Did the State Department Throw Hillary Clinton Under the Bus?

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Hillary Clinton’s emails are once again the subject of a front-page story, this time in the Washington Post. And once again, I’m mystified by what the point is supposed to be. I’ve read tonight’s story three times trying to figure it out.

The entire piece is based on a statement the State Department sent to the Post explaining why they originally asked for Hillary’s emails. Supposedly this statement “undercuts” Hillary’s own explanation, which she’s offered on multiple occasions. But does it? Here are the competing explanations as written by the Post:

Hillary Clinton

“When we were asked to help the State Department make sure they had everything from other secretaries of state, not just me, I’m the one who said, ‘Okay, great, I will go through them again,’ ” Clinton said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “And we provided all of them.”

State Department

“In the process of responding to congres­sional document requests pertaining to Benghazi, State Department officials recognized that it had access to relatively few email records from former Secretary Clinton,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said in a statement e-mailed to The Washington Post….Kirby added that the agency then recognized “that we similarly did not have extensive email records from prior Secretaries of State and therefore included them when we requested their records in October 2014.”

Hillary Clinton doesn’t say anything here about why the State Department asked for her emails—though it was hardly a secret that they were responding to obsessive congressional inquiries about Benghazi. What she did say is that State also asked three other former secretaries for their emails, which is what the State Department says as well.

There’s also alleged to be a “discrepancy” between Hillary’s timetable and State’s. But what is it? Apparently State first contacted Hillary informally in July, at which point one of her aides retrieved the emails and began going through them to decide which ones were official and which were personal. In October, State officially asked four former secretaries (Clinton, Rice, Powell, and Albright) to provide their email records. Hillary provided hers in December.

I don’t get it. I’m not seeing the problem with this. Hillary’s staff began the process of retrieving emails as soon as they first heard from State, and turned them over within a few months. What’s the issue supposed to be here?

In any case, the truly gobsmacking thing here has nothing to do with Hillary Clinton. Can you figure out what it is?

“In the process of responding to congressional document requests pertaining to Benghazi, State Department officials recognized that it had access to relatively few email records from former Secretary Clinton,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said in a statement….Kirby added that the agency then recognized “that we similarly did not have extensive email records from prior Secretaries of State and therefore included them when we requested their records in October 2014.”

….The early call from the State Department [in July] is a sign that, at the least, officials in the agency she led from 2009 to 2013 were concerned by the practice [of using a private email server] — and that they had been caught off guard upon discovering her exclusive use of a private account.

….State Department staffers were trying to figure out where her work e-mails were stored and how they might try to assemble them, one official said. Clinton turned over copies of about 30,000 work-related e-mails to the department in December.

Holy crap. In 2014, the State Department suddenly realized that it had very few email records from secretaries going back to Madeleine Albright. Two years after Hillary had left office, they were trying to figure out where her emails were stored. This very much does not suggest to me that they were “caught off guard” by Hillary’s use of a private server. Rather, it suggests only that the State staffers responding to the congressional inquiries didn’t happen to know that Hillary used a private server. More importantly, it also suggests that for well over a decade, (a) the department had no oversight of emails sent and received by Secretaries of State, (b) didn’t really care about these emails, (c) didn’t archive them, and (d) had no idea where they might be. It happens to be Benghazi that finally got them to start checking on this, but that’s irrelevant. It could have been anything.

The real question here is why, for nearly 20 years, the State Department seemingly had no real policies about and—apparently—no real interest in preservation of official emails from Secretaries of State. Seriously, folks?

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate