by David Brock
She supported progressive tax policies and opposed the Bush tax cuts that were tilted toward the top. She worked to expand access to early childhood education for children in low-income families. She introduced bills to expand the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) she helped create as First Lady.
Indeed, while Hillary’s attempt to spearhead the passage of universal health-care legislation during the first Clinton administration—an unusually substantive role for a First Lady—may have fallen short, it not only resulted in the development of CHIP but also helped lay the groundwork for the passage of the Affordable Care Act fifteen years later. In a fair telling of the story, Hillary would be remembered not for the initial failure in 1994, but for the progress she helped make toward the ultimate goal achieved in 2010.
Meanwhile, her commitment to economic justice dates all the way back to her time as a private citizen, when she joined the Children’s Defense Fund straight out of law school rather than seek a more lucrative job with a big law firm.
If conservatives—or liberals for that matter—are hoping to drive a wedge between Hillary and the Democratic base, they’re going to have to use something other than her actual positions to do it.
And if they are hoping to cast Hillary’s progressive economic message as fraudulent so they can lay claim to populism in 2016, they’re going to have to ignore or negate a personal story that makes Hillary instantly relatable to middle-class voters; a long public record of advocating for income equality; and a platform that is fully in line with the needs of today’s working families.
At that EMILY’s List event, Hillary told a story about waiting with her family for her granddaughter, Charlotte, to be born:
When Bill and I were at the hospital waiting for our granddaughter to make her grand entrance, one of the nurses there said to me, “Thank you for fighting for paid leave.” And I looked at her and thought, here she is taking care of other people’s babies, and having to worry about what happens when her child gets sick, and how she makes all of that work.
Her words stayed with me. I remember being a young mother and having all the balancing acts that we all have to do. I remember one morning getting ready to go to court, and my babysitter was sick, and my daughter was sick, and I was calling desperately to find somebody to come.
I finally found a friend who came and stayed, thankfully, but it just made me so sick inside, because I had to leave my daughter. And I rushed home after I finished in court, and Chelsea was fine, sitting there with my friend, and for the first time all day, my heart stopped aching.
That was one day for me—but for so many moms and dads, that ache is with them every day. That’s what the nurse was talking about. That’s what we have to stand up for.
Hillary Clinton is not Saul Alinsky, though she wrote her college honors paper about him and corresponded with him. She is not Elizabeth Warren, though she supports many of Warren’s reforms. And she is certainly not Mitt Romney. She is a woman who grew up middle-class and has always stayed true to those roots. She is a leader who has always stayed focused on issues affecting children and families. And she is the strongest possible messenger for a progressive vision of a fair and secure economy that works for all Americans—a message that Republicans will do anything to stop her from delivering.
Chapter Eleven
E-mails: The Times Strikes Again
If you can’t win the argument, try to disqualify your opponent. For two decades, that’s been a major component of the right’s war on Bill and Hillary Clinton. They’ve never been able to compete with the Clintons’ political skills, with their popularity, with their ideas—so they’ve staked their hopes on scandalmongering.
Over the past few chapters, we’ve looked at how Republicans are attacking Hillary’s candidacy for president, hoping to turn her greatest strengths against her, and how they’re trying to destroy her credibility on an issue that will be at the core of her message, an issue on which the right simply can’t compete.
In their hearts, however, conservatives know that their best hope for beating Hillary is to drag the campaign down into the mud. It would be nice if they could find a diamond in that dirt, some disqualifying scandal that could turn voters against her overnight or even force her from the race. They’ve been looking for that scandal for twenty-five years, and the Clintons have survived every attack. The Clintons’ resilience, in fact, has become a part of their political appeal in a nation that sees itself as resilient.
But the new scandalmongering strategy no longer relies on actually finding a scandal. A conviction would be great, but conservatives are in the business of collecting indictments; for the scandal launderers, the journey has become the destination.
For example, take a look at a Bloomberg News story that ran in January 2015. Here’s the lead paragraph:
Hillary Clinton took more than 200 privately chartered flights at taxpayer expense during her eight years in the U.S. Senate, sometimes using the jets of corporations and major campaign donors as she racked up $225,756 in flight costs.
If you stopped reading the story there, you might think that Bloomberg had unearthed something really damaging. That’s a lot of money—and at taxpayer expense, too! But if you read on, you learn a few more things, like:
Clinton, 67, the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, reported the travel in official filings with the Senate.
And:
There is no evidence her Senate trips, which ranged in cost from less than $200 to upwards of $3,000 per flight, ran afoul of Senate rules, which were tightened by a 2007 ethics law.
