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{{HillaryClintonSegmentsUnderInfoBox}}
{{HillaryClintonSegmentsUnderInfoBox}}


A controversy arose in March 2015, when it became known that [[Hillary Clinton|Hillary Rodham Clinton]] had exclusively used personal [[email]] accounts on a non-government, privately maintained [[email server|server]]—in lieu of email accounts maintained on Federal government servers—when conducting official business during her tenure as [[Hillary Rodham Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State|United States Secretary of State]]. Some experts, officials, and members of [[United States Congress|Congress]] contended that her use of private [[Message transfer agent|messaging system]] software and a private server, and the deletion of nearly 32,000 emails that she deemed private, violated [[United States Department of State|State Department]] protocols and procedures, and Federal laws and regulations governing [[recordkeeping|recordkeeping requirements]]. An FBI probe was initiated regarding how classified information was handled. The controversy occurred against the backdrop of [[Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, 2016|Clinton's 2016 presidential election campaign]] and hearings held by the [[United States House Select Committee on Benghazi]].
A controversy arose in March 2015, when it became known that [[Hillary Clinton|Hillary Rodham Clinton]] had exclusively used personal [[email]] accounts on a non-government, privately maintained [[email server|server]]—in lieu of email accounts maintained on Federal government servers—when conducting official business during her tenure as [[Hillary Rodham Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State|United States Secretary of State]]. Some experts, officials, and Republican members of [[United States Congress|Congress]] contended that her use of private [[Message transfer agent|messaging system]] software and a private server, and the deletion of nearly 32,000 emails that she deemed private, violated [[United States Department of State|State Department]] protocols and procedures, and Federal laws and regulations governing [[recordkeeping|recordkeeping requirements]]. An FBI probe was initiated regarding how classified information was handled. The controversy occurred against the backdrop of [[Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, 2016|Clinton's 2016 presidential election campaign]] and hearings held by the [[United States House Select Committee on Benghazi]].


==Background==
==Background==
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On August 10, 2015, the IC inspector general said that two of the 40 emails in the sample were "Top Secret/[[Sensitive Compartmented Information]]" and subsequently given classified labels of "TK" (for "Talent Keyhole," indicating material obtained by [[spy satellite]]s) and [[NOFORN]].<ref name=AP81415/> One is a discussion of a news article about a [[Drone strikes in Pakistan|U.S. drone strike operation]].<ref name=AP81415/> The second, he said, either referred to classified material or else was "parallel reporting" of [[open-source intelligence]], which would also be classified.<ref name=AP81415/><ref>{{cite news|author=Associated Press|title=US State Department 'Top secret' emails on Clinton server discussed drone program, reference classified info.|url=http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/08/14/top-secret-emails-on-clinton-server-discussed-drone-program-may-reference/?intcmp=ob_article_footer_text&intcmp=obinsite|accessdate=August 24, 2015|work=Fox News|date=August 14, 2015}}</ref> Clinton's presidential campaign and the State Department disputed the letter, and questioned whether the emails had been over-classified by an arbitrary process. According to an unnamed source, a secondary review by the CIA and the [[National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency]] endorsed the earlier inspectors general findings concluding that the emails (one of which concerned North Korea's nuclear weapons program) were "Top Secret" when received by Clinton through her private server in 2009 and 2011, a conclusion also disputed by the Clinton campaign.<ref>Michael S. Schmidt, [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/08/us/politics/second-review-says-classified-information-was-in-hillary-clintons-email.html Second Review Says Classified Information Was in Hillary Clinton's Email] ''New York Times'' (September 7, 2015).</ref>
On August 10, 2015, the IC inspector general said that two of the 40 emails in the sample were "Top Secret/[[Sensitive Compartmented Information]]" and subsequently given classified labels of "TK" (for "Talent Keyhole," indicating material obtained by [[spy satellite]]s) and [[NOFORN]].<ref name=AP81415/> One is a discussion of a news article about a [[Drone strikes in Pakistan|U.S. drone strike operation]].<ref name=AP81415/> The second, he said, either referred to classified material or else was "parallel reporting" of [[open-source intelligence]], which would also be classified.<ref name=AP81415/><ref>{{cite news|author=Associated Press|title=US State Department 'Top secret' emails on Clinton server discussed drone program, reference classified info.|url=http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/08/14/top-secret-emails-on-clinton-server-discussed-drone-program-may-reference/?intcmp=ob_article_footer_text&intcmp=obinsite|accessdate=August 24, 2015|work=Fox News|date=August 14, 2015}}</ref> Clinton's presidential campaign and the State Department disputed the letter, and questioned whether the emails had been over-classified by an arbitrary process. According to an unnamed source, a secondary review by the CIA and the [[National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency]] endorsed the earlier inspectors general findings concluding that the emails (one of which concerned North Korea's nuclear weapons program) were "Top Secret" when received by Clinton through her private server in 2009 and 2011, a conclusion also disputed by the Clinton campaign.<ref>Michael S. Schmidt, [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/08/us/politics/second-review-says-classified-information-was-in-hillary-clintons-email.html Second Review Says Classified Information Was in Hillary Clinton's Email] ''New York Times'' (September 7, 2015).</ref>


