What Happened

by Clinton, Hillary Rodham

  The facts didn’t stop the hamster wheel of Washington scandal from spinning into rapid motion, as other media outlets sought to follow a story that must be important, because the New York Times had put it on the front page.

  In an effort to calm things down, two days after the Times article appeared, I called for the public release of all the emails I had provided the State Department. I knew that would be a level of transparency unheard of in public life. In fact, more of my emails are now publicly available than every other President, Vice President, and Cabinet Secretary in our country’s history combined. I had nothing to hide, and I thought that if the public actually read all of these thousands of messages, many people would see that my use of a personal account was never an attempt to cover up anything nefarious. The vast majority of the emails weren’t particularly newsworthy, which may be why the press focused on any gossipy nugget it could find and otherwise ignored the contents. There were no startling revelations, no dark secrets, no tales of wrongdoing or negligence. They did, however, reveal something I felt was worth seeing: the hard work and dedication of the men and women of the State Department.

  Once people did start reading, I was amused by some of the reactions, as I always am when people discover that I am, in fact, a real person. “I was one of the most ardent Hillary haters on the planet . . . until I read her emails,” one writer declared. “I discovered a Hillary Clinton I didn’t even know existed,” she continued, “a woman who cared about employees who lost loved ones . . . who, without exception, took time to write notes of condolence and notes of congratulations, no matter how busy she was . . . who could be a tough negotiator and firm in her expectations, but still had a moment to write a friend with encouragement in tough times.” Unfortunately, most people didn’t read the emails; they just knew what the press and the Republicans said about them, so they figured they must contain some dark, mysterious secrets.

  On March 10 I held a press conference. It wasn’t a pleasant experience. The press was ravenous, and I was rusty, having been out of partisan politics for several years. “Looking back, it would’ve been better if I’d simply used a second email account and carried a second phone,” I said. “But at the time, this didn’t seem like an issue.” That was true. And it didn’t satisfy anyone. Right then and there, I should have known there would never be some magical words to prove how silly it was and make it go away.

  Losing the story to another news outlet would have been a far, far better outcome than publishing an unfair story and damaging the Times’s reputation for accuracy.

  —New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan on July 27, 2015

  Late on July 23, 2015, the Times delivered another bombshell. A front-page article headlined “Criminal Inquiry Is Sought in Clinton Email Use” reported that two Inspector Generals had asked the DOJ “to open a criminal investigation into whether sensitive government information was mishandled in connection with the personal email account Hillary Rodham Clinton used as Secretary of State.” Now my campaign had to deal with questions about whether I was being measured for an orange jumpsuit.

  The Justice Department, however, clarified quickly that it had “received a referral related to the potential compromise of classified information” but “not a criminal referral.” The Times had to publish two corrections and an editor’s note explaining why it had “left readers with a confused picture.”

  Representative Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the Benghazi Committee, helped explain what happened: “I spoke personally to the State Department Inspector General on Thursday, and he said he never asked the Justice Department to launch a criminal investigation of Secretary Clinton’s email usage. Instead, he told me the Intelligence Community IG [Inspector General] notified the Justice Department and Congress that they identified classified information in a few emails that were part of the FOIA review, and that none of those emails had been previously marked as classified.”

  Looking back after the election, the Times described the mix-up as “a distinction without a difference,” because we now know that there was an investigation under way. But we also now know that there was a disagreement between the Department of Justice and the FBI about how to describe it appropriately. The DOJ’s approach, reflected in the clarification to the Times story issued by its spokesperson, was intended to adhere to the long-standing policy of not confirming or denying the existence of an investigation—a rule that Comey respected scrupulously when he refused to say anything at all about the investigation into possible ties between Russia and the Trump campaign. But when it came to my emails, he had plenty to say. Regardless, the Times got into trouble because it gave its readers only one side of the story. The paper’s Margaret Sullivan published a scathing postmortem headlined, “A Clinton Story Fraught with Inaccuracies: How It Happened and What Next?” Sullivan took the Times to task for its shoddy reporting. “You can’t put stories like this back in the bottle—they ripple through the entire news system,” she wrote. “It was, to put it mildly, a mess.”

  If all these respected, senior foreign service officers and experienced ambassadors are sending these emails, then this issue is not about how Hillary Clinton managed her email, but how the State Department communicates in the 21st century.

  —Phil Gordon, a former Assistant Secretary of State and National Security Council official, who had some of his emails to me classified retroactively, in the Times, May 10, 2016

  The Department of Justice’s investigation, and pretty much everything else that followed, turned on questions of classification. The issue was no longer using personal email on the job. The question now was what should be considered classified, and did I or anyone else intend to mishandle it?

