Department, and the remaining 31,830 were private, personal records.”
And that, of course, raises another issue: the process by which roughly half of her emails were selected by her staff to be given to the State Department. We can only take Clinton’s word that everything was properly included or excluded, because no independent authority was given the opportunity to judge. Clinton successfully secured this privilege for herself when she chose originally to deem herself too important to follow federal records and transparency rules.
The fact that Clinton’s pertinent emails were released entirely at her own discretion, with no independent check on the material and its nature, makes the bottom line to this story one of trust. You just have to trust Hillary. Given all the other holes and inconsistencies in her story, that is hard to do.