''Politico'' reported the initial determination that the two emails contained top secret information was "based on a flawed process" and intelligence agencies concluded the two emails did not include highly classified intelligence secrets.<ref name="politico-gerstein">{{cite news | url=http://www.politico.com/story/2015/11/hillary-clinton-email-no-highly-classified-215599 | title=Source: Key Clinton emails did not contain highly classified secrets | last=Gerstein | first=Josh | publisher=''[[Politico]]'' | date=2015-11-06 | accessdate=2015-11-07}}</ref>


===Journalists and experts===
===Journalists and experts===

Revision as of 01:59, 8 November 2015

File:Hillary Clinton Testimony to House Select Committee on Benghazi.png
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testifying before the House Select Committee on Benghazi

Template:HillaryClintonSegmentsUnderInfoBox

A controversy arose in March 2015, when it became known that Hillary Rodham Clinton had exclusively used personal email accounts on a non-government, privately maintained server—in lieu of email accounts maintained on Federal government servers—when conducting official business during her tenure as United States Secretary of State. Some experts, officials, and Republican members of Congress contended that her use of private messaging system software and a private server, and the deletion of nearly 32,000 emails that she deemed private, violated State Department protocols and procedures, and Federal laws and regulations governing recordkeeping requirements. An FBI probe was initiated regarding how classified information was handled. The controversy occurred against the backdrop of Clinton's 2016 presidential election campaign and hearings held by the United States House Select Committee on Benghazi.

Background

Domain names

At the time of Senate confirmation hearings on Hillary Clinton's nomination as Secretary of State, the domain names clintonemail.com, wjcoffice.com, and presidentclinton.com were registered to Eric Hoteham,[1] with the Clintons' home in Chappaqua, New York, as the contact address.[2][3] The domains were pointed to a private email server that Clinton, who never had a state.gov email account, used to send and receive email.[4][5] The server had been purchased and installed in the Clintons' home for her 2008 presidential campaign.

Email server

Until 2013, Justin Cooper, a longtime aide to former President Bill Clinton, managed the system. Cooper had no security clearance or expertise in computer security.[6]

The email server was stored in the Clintons' home in Chappaqua, New York until 2013, when it was sent to a data center in New Jersey to be wiped of any sensitive information before being handed over to Platte River Networks, a Denver-based information technology firm that Clinton hired to manage her email system.[7][8][9][10][11] Datto, Inc., which provided data backup service for Clinton's email, agreed to give the FBI the hardware that stored the backups.[12]

The Clintons paid Bryan Pagliano, the former IT director for Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign, to maintain their private email server while Clinton was Secretary of State.[13][14] Security experts such as Chris Soghoian believe that emails could be at risk of hacking and foreign surveillance.[15] According to documents and data reviewed by the Associated Press, Clinton's server was configured to allow users to connect openly from the Internet and control it remotely using the Microsoft's Remote Desktop Services.[16][17] These records showed that, using a computer in Serbia, the hacker had scanned Clinton's Chappaqua server at least twice, in August and in December 2012. It was unclear from the reports whether the hacker knew the server belonged to Clinton, although it did identify itself as providing email services for clintonemail.com.[16] Marc Maiffret, a cybersecurity expert, said that the server had "amateur hour" vulnerabilities.[16]

Events

As early as 2009, officials with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) expressed concerns over possible violations of normal federal government record-keeping procedures at the Department of State under Secretary Clinton.[18]

Emails sent to Clinton's private clintonemail.com address were first discovered in March 2013, when a hacker named "Guccifer" widely distributed emails sent to her from Sidney Blumenthal, obtained by illegally accessing Blumenthal's email account.[19][20][21] The emails dealt with the 2012 attack on the Benghazi consulate and other issues in Libya and revealed the existence of her clintonemail.com address.[19][20][21]

In the summer of 2014, lawyers from the State Department noticed that a number of emails had been sent to and from a personal email account for Clinton, while reviewing documents related to the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi. A subsequent request by the State Department for additional emails from Clinton's personal account led to negotiations with her lawyers and advisors. In October, the State Department sent letters to Clinton and all previous Secretary's of State back to Madeleine Albright requesting emails and documents related to their work while in office. In December, 50,000 printed pages of emails from Clinton's personal email account were delivered to the State Department, and the State Department subsequently transferred the emails related to Benghazi to the House Select Committee on Benghazi.

A March 2, 2015 New York Times article broke the story that the Benghazi panel had discovered that Clinton exclusively used her own private email server rather than a government-issued one throughout her time as Secretary of State, and that her aides took no action to preserve emails sent or received from her personal accounts as required by law.[22][23] At that point, Clinton announced that she had asked the State Department to release her emails.[24] Some in the conservative media labeled the controversy "emailgate."[25][26][27]

When Clinton's use of a private email server for government business became public, she initially stated that it had not been used to store any classified information. Based on a request from the Senate intelligence and foreign relations committees, the inspectors general for the State Department and Intelligence Community reviewed Clinton's emails and discovered a number that should have been marked as "secret" but were not. In addition, a number of Clinton's emails that were subsequently released to the public had classified information redacted, as the classification was changed at a later date.[4] Also, according to Reuters, a number of emails included classified information, relating for example to foreign governments, which is automatically considered classified regardless of whether it is marked as such.[28] At that point, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began a probe into how classified information was handled.[4]


Freedom of Information lawsuits

Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State

Judicial Watch, a nonprofit advocacy organization, filed a complaint against the Department of State in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on September 10, 2013, seeking records under the federal Freedom of Information Act relating to Clinton aide Huma Abedin (a former deputy chief of staff and former senior advisor at the State Department).[29][30] Judicial Watch was particularly interested in Abedin's role as a "special government employee" (SGE), a consulting position which allowed her to represent outside clients while also serving at the State Department.[29] After corresponding with the State Department, Judicial Watch agreed to dismiss its lawsuit on March 14, 2014.[29] On March 12, 2015, in response to the uncovering of Clinton's private email account, it filed a motion to reopen the suit, alleging that the State Department had misrepresented its search and had not properly preserved and maintained records under the act.[29] U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan granted the motion to reopen the case on June 19, 2015.[31][32]

On July 21, 2015, Judge Sullivan issued supplemental discovery orders, including one that Clinton, Abedin, and former Deputy Secretary of State Cheryl Mills disclose any required information they had not disclosed already, and promise under oath that they had done so, including a description of the extent Abedin and Mills had used Clinton's email server for official government business.[33][34] On August 10, 2015, Clinton filed her declaration, stating "I have directed that all my emails on clintonemail.com in my custody that were or potentially were federal records be provided to the Department of State," and that as a result of this directive, 55,000 pages of emails were produced to the Department on December 5, 2014.[35][36][37] Clinton also said in her statement that Abedin did have an email account through clintonemail.com that "was used at times for government business," but that Mills did not.[35][36][37] The statement was filed as Clinton faced questions over fifteen emails in exchanges with Blumenthal that were not among the emails she gave to the department the previous year.[36] She did not address the matter of those emails in the statement.[36] On September 25, 2015, several additional emails from her private server[38] surfaced that she had not provided to the State Department.[38][39][40] These emails between Clinton and General David Petraeus, discussing personnel matters, were part of an email chain that started on a different email account before her tenure as Secretary of State,[38][39][40] but continued onto her private server [38] in late January 2009 after she had taken office.[38][39][40] The existence of these emails also called into question Clinton's previous statement that she did not use the server before March 18, 2009.[41]

Jason Leopold v. U.S. Department of State

In November 2014, Jason Leopold of Vice News made a Freedom of Information Act request for Clinton's State Department records,[42][43] and, on January 25, 2015, filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia seeking to compel production of resposive documents.[42][43][44] After some dispute between Leopold and the State Department over the request, U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras ordered rolling production and release of the emails on a schedule set by the State Department.[45][46][47]

The State Department released the first batch of emails and posted them online on May 26, 2015,[48][49] and the second batch on June 30, 2015.[50][51][52] The emails showed that Blumenthal communicated with Clinton while Secretary on a variety of issues including Benghazi.[51][53] On July 31, 2015, the State Department produced its third batch of emails.[54]

On August 17, 2015, the State Department filed a court document in the case saying that it had reviewed 6,100 emails (20 percent of the full email set), and of these had referred 305 emails to the various intelligence agencies for further screening for classified information.[55]