And:
The records were provided to Bloomberg News by a Republican operative.
What’s really going on here? Hillary did nothing wrong, or even unusual, as the article itself acknowledges:
The flights fell within congressional rules and were not out of the ordinary for senators at the time.
Indeed, the “story” here is a story about completely routine activity, disclosed in complete accordance with the rules.
True, it’s unlikely that we’ll hear much more about these flights, but from the right’s perspective, that’s okay—it contributes to the sense that “scandal surrounds her,” as Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said. And, even better, as the article helpfully notes, the story “could play into the emerging Republican line of attack that Clinton’s wealth and years in government office have left her out of touch with the voters she’ll court on the campaign trail.”
So, whichever Republican operative pitched it to Bloomberg had a good day when this article was published. And the next morning, he or she was right back at it, pitching an infinite number of paper-thin claims to an infinite number of reporters needing to fill an infinite number of column inches and website pixels, each of them desperate for any new nugget of Hillary news, each of them wanting to be the one who breaks the story that finally brings her down.
That’s the other piece of the scandal story: As eager as conservatives are to bring Hillary up on charges of impropriety, the political press corps is like the grand jury who will happily indict a ham sandwich. The media shares conservatives’ belief that, somewhere out there, there’s a disqualifying scandal—and, if not, that the constant din of pseudoscandal is itself a story worth chasing. There is almost nothing you can say about Hillary that the press won’t believe long enough to at least report out the story, thus giving it oxygen and the sheen of legitimacy.
And if all else fails, there’s always the Daily Caller.
It was Monday evening, March 2, 2015, when my inbox exploded.
The New York Times had just published a story by Michael Schmidt, and, at first glance, it looked bad:
HILLARY CLINTON USED PERSONAL EMAIL ACCOUNT AT STATE DEPT., POSSIBLY BREAKING RULES
WASHINGTON—Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may hav
e violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record.
Mrs. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act.
It was only two months ago, in response to a new State Department effort to comply with federal record-keeping practices, that Mrs. Clinton’s advisers reviewed tens of thousands of pages of her personal emails and decided which ones to turn over to the State Department.
The article even included a juicy quote:
“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,” said Jason R. Baron, a lawyer at Drinker Biddle & Reath who is a former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration.
The fact that Hillary used a personal e-mail account had been known for a couple of years, ever since Gawker published a story about it back in 2013. But on Twitter, even steadfast Democrats were freaking out. No government e-mail address? Violating federal law?
Those two words in the headline—BREAKING RULES—were ominous. And conservatives were already crowing, not just about the possibility that Hillary might actually be in trouble this time, but about the way the story fit into their caricature of her as calculating and secretive, someone who put her own political well-being above everything else—even, possibly, our national security; was she conducting diplomacy via Gmail?!?!
Schmidt made sure to underscore that GOP talking point with an editorial comment of his own:
The revelation about the private email account echoes longstanding criticisms directed at both the former secretary and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, for a lack of transparency and inclination toward secrecy.
On top of that, Jeb Bush (whose new communications director was Tim Miller, formerly of America Rising) had publicly and with great fanfare published his own e-mail archives online—the contrast was unmistakable, and if you missed it, Schmidt helpfully reminded you of that, too.
Worst of all, while careful readers could tell that Schmidt’s story was sourced to the Republican Committee investigating Benghazi, it hadn’t made its first appearance on Fox or in the Washington Free Beacon, but was more artfully planted in the paper of record. A story in the New York Times gets, essentially, an automatic pass into the next day’s news cycle—no outlet has the same power to command every reporter and pundit’s attention. Republicans could use the paper’s credibility for their own ends (“even the liberal New York Times”). And Democrats and liberals, for whom the Times is viewed as a reliable source of information, could be counted on to be especially shaken by the revelation.
In short, this was a big deal.
Reading the piece on my phone, I had no idea how much of it was true, nor how much of what was true was actually damaging. All I had to go on was a quote in the article from Nick Merrill, Hillary’s personal spokesman, asserting that she had complied with the “letter and spirit of the rules.”
In fact, I would have had a lot more to go on if the Times had published the meat of Merrill’s statement. And Times readers, as well, would have had a much better understanding of the issues at play.
Merrill had told the Times that previous secretaries of state had used personal e-mail accounts when conducting official business. He told the Times that when sending work e-mails from her personal account, Hillary e-mailed other officials on their work accounts, so that those e-mails would be retained by the government. And most important, he told the Times that use of personal e-mail accounts was permissible under federal rules, so long as work-related e-mails were retained, which Hillary did. In other words, if Merrill was right on his last point, the Times’ central allegation was based on a wrong interpretation of the relevant statues.
