During the campaign, I tried endlessly to explain that I’d acted in good faith. I tried to apologize, though I knew the attacks being lobbed at me were untrue or wildly overstated, and motivated by partisan politics. Sometimes I dove deep into the tedious details. Other times I tried to rise above it all. Once I even told a bad joke. No matter what, I never found the right words. So let me try again:
It was a dumb mistake.
But an even dumber “scandal.”
It was like quicksand: the more you struggle, the deeper you sink. At times, I thought I must be going crazy. Other times, I was sure it was the world that had gone nuts. Sometimes I snapped at my staff. I was tempted to make voodoo dolls of certain members of the press and Congress and stick them full of pins. Mostly, I was furious at myself.
Given my inability to explain this mess, I decided to let other voices tell the story this time. I hope that it helps to better connect the dots and explain what did and, equally important, didn’t happen.
Nothing can undo what’s done, but it does help with my frustration—and that’s clearly good for my mental health!
Our best information is that she set it up as a matter of convenience.
—FBI Director Jim Comey, in congressional testimony, July 7, 2016
Yes, it was supposed to be convenient. Some doubted that explanation. But that’s what the FBI concluded after months of investigation. And it’s the truth.
A lot of young people today are used to carrying around multiple devices and having both a personal phone and one provided by their work. But I’m not a digital native. (I couldn’t even have told you what that term meant until fairly recently.) I didn’t send a single email while I was in the White House as First Lady or during most of my first term in the U.S. Senate. I’ve never used a computer at home or at work. It was not until about 2006 that I began sending and receiving emails on a BlackBerry phone. I had a plain old AT&T account like millions of other people, and used it both for work and personal email. That was my system, and it worked for me.
Adding another email account when I became Secretary of State would have meant juggling a second phone, since both accounts could not be on the same State Department device. I knew that former Secretary of State Colin Powell had used personal email exclusively. I also knew that email wasn’t where the bulk of a Secretary’s work was done. All this added up to me not giving this much thought when I took office—there was a lot else going on—although, of course, I now wish I had.
In early 2009, I moved my email account from AT&T’s server to one that my husband’s office had previously set up in our Chappaqua home, which is guarded by the Secret Service. People have asked, “Why did you set up that server?” But the answer is that I didn’t; the system was already there. My husband had been using an office server for years and had recently upgraded it. It made sense to me to have my email account on that same system. So I just moved my account onto it. I could keep using my BlackBerry in exactly the same way as I always had.
I emailed regularly with Chelsea and with Bill’s team—he does not personally use email, and we are still phone people—and with relatives and friends. But very little of my work was via email during the next four hectic years. I held lots of meetings, talked on the telephone (on both regular and secure lines), read stacks of briefing papers, and traveled nearly a million miles to 112 countries to see people face-to-face.
When we went back later on and collected all my work-related emails, we found a lot like this:
From:
H
To:
John Podesta
Sent:
Sunday, September 20, 2009 10:28 PM
Subject:
Re: When could we talk?
I’m on endless calls about the UN. Could I call you early tomorrow? Would btw 6:30 and 8:00 be too early? Please wear socks to bed to keep your feet warm.
Yes, that’s me telling my friend John to wear warm socks. Or, there’s this one, where I struggle to use my fax machine:
From:
H
To:
Huma Abedin
Sent:
Wednesday, December 23, 2009 2:50 PM
Subject:
Re: can you hang up the fax line, they will call again and try fax
I did.
—Original Message—
From:
Huma Abedin
To:
H
Sent:
Wed Dec 23 14:43:02 2009
Subject:
Re: can you hang up the fax line, they will call again and try fax
Yes but hang up one more time. So they can reestablish the line.
—Original Message—
From:
H
To:
Huma Abedin
Sent:
Wed Dec 23 14:39:39 2009
Subject:
Re: can you hang up the fax line, they will call again and try fax
I thought it was supposed to be off hook to work?
Here’s one more that still makes me chuckle:
From:
H
To:
Huma Abedin
Sent:
Wednesday, February 10, 2010 3:19 PM
Subject:
Re: Diane Watson to retire
I’d like to call her.
But right now I’m fighting w the WH operator who doesn’t believe I am who I say and wants my direct office line even tho I’m not there and I just [gave] him my home # and the State Dept # and I told him I had no idea what my direct office # was since I didn’t call myself and I just hung up and am calling thru Ops like a proper and properly dependent Secretary [of] State—no independent dialing allowed.
In the end, what was meant to be convenient turned out to be anything but. If I had known all that at the time, there’s no question I would have chosen a different system. Just about anything would have been better. Carving messages in stone and lugging them around town would have been better.
Laws and regulations did not prohibit employees from using their personal email accounts for the conduct of official Department business.