Associated Press v. U.S. Department of State

On March 11, 2015, the day after Clinton acknowledged her private email account, the Associated Press filed suit against the State Department regarding multiple FOIA requests over the past five years. The requests were for various emails and other documents from Clinton's time as secretary of state and were still unfulfilled at the time.[56][57][58] The State Department said that a high volume of FOIA requests and a large backlog had caused the delay.[56][59]

On July 20, 2015, U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon reacted angrily to what he said was "the State Department for four years dragging their feet."[59] Leon said that "even the least ambitious bureaucrat" could process the request faster than the State Department was doing.[60] On August 7, 2015, Leon issued an order setting a stringent schedule for the State Department to provide the AP with the requested documents over the next eight months.[58] The order issued by Leon did not include the 55,000 pages of Clinton emails the State Department scheduled to be released in the Leopold case, or take into account 20 boxes given to the State Department by Philippe Reines, a former Clinton senior adviser.[58]

Coordination of email cases

In September 2015, the State Department filed a motion in court seeking to consolidate and coordinate the large number of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits relating to Clinton and Clinton-related emails. At least three dozen lawsuits are pending, before 17 different judges.[61][62]

In an United States District Court for the District of Columbia order issued on October 8, 2015, chief judge Richard W. Roberts wrote that the cases did not meet the usual criteria for consolidation but: "The judges who have been randomly assigned to these cases have been and continue to be committed to informal coordination so as to avoid unnecessary inefficiencies and confusion, and the parties are also urged to meet and confer to assist in coordination."[62]

Question of use of private server for government business

According to former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Howard Dean, and a spokesman for Clinton, a number of government officials have used private email accounts for official business, including secretaries of state before Clinton, such as Colin Powell.[63][64] State Department spokesperson Marie Harf said that: "For some historical context, Secretary Kerry is the first secretary of state to rely primarily on a state.gov email account."[22] Experts[who?] agree that these practices are allowed by federal law,[64][65] at least in case of emergencies.[23] Dan Metcalfe, a former head of the Justice Department's Office of Information and Privacy, stated: "She managed successfully to insulate her official emails, categorically, from the FOIA, both during her tenure at State and long after her departure from it — perhaps forever." He said that was "a blatant circumvention of the FOIA by someone who unquestionably knows better."[22]

According to Department spokesperson Harf, use by government officials of personal email for government business is permissible under the Federal Records Act, so long as relevant official communications, including all work-related emails, are preserved by the agency.[22] The Act (which was amended in late 2014 after Clinton left office to require that personal emails be transferred to government servers within 20 days) requires agencies to retain all official communications, including all work-related emails, and stipulates that government employees cannot destroy or remove relevant records.[22] NARA regulations dictate how records should be created and maintained, require that they must be maintained "by the agency," that they should be "readily found", and that the records must "make possible a proper scrutiny by the Congress."[22] Section 1924 of Title 18 of the United States Code addresses the deletion and retention of classified documents, under which "knowingly" removing or housing classified information at an "unauthorized location" is subject to a fine, or an up to year in prison.[22]

Transparency advocates, such as John Wonderliche of the Sunlight Foundation, concede that the use of private email accounts is legally permissible, but discourage the practice, believing that official email accounts should be used.[22] Jason R. Baron, the former head of litigation at NARA, described the practice as "highly unusual" but not a violation of the law. In a separate interview, he said, "It is very difficult to conceive of a scenario—short of nuclear winter—where an agency would be justified in allowing its cabinet-level head officer to solely use a private email communications channel for the conduct of government business."[23][66][67] Baron told the Senate Judiciary Committee in May 2015 that "any employee's decision to conduct all email correspondence through a private email network, using a non-.gov address, is inconsistent with long-established policies and practices under the Federal Records Act and NARA regulations governing all federal agencies."[68]

Question of classified information in emails

Some of the emails were later deemed classified by government officials.[69] Questions were raised about whether Clinton passed information through her mail server that was classified at the time, which would be improper because it was a private, non-secured channel.[70]

Official statements

A June 29, 2015 memorandum from the inspector general of the State Department, Steve A. Linick, said that a review of the 55,000-page email release found "hundreds of potentially classified emails".[71] A July 17, 2015 follow-up memo, sent jointly by Linick and the Intelligence Community (IC) inspector general, I. Charles McCullough III, to Under Secretary of State for Management Patrick F. Kennedy, stated that they had confirmed that several of the emails contained classified information that was not marked as classified, at least one of which was publicly released.[71] On July 24, 2015, Linick and McCullough said they had discovered classified information on Clinton's email account,[72] but did not say whether Clinton sent or received the emails.[72] Investigators from their office, searching a randomly chosen sample of 40 emails, found four that contained classified information that originated from U.S. intelligence agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA).[72] Their statement said that the information they found was classified when sent, remained so as of their inspection, and "never should have been transmitted via an unclassified personal system."[72]

