by David Brock
Adding to my confidence level was my firsthand experience with many other stories just like this one.
I had seen it all before: the weakly supported accusations of wrongdoing, the feeding frenzy from a press corps hoping to write the Clintons’ political obituary, the braying on the right and the panic on the left. My instincts told me that if we just gave the story another poke or two, the whole house of cards would collapse.
So, that Tuesday morning, I assembled all the flaws we’d found in Michael Schmidt’s story and sent an open letter to the public editor of the New York Times asking for a prominent correction. And when those media bookers started calling around, looking for talkers, I told them to sign me up, doing four shows in one day.
Wednesday morning, I appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. Hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski were convinced that Hillary was done for, and somewhat incredulous that I was defending her so strongly: “The story,” I said, “was wrong. It’s based on a false premise.” (“I’m not sure what planet I’m on right now,” Mika marveled when I refused to admit that some law must have been broken.)
Bob Woodward, also on the panel, tried to get me to hedge: “Clearly, it was a good story. You may have some technical disagreements, but we get into this issue—were the walls green, is that really illegal and so forth, it’s an important story, won’t you concede that?”
But it wasn’t a good story. The central premise had fallen apart. So I held my ground. No hedging.
Instead, I reminded the audience of what was really going on: “Let’s not have a situation where the normal journalistic rules apply to everybody but Hillary Clinton. And let’s not forget that the real story here is, you’ve got a dying Benghazi investigation on Capitol Hill… they want a fishing expedition into these e-mails.”
I better understood the reluctance of my fellow Democrats to defend Hillary in that moment when the press notices on my appearances came in. Peggy Noonan called me a “weirdo.” The National Review Online would cite my “unique mélange of clownishness, self-interest, and hypercompetence,” suggesting that I was “taking the heat” for the Clintons like a “good and faithful servant.” And Fox News, commenting on my wavy gray locks, called me “Captain Crazy Hair.”
To Maureen Dowd, I was officially a Hillary “hatchet.” And according to the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Media Matters was now to be regarded as a “propaganda operation,” while American Bridge was Hillary’s “attack machine.”
The strangest comment, apparently meant to be an antigay slur, came from the National Review’s Jonah Goldberg, who fantasized about my taking orders from Hillary after “slinking” out of a “leather onesie.”
All of it was an unpleasant reminder that marginalizing Democrats who forcefully defend their own side—rather than seeking a “reasonable” middle ground and hedging the defense—was all part of the game. And so was the political media’s continuing overreaction, as the Sunday shows and op-ed columnists got their chance to weigh in on What It All Meant.
“This isn’t about the e-mails,” said Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter on Meet the Press, explaining that “it feeds into this narrative that she isn’t a change agent.”
On ABC’s This Week, Mark Halperin declared that he no longer considered her the favorite to be elected president because of the e-mail dustup. “Exhale,” urged copanelist Donna Brazile, the Democratic veteran. But Halperin was on a roll: “If this is the way she’s going to run her operation, if this is the mind-set she’s going to have, I don’t think she’s going to be president.”
CNN’s John King wrote a piece headlined HILLARY CLINTON’S EMAIL SCANDAL IS EXACTLY WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT FROM HER PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN.
“Secrecy. Shielding documents. Accusations of arrogance and hypocrisy. Debates about the letter and the spirit of the rules,” King wrote, adding, “We have seen this movie before.”
In other words, it was all the Clintons’ fault. “We do seem to have gotten back into the way-back machine,” said NPR’s Mara Liasson, “and revisited the Clintons’ penchant for scandals and controversy.” The “Clintons’ penchant”?
Yet, even as all this was in the air, my belief, based on facts, that Hillary had done nothing wrong, and that this would prove to be another fake scandal—grew stronger by the day. Mainstream media outlets had spent the week excitedly chasing the whiff of impropriety, only to end up having to walk back their own coverage when the facts came out:
In response to my open letter, Margaret Sullivan, the public editor of the New York Times, defended the Schmidt story in part, but acknowledged that it “should have been much clearer about precisely what regulations might have been violated.” While Times editor Carolyn Ryan and reporter Michael Schmidt, both name-checked by Sullivan, naturally described the story as “incredibly solid,” in Ryan’s words, Sullivan concluded:
“As the Times continues to cover Mrs. Clinton into 2016, it will be dealing with dozens of dust-ups like this one. It’s going to be a long campaign, and Clinton coverage inevitably will be microscopically examined and fraught with conflicting reaction.
“Attacks on the reporting will come no matter what. But the Times can do itself—and its readers—a lot of good by making sure that every story is airtight: solidly sourced, written with particular clarity and impartiality, and edited with a prosecutorial eye.”