  Despite its science-y name, classification isn’t a science. Five people asked to look at the same set of documents could easily come to five different decisions. We see this every day across the government as different agencies disagree about what information should be considered classified. When I was Secretary, it was not uncommon for one of our Foreign Service Officers talking to foreign diplomats and journalists to report back on political or military developments in a country and file this information in an unclassified form. But a CIA agent in the same country, using covert informants and techniques, might gather the very same facts yet classify the report as secret. The very same information: Is it classified or not? Experts and agencies frequently disagree.

  That’s what happened when the State Department and the intelligence agencies reviewed my emails for release. Remember, I had asked for all of them to be published so that the American people could read them and judge for themselves. There were also a number of Freedom of Information Act requests working their way through the courts. The easiest thing to do would have been to just dump every email onto a website and be done with it, but the government has rules it has to follow in FOIA cases. You don’t want to accidentally publish someone’s Social Security number or cell phone number.

  When reviewing my thirty thousand emails, in a number of instances, representatives of various U.S. intelligence agencies sought to retroactively classify messages that had not previously been marked as classified. Many State Department diplomats with long experience conducting sensitive diplomacy disagreed with those decisions. It was like a town changing speed limits and retroactively fining drivers who had complied with the old limit but not the new one.

  For example, an email from Dennis Ross, one of our country’s most experienced diplomats, was declared classified retroactively. It described back-channel negotiations he’d conducted with Israelis and Palestinians as a private citizen back in 2011. Government officials had already cleared him to publish the same information in a book, which he had done, but now different officials were trying to classify it. “It shows the arbitrariness of what is now being classified,” Dennis observed.

  Something similar happened to Henry Kissinger around the same time. The State Department released the transcript of a 1974 conversation
about Cyprus between then-Secretary of State Kissinger and the director of the CIA, but much of the text was blacked out because it was now considered classified. This puzzled historians because State had published the full, unredacted transcript eight years before in an official history book . . . and on the department’s website!

  Another veteran diplomat, Ambassador Princeton Lyman, was also surprised to find some of his run-of-the-mill emails to me retroactively designated as classified. “The day-to-day kind of reporting I did about what happened in negotiations did not include information I considered classified,” he told the Washington Post.

  That is an absurdity. We might as well shut the department down.

  —Former Secretary of State Colin Powell in the Times on February 4, 2016, after learning that two messages sent to his personal email account were being classified retroactively

  Like Colin, I thought it was ridiculous that some in the intelligence agencies were now trying to second-guess the judgment of veteran diplomats and national security professionals in the State Department about whether messages they sent should be classified. It was doubly ridiculous to suggest that I should have second-guessed them in the moment.

  Given all this, it’s no surprise that many experts say that overclassification has become a big problem across the government. Even FBI Director Comey admitted as much in a Senate hearing, agreeing that a great deal of material that gets classified is, in fact, widely known to the public and poses little or no risk to national security.

  Comey also confirmed that none of my emails was properly marked as classified, and therefore I would reasonably conclude they were not. His full exchange with Congressman Matt Cartwright of Pennsylvania in a congressional hearing on July 7, 2016, is worth reading:

  CARTWRIGHT: You were asked about markings on a few documents—I have the manual here—marking national classified security information. And I don’t think you were given a full chance to talk about those three documents with the little c’s on them. Were they properly documented? Were they properly marked according to the manual?

  COMEY: No.

  CARTWRIGHT: According to the manual, if you’re going to classify something, there has to be a header on the document? Right?

  COMEY: Correct.

  CARTWRIGHT: Was there a header on the three documents that we’ve discussed today that had the little c in the text someplace?

  COMEY: No. There were three emails. The c was in the body, in the text, but there was no header on the email or in the text.

  CARTWRIGHT: So if Secretary Clinton really were an expert about what’s classified and what’s not classified, and we’re following the manual, the absence of a header would tell her immediately that those three documents were not classified. Am I correct in that?

  COMEY: That would be a reasonable inference.

  This is not a situation in which America’s national security was endangered.

  —President Barack Obama, on 60 Minutes, October 11, 2015

  This wasn’t just the view of the Commander in Chief. Many top foreign policy officials from both parties agreed, and endorsed me for President—like Michael Chertoff, George W. Bush’s Secretary of Homeland Security. “She’s going to do a good job protecting the country,” Chertoff told NPR. “In a world at war, you’ve got to focus on the top priority which is protecting the United States and protecting our friends and allies.”

  The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails! Enough of the emails. Let’s talk about the real issues facing America.

  —Senator Bernie Sanders, in the first Democratic debate, October 13, 2015

  I couldn’t have said it better myself. I remain grateful for Bernie’s wise comment in our first debate. There was a reason the crowd cheered so heartily. He was right that the whole controversy was nonsense. If only the press had treated it that way. I wish I could end this story right here. Unfortunately, the saga continued.