In a separate statement in the form of a letter to Congress, McCullough said that he had made a request to the State Department for access to the entire set of emails turned over by Clinton, but that the Department rejected his request.[72][73] The letter stated that none of the emails were marked as classified, but because they included classified information they should have been marked and handled as such, and transmitted securely.[73]

On August 10, 2015, the IC inspector general said that two of the 40 emails in the sample were "Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information" and subsequently given classified labels of "TK" (for "Talent Keyhole," indicating material obtained by spy satellites) and NOFORN.[74] One is a discussion of a news article about a U.S. drone strike operation.[74] The second, he said, either referred to classified material or else was "parallel reporting" of open-source intelligence, which would also be classified.[74][75] Clinton's presidential campaign and the State Department disputed the letter, and questioned whether the emails had been over-classified by an arbitrary process. According to an unnamed source, a secondary review by the CIA and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency endorsed the earlier inspectors general findings concluding that the emails (one of which concerned North Korea's nuclear weapons program) were "Top Secret" when received by Clinton through her private server in 2009 and 2011, a conclusion also disputed by the Clinton campaign.[76]

Politico reported the initial determination that the two emails contained top secret information was "based on a flawed process" and intelligence agencies concluded the two emails did not include highly classified intelligence secrets.[77]

Journalists and experts

According to the New York Times, if Clinton was a recipient of classified emails, "it is not clear that she would have known that they contained government secrets, since they were not marked classified."[72] No email yet released was marked as classified at the time it was sent or received, although several were subsequently marked classified.[78] The newspaper also reported that "most specialists believe the occasional appearance of classified information in the Clinton account was probably of marginal consequence."[4] Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said that inadvertent "spillage" of classified information into an unclassified realm is a common occurrence.[4] No evidence has emerged that clintonemail.com was ever actually compromised.[15]

An August 2015 review by Reuters of a set of released emails found "at least 30 email threads from 2009, representing scores of individual emails," that include what the State Department identifies as "foreign government information," defined by the U.S. government as "any information, written or spoken, provided in confidence to U.S. officials by their foreign counterparts."[78] Although unmarked, Reuters' examination appeared to suggest that these emails "were classified from the start."[78] J. William Leonard, a former director of the NARA Information Security Oversight Office, said that such information is "born classified" and that "If a foreign minister just told the secretary of state something in confidence, by U.S. rules that is classified at the moment it's in U.S. channels and U.S. possession."[78] According to Reuters, the standard U.S. government nondisclosure agreement "warns people authorized to handle classified information that it may not be marked that way and that it may come in oral form."[78] The State Department "disputed Reuters' analysis" but declined to elaborate.[78]

The Associated Press reported that "Some officials said they believed the designations were a stretch — a knee-jerk move in a bureaucracy rife with over-classification."[74] Jeffrey Toobin, in an August 2015 New Yorker article, wrote that the Clinton email affair is an illustration of overclassification, a problem written about by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his book Secrecy: The American Experience.[70] Toobin writes that "government bureaucracies use classification rules to protect turf, to avoid embarrassment, to embarrass rivals—in short, for a variety of motives that have little to do with national security."[70] Toobin wrote that "It's not only the public who cannot know the extent or content of government secrecy. Realistically, government officials can’t know either—and this is Hillary Clinton's problem.[70] Toobin noted that "one of Clinton's potentially classified email exchanges is nothing more than a discussion of a newspaper story about drones" and wrote: "That such a discussion could be classified underlines the absurdity of the current system. But that is the system that exists, and if and when the agencies determine that she sent or received classified information through her private server, Clinton will be accused of mishandling national-security secrets."[70]

Richard Lempert, in an analysis of the Clinton email controversy published by the Brookings Institution, wrote that "security professionals have a reputation for erring in the direction of overclassification."[79] Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the liberty and national security program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, says that "The odds are good that any classified information in the Clinton emails should not have been classified," since an estimated 50 percent to 90 percent of classified documents could be made public without risking national security.[79] Nate Jones, an expert with the National Security Archive at George Washington University, said: "Clinton's mistreatment of federal records and the intelligence community's desire to retroactively overclassify are two distinct troubling problems. No politician is giving the right message: Blame Clinton for poor records practices, but don't embrace overclassification while you do it."[79]