The Associated Press alleged that a “homebrew” e-mail server based in Hillary’s house was traced “to a mysterious identity, Eric Hoteham.” The name Eric Hoteham, it was noted with an air of tantalizing mystery, did not appear in public records! Later, the AP had to acknowledge that “it was not immediately clear exactly where Clinton’s home computer server was run.” And the mysterious Eric Hoteham? That was just a misspelling of the name of Hillary’s aide who had handled the family’s IT needs, Eric Hothem.
The Washington Post reported that a State Department review was under way to determine whether Hillary’s use of a private e-mail account “violated policies designed to protect sensitive information.” Later, the article’s headline was changed, and its language updated, to reflect the fact that the investigation was into whether the e-mails could be safely released, not into whether Hillary had violated the rules.
Politico claimed that by using a private e-mail account, Hillary was at odds with a “clear cut” 2005 Foreign Affairs Manual that “warn officials against routine use of personal e-mail accounts for government work.” Later, the story was updated to quote a State Department official who explained that the 2005 policy was “limited to records containing… sensitive information,” adding, “Reports claiming that by using personal email she is automatically out of step of that FAM are inaccurate.”
With the hopes of finding some clear-cut wrongdoing fading quickly, the story became less about whether Hillary had broken the law and more about her alleged penchant for secrecy. We were no longer having a legal or ethical argument, we were now doing exactly what the Republicans wanted—baselessly trashing Hillary’s character even as she was calling for unprecedented transparency.
Two days after the story broke, Hillary had tweeted, “I want the public to see my email. I asked State to release them. They said they will review them for release as soon as possible.” And a week later, she held a press conference to answer questions from an antagonistic press corps incredulous that she wasn’t throwing herself on the mercy of the court.
As we watched her take the stage from our headquarters at American Bridge, we suddenly heard sirens—a literal fire drill was taking place in our office. People headed toward the exits. I stood up from my chair and raised the volume on my TV to drown out the alarms.
In front of a packed room of reporters, Hillary explained that using her personal e-mail account for official business was clearly allowed by the applicable laws and regulations—and that she made a practice of e-mailing government officials on their “.gov” accounts so that business e-mails she sent would be immediately captured and pres
erved in the State Department’s system, which went beyond what the law required. Moreover, Hillary made clear, even if she had used two accounts, she would have decided which e-mails were retained as government records and which ones were personal. Every government employee made the same decisions every day. Thus, the use of one e-mail address was obviously not some nefarious plot to keep certain communications secret, it was just a matter of personal convenience: Hillary had decided to work from one account rather than two so she would not have to carry a second device to keep in regular touch with family and friends.
Looking back, Hillary acknowledged, it would have been better just to have used two phones. But she had a solid answer for every question, and a nine-page document from her office helped to knock down many of the other false claims that had been made since the Times story was published. No, she had never sent or received classified material on her personal account—in fact, only once had she ever used it to correspond with any foreign official. No, her server was never hacked. No, no one ever gained access to it.
And, while she had chosen not to hang on to personal messages about Chelsea’s wedding plans and her yoga routines, Hillary had turned over for preservation and public examination the e-mail on her account that related to her duties as secretary of state, again going beyond what the law required.
Hillary went into detail about the process used to cull all the messages from her account that were related to official business:
First, any e-mail with a “.gov” address in any field was deemed official.
Next, her team searched for the first and last names of more than one hundred different officials—including potential misspellings of their names. Anything that matched went in the official bucket, as well.
Finally, a number of terms were specifically searched for—including “Benghazi” and “Libya.” Anything that matched went into the pile to be turned over.
In all, there were fifty-five thousand pages of such e-mails in the hands of the State Department. But how, the press howled, do we know that every relevant e-mail was turned over, that there weren’t more Hillary was hiding?
In reality, as Hillary suggested in her press conference, it was a question that could be asked of literally every government employee. After all, even if Hillary had used a “state.gov” e-mail address, what would have stopped her from sending and receiving other messages on her personal account? What would stop any government employee from keeping messages away from the prying eyes of the public by using a nonofficial account? And even if Hillary (or any government employee) turned over the entire contents of that nonofficial account, what was to say they didn’t delete something first?
It was literally a no-win situation. Hillary was being asked to prove a negative. And here, we finally got to the heart of the matter.
Because barely had Hillary finished her press conference when Representative Trey Gowdy (R-South Carolina), the chair of the new House Select Committee on Benghazi, issued a statement demanding that her private e-mail server be turned over in its entirety.
That’s right. Under the guise of their long-failed Benghazi witch hunt, Republicans now felt entitled to riffle through every e-mail Hillary Clinton had ever sent or received from her personal e-mail account: notes from Bill, private conversations with friends, the whole lot. Forget the fishing expedition; they wanted to dredge the whole damn lake.
Perhaps, I wrote in a USA Today op-ed, they could hire Ken Starr, the man who turned the Whitewater witch hunt into an investigation into the president’s private behavior, to snoop into Hillary’s private e-mail. No public official would ever be subject to such an outrageous invasion of privacy.