Why did the Times edit out such critical information, cutting Merrill’s statement down so drastically?
}As Schmidt’s story was being put to bed, with its false hint of criminality trumpeted in an accusatory headline, Times editor Ryan held forth to colleagues that the response from the Clinton spokesman had been edited down to just a few stray phrases because she—Carolyn Ryan—believed it was a lie—and that the Clintons just lie.
Over the course of the evening, though, as other outlets tried to chase the New York Times report and I huddled with my staff on conference calls, it became clear that the Times had a more glaring problem than Hillary probably did. The Times, it turned out, not the Clinton spokesman, was the one lying.
First, and most important, the claim that Hillary had violated the law was wholly unsupported by anything Schmidt had reported.
The article referred to “federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record,” part of the Federal Records Act. But some quick research showed that the rules the Times suggested were broken were not in place when Hillary was secretary of state. The Presidential and Federal Records Act Amendments of 2014, which declared that official messages sent on personal accounts must be copied or forwarded to official accounts for record keeping, did not become law until more than eighteen months after she had left the State Department. The rules that were in effect during Hillary’s tenure at State did not require real-time archiving into State’s system, only that relevant records be retained and preserved, which Hillary clearly did.
In other words: The rule Schmidt was accusing Hillary of breaking wasn’t a rule at all when he suggested she broke it.
Knowing these facts, the story was starting to make a little more sense. That “new State Department effort to comply with federal record-keeping practices” two months earlier had been a response to the new law. The State Department had, as part of an update to its record preservation policies, asked every former secretary of state dating back to Madeleine Albright to provide records (including e-mails) from their time in office. In response, Hillary had sent more than fifty-five thousand pages of e-mails to be archived.
Within hours of the story’s publication, it was obvious that its central claim—that Hillary had possibly broken the law—was false. This alone should have been grounds for a retraction, or at least a prominent correction. By Tuesday morning, when the story appeared above the fold on the front page of the Times print edition with the subhead LACK OF ARCHIVING MAY BREAK FEDERAL RULES, we discovered more problems with it:
The initial version that went online reported that Hillary had provided the e-mails to one of the congressional committees engaged in the Benghazi witch hunt. But the story was later updated to make it clear that she voluntarily submitted e-mails sent from her account after the State Department first sought them as part of updating its records to comply with the new regulations. The Times never explained how Schmidt got that wrong.
Far down in the story, Schmidt noted that Hillary’s successor, John Kerry, used a government e-mail account. But while Schmidt relayed this fact in an MSNBC interview the next morning, his original story didn’t tell readers that Kerry was, in fact, the first secretary of state ever to rely primarily on official State Department e-mail.
Schmidt wrote, “Before the current regulations went into effect, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell… used personal email to communicate with American officials and ambassadors and foreign leaders.” This let Powell off the hook—but if that was right Hillary should have been in the clear, too: Her use of personal e-mail also came “before the current regulations went into effect.”
And that quote from Hillary’s spokesman? The full quote was missing from the lengthy article. Schmidt was unable to find room for what Hillary’s spokesman actually said. Or did he just not want to undermine his jurcy premise? (Only later did I learn the quote was purposely truncated.)
Finally, the primary source
cited to indict Hillary’s use of a personal e-mail account, Jason “Nuclear Winter” Baron, flatly told CNN that he did not believe Hillary had violated the law. Did Schmidt not ask him that question? Or did Schmidt just not find the answer useful?
That Tuesday, March 3, it was the pundits’ turn to weigh in on the previous evening’s story, and the hot takes were flying. “This will feed the idea she’s hiding something,” said Dana Bash on CNN, comparing the story to Mitt Romney’s infamous “47 percent” tape. Her colleague, Brianna Keilar, speculated that the controversy might spark challenges from other Democrats. In the Washington Post, Ruth Marcus wrote, “The Clintons’ unfortunate tendency to be their own worst enemy is on display again.”
Democrats, meanwhile, awoke in full meltdown. Cable news was looking for guests to defend Hillary’s use of personal e-mail; at this early stage of the story, with so many questions unanswered and facts unknown, few volunteered.
But I did. Even though I didn’t yet have an answer to every question raised in the article, I did have plenty of evidence to show that the Times had misfired badly. The central allegation—that Hillary had broken federal rules—was unsupported by the story; no one, including the lead expert quoted in the story, was backing it up. That was ground we could fight on. I also focused on the fact that the story advanced the agenda of partisan sources in the GOP desperately searching for a way to keep the failed Benghazi investigation active.