FBI probe

The State Department and Intelligence Community (IC) inspector generals' discovery of four emails containing classified information, out of a random sample of 40, prompted them to make a security referral to the FBI's counterintelligence office, to alert authorities that classified information was being kept on Clinton's server and by her lawyer on a thumb drive.[72][73] As part of an FBI probe at the request of the IC inspector general, Clinton agreed to turn over her email server to the U.S. Department of Justice, as well as thumb drives containing copies of her work-related emails. Other emails were obtained by the United States House Select Committee on Benghazi from other sources, in connection with the committee's inquiry. Clinton's own emails are being made public in stages by the State Department on a gradual schedule. The FBI has not called its probe a formal investigation, but has suggested that the bureau's interest focuses on the broader question of how classified materials were handled — and not necessarily on launching a criminal inquiry.[80]

Clinton's IT contractors turned over her personal email server to the FBI on August 12, 2015,[11] as well as thumb drives containing copies of her emails.[81][82] In a letter describing the matter to Senator Ron Johnson, Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Clinton's lawyer David E. Kendall said that emails, and all other data stored on the server, had earlier been erased prior to the device being turned over to the authorities, and that both he and another lawyer had been given security clearances by the State Department to handle thumb drives containing about 30,000 emails that Clinton subsequently also turned over to authorities.[83] Kendall said the thumb drives had been stored in a safe provided to him in July by the State Department.[83][83]

On August 20, 2015, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan stated that Hillary Clinton's actions of maintaining a private email server were in direct conflict with U.S. government policy. "We wouldn't be here today if this employee had followed government policy," he said, and ordered the State Department to work with the FBI to determine if any emails on the server during her tenure as Secretary of State could be recovered.[84][85][86] Platte River Networks, the Denver-based firm that managed the Clinton server since 2013, said it had no knowledge of the server being wiped, and indicated that the emails that Clinton has said were deleted could likely be recovered. "Platte River has no knowledge of the server being wiped," company spokesman Andy Boian told the Washington Post. "All the information we have is that the server wasn't wiped."[87] When asked by the Washington Post, the Clinton campaign declined to comment.[87] As of September 2015, FBI investigators were engaged in sorting messages recovered from the server, according to Bloomberg News.[88]

House Select Committee on Benghazi

On March 27, 2015, Republican Congressman Trey Gowdy, Chairman of the Select Committee on Benghazi , asserted that some time after October 2014, Clinton "unilaterally decided to wipe her server clean" and "summarily decided to delete all emails."[89][90] Clinton's attorney, David E. Kendall, said that day that an examination showed that no copies of any of Clinton's emails remained on the server. Kendall said the server was reconfigured to only retain emails for 60 days after Clinton lawyers had decided which emails needed to be turned over.[91]

Subpoenas for Department Testimony

On June 22, 2015, the Benghazi panel released emails between Clinton and Sidney Blumenthal, who had been recently deposed by the committee. Committee chairman Gowdy issued a press release criticizing Clinton for not providing the emails to the State Department.[92] Clinton had said she provided all work-related emails to the State Department, and that only emails of a personal nature on her private server were destroyed. The State Department confirmed that 10 emails and parts of five others from Sidney Blumenthal regarding Benghazi, which the Committee had made public on June 22, could not be located in the Department's records, but that the 46 other, previously unreleased Libya-related Blumenthal emails published by the Committee, were in the Department's records. In response, Clinton campaign spokesman Nick Merrill, when asked about the discrepancy said: "She has turned over 55,000 pages of materials to the State Department, including all emails in her possession from Mr. Blumenthal."[93]

Republican Committee members were encouraged about their probe, having found emails that Clinton did not produce.[93][94] Clinton campaign staff accused Gowdy and Republicans of "clinging to their invented scandal."[94]

Allegations of politicization

On September 29, 2015, House Republican Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy said the following during an appearance on Hannity "Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened, had we not fought."[95]

In response, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi threatened to end the Democrats' participation in the committee,[96] and committee Democrats released the full transcript of earlier testimony by Clinton aide Cheryl Mills, which Republicans had refused to release.[97] As Democrats considered filing a complaint with the Office of Congressional Ethics,[98] Representative Louise Slaughter introduced an amendment to disband the committee, which was defeated in a party-line vote. Minority Whip Steny Hoyer indicated that Democrats might leave the committee after Clinton's testimony on October 22.[99]

On October 7, the editorial board of The New York Times called for the end of the committee, by which time the committee had spent $4.6 million.[100] Representative Alan Grayson took the step of filing an ethics complaint, calling the committee "the new McCarthyism" and alleging that it violates both House rules and federal law by using official funds for political purposes.[101] Richard L. Hanna, a Republican representative from New York,[102] and conservative pundit Bill O'Reilly acknowledged the partisan nature of the committee.[103]