—Report by the State Department Inspector General, May 2016
Sounds definitive, right? Every department in the federal government has an internal Inspector General who oversees legal and regulatory compliance. The State Department Inspector General and his top aides, one of whom had formerly worked for Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, were no friends of mine. They looked for every opportunity to be critical. Yet when they examined all the rules in place when I was Secretary of State, they came to the above conclusion. There was a lot of confusion and consternation in the press about this question—in part because some of the rules changed after I left office. But as the Inspector General of the State Department spokesman confirmed: there was no prohibition on using personal email.
Prior to Secretary Kerry, no Secretary of State used a state.gov email address.
—Karin Lang, the career diplomat responsible for managing the staff supporting the Secretary of State, in a June 2016 deposition
The use of private email didn’t start with me. It also didn’t end with me. Colin Powell exclusively used an AOL account. Secretary Kerry, who was the first Secretary of State to use a government email address, has said that he continued using his preexisting personal email for official business well into 2015. None of this was particularly remarkable. Nor was it a secret. I corresponded with more than a hundred government officials from my personal email account, including the President and other White House officials. The IT staff at the State Department often assisted me in using my BlackBerry, particularly when they realized how technologically challenged I was.
As for record keeping, because the overwhelming number of people with whom I was exchanging work-related emails were government personnel on their “.gov” email addresses, I had every reason to think the messages I sent should have been captured by the government’s servers, archived, and
made available for Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
With respect to potential computer intrusion by hostile actors, we did not find direct evidence that Secretary Clinton’s personal email domain, in its various configurations since 2009, was successfully hacked.
—FBI Director Jim Comey, in a press conference on July 5, 2016
A lot of people suggested that the server maintained by my husband’s office might be vulnerable to hacking. As it turned out, the State Department network and many other highly sensitive government systems, including at the White House and the Pentagon, were all hacked. Colin Powell’s emails were hacked. But, as Comey stated, there has never been any evidence that my system was ever compromised. Ironically, it turns out it may have been one of the safest possible places for my email.
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.
—Republican Majority Leader Representative Kevin McCarthy, on Fox News, September 29, 2015
Here’s where the story takes a turn into the partisan swamp. Republicans spent years shamelessly trying to score political points off the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, in September 2012. It was a tragedy, and I lay awake at night racking my brain about what more could have been done to stop it. After previous tragedies, including the bombings of our embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 that killed 241 Americans, and the bombings of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 that killed 12 Americans and hundreds of Africans, there were good-faith bipartisan efforts to learn lessons and improve security. But after the attacks in Benghazi, Republicans turned the deaths of four brave Americans into a partisan farce. They weren’t satisfied that seven congressional investigations (five of them led by Republicans) and an independent review board conducted thorough factual reviews and concluded that neither President Obama nor I were personally to blame for the tragedy. The Republican committee chairmen had done their jobs, but their leaders weren’t satisfied. They wanted to score more political points. So they set up a “new” special committee to damage me as much as possible.
As Kevin McCarthy, the number two House Republican, explained in his moment of rare and unintentional candor, something had to be done to hurt me. He was also trying to become Speaker and needed to impress the right wing.
It wasn’t until October 2015 that the Republicans finally asked me to testify. By then, the investigation into the terrorist attack had long since been overshadowed by their obsession with my emails. The Republicans running the committee had scrapped ten planned hearings about security and other issues, and instead focused solely on me. I had already testified about the attack in both the House and the Senate in 2013, so there wasn’t much new ground to cover. Nonetheless, I answered questions for eleven hours. As overtly partisan as the whole exercise was, I was happy to have the chance to set the record straight.
The Republicans had delivered a massive binder of emails and memos to me just before the hearing began, warning that they planned to ask about any or all of them. Some I’d never seen before. The questioners tried to outdo one another in search of a “Gotcha!” moment that would play on the news. It was all a little ham-handed. One Congressman pointed portentously to a paragraph in one of my emails, insisting it contained some damning revelation of wrongdoing. I directed his attention to the next paragraph, which proved the opposite. And so it went.
Afterward, the Republican chairman Trey Gowdy sheepishly admitted the whole exercise had failed to achieve much of anything. When asked what new information had emerged over eleven hours of grilling, he paused for several seconds and then couldn’t come up with anything. I was down the hall in a small conference room, where I hugged my staff, who had labored so hard to prepare me for the hearing. I invited them back to my house in Northwest Washington, where we ate takeout Indian food and decompressed.
The press agreed that the committee was a bust for the Republicans. But I was experienced enough in the ways of Washington scandals to know that some damage had already been done. Accusations repeated often enough have a way of sticking, or at least leaving behind a residue of slime you can never wipe off.
There is no question that former Secretary Clinton had authority to delete personal emails without agency supervision.