To prove the point, I demanded that Gowdy turn over all of his personal e-mails so the public could see whether there was anything juicy in there. And, while he was at it, why didn’t he have his staff turn over their personal e-mails, too?
I bet we could have some fun with their personal, private communications. But I’m quite sure that, if we got to see what Gowdy and the Republicans were really thinking, we’d find proof that this “scandal” has been about keeping the Benghazi hoax alive from Day One.
Once again, the New York Times got taken for a ride by the Clintons’ political enemies.
Writing of the Times e-mail scoop for Media Matters, Eric Boehlert put it this way: “And that’s the pattern we’ve seen unfold for twenty-plus years at the Times… The Times uncorks supposedly blockbuster allegations against a Clinton that are based on vague reporting that later turns out to be flimsy, but not before the rest of the Beltway media erupts in a guttural roar (led by sanctimonious Times columnists) and not before Republicans launch investigations designed to destroy the Clintons politically.”
And after setting all those wheels in motion, sure enough, by the end of that second week, the Times was quietly backpedaling. No longer was the paper of record standing by its bombshell alleging that Hillary “may have violated” federal law. Without ever correcting a word of the initial report, the paper was striking a different tone, explaining that the story was really about the confusion caused by new technology:
Hillary Rodham Clinton’s disclosure that she exclusively used a private email address while she was secretary of state and later deleted thousands of messages she deemed “personal” opens a big picture window into how vague federal email guidelines have been for the most senior government leaders.
In its initial report, the Times had claimed that Hillary’s “aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act.” Now the paper finally acknowledged that those rules for preserving emails in real time didn’t even exist until after she had left Foggy Bottom:
While many agencies’ current practice is to print and file emails deemed worthy of saving, an Obama administration directive in 2012 mandates that agencies must devise a system for retaining and preserving email records electronically by the end of 2016….
Mr. Obama signed legislation late last year requiring government officials who use personal email addresses for official business to bring those records into the government within 20 days. Before that, the National Archives and Records Administration simply required those messages at some point to be provided to the government.
Those passages represented, in effect, a retraction of the initial Schmidt story. But Times readers would never know it, unless they had been carefully parsing every word of the paper’s coverage all along. In this sneaky way, Schmidt, who was regarded by some colleagues as nothing but a messenger boy for the Republican Benghazi investigators, was able to cover his posterior, and no one was the wiser. The previous week, the Times had claimed that Hillary’s use of private e-mail was seen as “alarming” and a “serious breach.” Now it was being described as business as usual—and certainly not a breach of anything:
Members of President Obama’s cabinet have a wide variety of strategies, shortcuts and tricks for handling their email, and until three months ago there was no law setting out precisely what they had to do with it, and when. And while the majority of Obama administration officials use government email to conduct their business, there has never been any legal prohibition against using a personal account.
Meanwhile, we were learning that many, if not all, leading Republicans had held themselves to a far lower standard of transparency. Scott Walker’s County Executive office used a secret e-mail system in order to avoid public records disclosure laws, which, investigators determined, allowed him and his staff to engage in campaign work on county time. Chris Christie’s staff used private e-mails to conduct state business, and ignored reporters’ requests to view them. John Kasich kept a list of his staffers’ private e-mail addresses labeled “DO NOT DISTRIBUTE.” Mike Huckabee physically destroyed travel records and calendars and, yes, e-mails.
And then there was Jeb Bush. Recall that, in the original New York Times story, Michael Schmidt had held him up as a paragon of transparen
cy compared to Hillary:
And others who, like Mrs. Clinton, are eyeing a candidacy for the White House are stressing a very different approach. Jeb Bush, who is seeking the Republican nomination for president, released a trove of emails in December from his eight years as governor of Florida.
“Transparency matters,” Jeb had tweeted; Hillary’s “emails should be released.”
But he had only released 250,000 e-mails, less than one tenth of the 3 million he had received on a server that, like Hillary, he owned himself.
And then, just eleven days after Schmidt’s story, it emerged that, as the New York Times itself reported, “it took Mr. Bush seven years after leaving office to comply fully with a Florida public records statute requiring him to turn over emails he sent and received as governor, according to records released Friday.”
In fact, he had forked over the latest batch—twenty-five thousand e-mails—only when he was beginning to think about running for the White House. And that, it turns out, actually was breaking the law:
A Florida statute governing the preservation of public records requires elected officials, including the governor, to turn over records pertaining to official business “at the expiration of his or her term of office.”
“If they’ve been adding to it, it’s a technical violation of the law,” said Barbara A. Petersen, president of the First Amendment Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group in Florida that advocates access to government information.
She added, “The law clearly says you’re supposed to turn everything over at the end of your term in office.”
Jeb’s lawyers explained that they had only just found these e-mails. But, as the expert quoted in the story said, that smelled funny: “I can see how it might take six months or so, a year maybe, to locate all these records. But we are talking, what now, seven years?”