In October 2015, Bradley F. Podliska, who had recently been fired as a staffer on the committee, said that the purpose of the committee is political and that he was fired for not focusing his research on Clinton.[104]

Clinton's testimony at public hearing

File:House Select Committee on Benghazi.png
House Select Committee on Benghazi - Hillary Clinton public hearing

On October 22, 2015, Clinton testified before the Committee and answered members' questions for more than eight hours before the Committee in a public hearing.[105][105][106][107]

The New York Times reported that "the long day of often-testy exchanges between committee members and their prominent witness revealed little new information about an episode that has been the subject of seven previous investigations...Perhaps stung by recent admissions that the pursuit of Mrs. Clinton's emails was politically motivated, Republican lawmakers on the panel for the most part avoided any mention of her use of a private email server."[105] The email issue did arise shortly before lunch, in a "a shouting match" between Republican committee chair Trey Gowdy and two Democrats, Adam Schiff and Elijah Cummings.[105] Late in the hearing, Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, accused Clinton of changing her accounts of the email service, leading to a "heated exchange" in which Clinton "repeated that she had made a mistake in using a private email account, but maintained that she had never sent or received anything marked classified and had sought to be transparent by publicly releasing her emails."[105]

Responses and analysis

Clinton's initial response

Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill defended Clinton's use of the personal server and email accounts as being in compliance with the "letter and spirit of the rules." Clinton herself stated that she had done so only as a matter of "convenience."[108]

VOA News video on Clinton email controversy

On March 10, 2015, while attending a conference at the United Nations Headquarters in Manhattan, Clinton spoke with reporters for about 20 minutes.[109] Clinton said that she had used a private email for convenience, because she did not want to carry two phones.[110][111] She said that her staff would be turning over copies of 30,000 emails from her private server from her time at the State Department that she believed belonged in the public domain. She said that they had deleted another 32,000 emails from the server from that same time period, that she regarded as personal and private.[112] It was later determined that Clinton had used both an iPad and a BlackBerry while Secretary of State.[110][113][114][115]

Republican response

Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus said, in a statement regarding the June 30 email releases, "These emails ... are just the tip of the iceberg, and we will never get full disclosure until Hillary Clinton releases her secret server for an independent investigation."[53] Gowdy, a Republican, said on June 29, 2015 that he would press the State Department for a fuller accounting of Clinton’s emails, after the Benghazi panel obtained 15 additional emails to Sidney Blumenthal that the department had not provided to the Committee.[116]

On September 12, 2015, Republican Senators Charles Grassley and Ron Johnson, chairmen of the Senate Judiciary and Homeland Security committees, respectively, said they will seek an independent review of the deleted emails, if they are recovered from Clinton's server, to determine if there are any government related items among those deleted.[87] The Justice Department (DOJ), on behalf of the State Department has argued that personal emails are not federal records, that courts lack the jurisdiction to demand their preservation, and defended Clinton's email practices in a court filing on September 9, 2015. DOJ lawyers argued that federal employees, including Clinton, are allowed to discard personal emails provided they preserve those pertaining to public business. "There is no question that former Secretary Clinton had authority to delete personal emails without agency supervision — she appropriately could have done so even if she were working on a government server," the DOJ lawyers wrote in their filing.[87]

Democratic response

Democrats downplayed the significance of Clinton's private email account, saying her use of personal email has been public knowledge for years, and that follows a pattern of use by previous secretaries of state.[64]

In August 2015, the New York Times reported on "interviews with more than 75 Democratic governors, lawmakers, candidates and party members" on the email issue.[117] The Times reported that "None of the Democrats interviewed went so far as to suggest that the email issue raised concerns about Mrs. Clinton's ability to serve as president, and many expressed a belief that it had been manufactured by Republicans in Congress and other adversaries."[117] At the same time, many Democratic leaders showed increasing frustration among party leaders of Clinton's handling of the email issue.[117] For example, Edward G. Rendell, former governor of Pennsylvania, a Clinton supporter, said that a failure of the Clinton campaign to get ahead of the issue early on meant that the campaign was "left just playing defense."[117] Other prominent Democrats, such as Governor Dannel P. Malloy of Connecticut, were less concerned, noting that the campaign was at an early stage and that attacks on Clinton were to be expected.[117]

At the October 2015 primary debate, Clinton's chief rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, defended Clinton, saying: "Let me say this. Let me say something that may not be great politics. But I think the secretary is right. And that is that the American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails!" Clinton responded: "Thank you. Me too. Me too." Clinton and Sanders shook hands on stage.[118][119] According to the Los Angeles Times: "The crowd went wild. So did the Internet."[118][119] Sanders later said that "real issues" such as paid family and medical leave, college affordability, and campaign finance reform "are more important than Hillary Clinton's emails."[119]