  Our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.

  —FBI Director Jim Comey, in a press conference on July 5, 2016

  The FBI’s security inquiry was thorough, professional—and slow. My lawyer wrote to the Department of Justice way back in August 2015, repeating my public pledge to cooperate completely and offering for me to appear voluntarily to answer questions. I wanted my interview to take place as quickly as possible, since the first Democratic primaries were looming. But we were repeatedly told, “Not yet.”

  It became clear that I would likely be the last witness interviewed. I understood this was the logical sequence, but I chafed at being unable to dispel the cloud of uncertainty looming over me.

  Finally, in June 2016, they were ready to talk to me. We agreed to an interview on July 2, a sleepy Saturday on a hot holiday weekend. To avoid press hoopla as much as possible, we set it for 8:00 A.M. at the FBI Headquarters in the J. Edgar Hoover Building in downtown Washington.

  An elevator whisked me and my team up from the basement parking lot to the eighth floor, where we were brought to a secure conference room. Eight DOJ and FBI lawyers and agents were waiting for us. One of my attorneys, Katherine Turner, was eight and a half months pregnant, so there was a lot of baby-related small talk to help break the ice.

  The interview lasted three and a half hours and was conducted largely by two FBI agents, although all the government lawyers asked some questions. They wanted to know how I had decided to use my personal email at the State Department, who I’d talked to, what I’d been told, what I knew about maintenance of the system, how I’d had the emails sorted, and other things. The agents were professional, precise, and courteous. Their questions were phrased carefully and not argumentative, and when they obtained an answer, they didn’t try to badger. I thought it was conducted efficiently. When they said they had no further questions and thanked me, I apologized to them all, saying that I was sorry they’d had to spend so much time on this matter.

  Director Comey had not been present during my Saturday interview. But three days later, on Tuesday, July 5, he held a very unusual press conference. It came as a complete surprise to us. We had no warning and had heard no feedback at all after the Saturday session.

  Comey made a double-barreled announcement. First, he said that no criminal charges would be brought against anyone, stating that “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring a criminal case of mishandling classified information in this situation. We had expected that. Nonetheless, it was good to hear those words.

  The second shot was both completely unexpected and inappropriate. Comey said that although my State Department colleagues and I had not violated the law about handling classified information, we—all three hundred of us who had written emails later classified—were nevertheless “extremely careless.” He said the FBI had found that “the security culture of the State Department in general, and with respect to use of unclassified email systems in particular, was generally lacking in the kind of care for classified information found elsewhere in the government.” It was one thing to go after me, but disparaging the entire State Department was totally out-of-bounds and revealed how much age-old institutional rivalries between agencies colored this entire process.

  Much of the public and press reaction to Comey’s announcement rightly focused on the overall conclusion that after months of controversy, there was no case. Critics predicting my imminent indictment were bitterly disappointed. But I was angry and frustrated that Comey had used his public position to criticize me, my staff, and the State Department, with no opportunity for us to counter or disprove the charge.

  I felt a little like Ray Donovan, President Reagan’s Secretary of Labor, who, after being acquitted of fraud charges, asked, “Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?”

  My first instinct was that my campaign should hit back hard and explain to the public that Comey had badly overstepped his bounds—the same argument Rod Rosenstein would make months after the election. That might have blunted the political dama
ge and made Comey think twice before breaking protocol again a few months later. My team raised concerns with that kind of confrontational approach. In the end, we decided it would be better to just let it go and try to move on. Looking back, that was a mistake.

  The Director laid out his version of the facts for the news media as if it were a closing argument, but without a trial. It is a textbook example of what federal prosecutors and agents are taught not to do.

  —Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, in his May 9, 2017, memo to Attorney General Jeff Sessions

  Rosenstein’s damning memo about Comey’s handling of the email investigation may have been exploited by the Trump White House to justify firing the FBI Director in a bid to shut down the Russia investigation, but its conclusions should still be taken seriously. After all, Rosenstein is a veteran prosecutor who once again proved his independence by appointing respected former FBI Director Bob Mueller as Special Counsel.

  According to Rosenstein, at the July 5 press conference, Comey “usurped” the Attorney General’s authority, “violated deeply engrained rules and traditions” at the Justice Department, and “ignored another long-standing principle: we do not hold press conferences to release derogatory information about the subject of a declined criminal investigation.”

  Comey’s excuse for breaking protocol and denouncing me in public was that this was “a case of intense public interest.” But as Matt Miller, the Justice Department’s Public Affairs Officer from 2009 to 2011, pointed out the day after the press conference, “The Department investigates cases involving extreme public interest all the time.” He said that Comey’s “willingness to reprimand publicly a figure against whom he believes there is no basis for criminal charges should trouble anyone who believes in the rule of law and fundamental principles of fairness.”