—Department of Justice court filing, September 2015
The Benghazi Committee sent the State Department a blizzard of requests for documents. In August 2014, among 15,000 pages of emails provided to the committee were eight emails to or from me. At the time, nobody raised any questions to me about why I was using a non-state.gov account.
A few months later, during the fall of 2014, the State Department, in an attempt to complete its record keeping, sent a letter to each of the four previous Secretaries of State—me, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Madeleine Albright—for copies of all work emails we might still have in our possession. None of the other Secretaries produced anything. Nothing about weapons of mass destruction and the deliberations that led up to the Iraq War. Nothing about the fallout over the mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison or the use of torture. Nothing at all. Madeleine said she never used email at the State Department. Neither did Condi, although senior aides of hers used personal email accounts. Powell said he didn’t keep any of his emails.
I directed my attorneys to collect and provide to the department any messages I had that could conceivably be considered related to official business. That came to more than 30,000 emails. They were intentionally expansive in what they determined to be work related. The State Department and the National Archives and Records Administration later determined that 1,258 of them were, in fact, purely personal, and did not need to be provided to the department.
More than 30,000 emails sounds like a lot. But that’s over four years, and a lot of those consisted of “Thx,” or “Pls Print”—or no reply at all. One of my aides once calculated the average number of emails he sent and received every day. Over four years, it was hundreds of thousands. That helps put the numbers in context.
Another 31,000 of the emails I had were personal and not related in any way to my job as Secretary of State. I got a lot of grief for saying they were about yoga sessions and wedding planning. But these messages also included communications with lawyers and doctors, information about my mother’s estate, reports from family and friends about things happening in their personal lives, both happy and sad—in short, clearly private personal content. Naturally I didn’t want strangers reading them.
So we checked to make sure we were following the rules, providing every relevant email I had, and deleted the personal ones.
Critics later pounced on the fact that I deleted my personal emails and accused me of acting improperly. But as the Justice Department said, the rules were clear, and they would have applied to personal emails sent on a government account as well. And for good reason: nobody wants his or her personal emails made public.
Lock her up!
—Trump advisor Michael Flynn at the Republican National Convention, July 18, 2016
This quote could have been pulled from nearly any Trump rally of the entire campaign, but there’s a certain poetic justice now in remembering how enthusiastic Michael Flynn was about sending me to jail.
The endless chants of “Lock her up!” once again exposed the viciousness of the Republican smear merchants and their most devoted followers. It was all depressingly familiar. For decades, political adversaries have accused me of every crime under the sun—even murder—and promised that I’d end up in jail one day.
You’d think that this history might have prompted fair-minded journalists to hesitate before setting off on another scandal jamboree. Or that voters might look at a long pattern of false accusations and be skeptical of new claims. But you’d be wrong. The vaguely remembered history of past pseudoscandals ended up reinforcing the general perception that “something shady must be going
on with her” and fueling the much-discussed phenomenon of “Clinton fatigue.”
Throughout the 2016 campaign, I watched how lies insinuate themselves into people’s brains if hammered often enough. Fact checking is powerless to stop it. Friends of mine who made calls or knocked on doors for me would talk to people who said they couldn’t vote for me because I had killed someone, sold drugs, and committed any number of unreported crimes, including how I handled my emails. The attacks were repeated so frequently that many people took it as an article of faith that I must have done something wrong.
The hysteria over emails kicked off in earnest in March 2015. On a Saturday night, my attorney, David Kendall, received an email from the New York Times asking several questions about my email practices and asking for responses “by late Sunday or early Monday at the latest.” We scrambled to answer as many of the Times’s questions as we could. Clearly something was up. The Times article appeared online late Monday, March 2, with the headline “Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email Account at State Dept., Possibly Breaking Rules.”
As the Inspector General’s report eventually made clear, this was baloney. The Times observed darkly: “The revelation about the private email account echoes long-standing criticisms directed at both the former Secretary and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, for a lack of transparency and inclination toward secrecy.” It wasn’t until the eighth paragraph that the story noted, “Mrs. Clinton is not the first government official—or first Secretary of State—to use a personal email account on which to conduct official business.”
The Times’s argument was that using personal email reinforced the narrative that I had a penchant for secrecy, but I’ve always found that charge odd. People know more about me and Bill than anybody in public life. We’ve made public thirty-eight years of our tax returns (thirty-eight years more than a certain someone), all my State Department emails, the Clinton Foundation tax returns and donors, medical information—yet we were secretive? When we sometimes did draw a line after going further than anyone in public life to be transparent, we didn’t do it to be secretive—we did it to keep ourselves sane. Not to mention that someone trying to keep her email secret would be pretty dumb to use @clintonemail.com!
What Happened Page 29