Later responses by Clinton

Clinton's responses to the question, made during her presidential campaign, have evolved over time.[70][120] Clinton initially said that there was no classified material on her server.[70] Later, after a government review discovered some of her emails contained classified information, she said she never sent or received information that was marked classified.[70] Her campaign also said that other emails contained information that is now classified, but was retroactively classified by U.S. intelligence agencies after Clinton had received the material.[121] Campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said: "She was at worst a passive recipient of unwitting information that subsequently became deemed as classified."[121] Clinton campaign spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri has "stressed that Clinton was permitted to use her own email account as a government employee and that the same process concerning classification reviews would still be taking place had she used the standard 'state.gov' email account used by most department employees."[74][122] Downplaying the seriousness of the events, Palmieri said: "Look, this kind of nonsense comes with the territory of running for president. We know it, Hillary knows it, and we expect it to continue from now until Election Day."[7]

In her first national interview of the 2016 presidential race, on July 7, 2015, Clinton was asked by CNN's Brianna Keilar about her use of private email accounts while serving as Secretary of State. She said:

Everything I did was permitted. There was no law. There was no regulation. There was nothing that did not give me the full authority to decide how I was going to communicate. Previous secretaries of state have said they did the same thing…. Everything I did was permitted by law and regulation. I had one device. When I mailed anybody in the government, it would go into the government system.[123]

On September 9, 2015, Clinton apologized during an ABC News interview for using the private server, saying she was "sorry for that."[124]

Appearing on NBC's Meet the Press on September 27, 2015, Clinton defended her use of the private email server while she was secretary of state, comparing the investigations to Republican-led probes of her husband's presidential administration more than two decades ago, saying, "It is like a drip, drip, drip. And that's why I said, there's only so much that I can control".[125]

White House response

On October 11, 2015, President Obama commented in a 60 Minutes interview that the emails were a "legitimate issue" but that he did not think that Clinton's use of the private server endangered national security. Obama added: "I think she'd be the first to acknowledge that maybe she could have handled the original decision better and the disclosures more quickly."[126] Obama said that public officials should be more sensitive about how they handle information and personal data, yet that the criticism of Clinton had been primarily "ginned up" because of politics.[126]

According to FBI officials, investigators have not reached any conclusions yet about whether the information on Clinton's server was compromised, or whether to recommend charges, but were concerned that the President's comments made it sound as if he had already determined the answers to their questions, and had cleared anyone involved of wrongdoing.[127] FBI director James Comey acknowledged the difficulties posed by the email investigation, saying that one reason he has a 10-year term is "to make sure this organization stays outside of politics." Comey added: "If you know my folks, you know they don't give a rip about politics."[127][128]

Comparisons and media coverage

Media commentators have made drawn comparisons of Clinton's email usage to past political controversies.[129] Pacific Standard Magazine published an article in May 2015, comparing email controversy and her response to it with the Whitewater investigation 20 years earlier.[130]

In August 2015, Washington Post associate editor and investigative journalist Bob Woodward, when asked about Clinton's handling of her emails, said "they remind him of the Nixon tapes" from the Watergate scandal.[131] On March 9, 2015, Dana Milbank of the Chicago Tribune wrote that the "email fiasco shows that she's her own worst enemy", pointing out that Clinton herself had justifiably criticized the George W. Bush administration in 2007 for its "secret" White House email accounts.[132]

On Fox News Sunday, political analyst Juan Williams contrasted the media coverage of Clinton's emails to the coverage of the 2007 Bush White House email controversy.[133]

Public opinion

In a YouGov poll of American adults conducted from October 15–16, 2015, 57% of respondents said presidential candidate Bernie Sanders' statement that "the American people are sick and tired of hearing about Hillary Clinton's damn emails" was "probably true," while 30% said it as probably false, and 13% were not sure. Responses differed by party identification: 82% of Democrats, 51% of independents, and 38% of Republicans said that the statement was "probably true." The same poll showed that 48% of Americans believed the story was getting too much attention from the media, while 25% believed that it was not getting enough attention, and 15% believed the media is getting the balance right.[134]

A Monmouth University Polling Institute poll of American adults conducted from October 15–18, 2015, showed that 59% were "tired of hearing about Clinton's emails," while 32% said that "this is something the media should continue to cover," and 10% were unsure. The majority of respondents (52%) believed that Clinton used a personal email account as "a matter of convenience," while a minority (33%) said it was because she had "something to hide."[135][136]

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