In the News
- Hillary Clinton tries to quell email furor
- Democrats irate over GOP Iran letter
- Ferguson city manager resigns
- Human trafficking bill debacle
- Is Netanyahu in election trouble
- Obama said to resist pressure to arm Ukraine
- Obama: Help students pay back loans
- Wikimedia sues the NSA
Hillary Clinton Tries to Quell Email Furor
• Hillary Clinton, in a (defensive, lawyerly and awkward) presser Tuesday, revealed that she had deleted about half her emails from her years as SecState, saying she had turned over to the Obama admin all correspondence about govt business but had erased records about private matters, like yoga routines, her daughter’s wedding and her mother’s funeral (NYT, TRNS, me)
• She acknowledged it would have been wiser to use a govt email for official business, but said she had “fully complied with every rule” and was going “above and beyond” what was required of her in asking State to make public much of her correspondence
• “No one wants their personal emails made public,” she said, “and I think most people understand that and respect their privacy.” She said she had only convenience in mind in choosing to use just a personal email account.”
• “I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails instead of two,” she explained. She asked, in effect, that voters trust that she was disclosing more of them than she needed to – and even to credit her with an unusual degree of transparency (which she hasn’t been known for)
• Doc: Hillary Clinton’s office releases nine-page explainer on her email usage
• Clinton said that she turned over some 30,490 emails to State in December, nearly two years after leaving office. But she said she had deleted nearly 32,000 others
• Her confirmation that she and her aides had chosen which emails to make available to State raised new concerns about Clinton’s power to decide which records of her tenure as SecState would be available to congressional investigators, to journalists filing FOIA requests and to history
• Republicans pounced. “Because Sec Clinton has created more questions than answers, the Select Committee is left with no choice but to call her to appear at least twice,” said Rep Trey Gowdy (R-SC), who’s chair of the committee (salivating)
• “For any govt employee, it is that govt employee’s responsibility to determine what’s personal and what’s work related,” Clinton told clamoring reporters. “I went above and beyond what I was requested to do.”
• Indeed, nothing prohibited federal employees from using private accounts for work when Clinton was SecState, although the practice was discouraged
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• But beginning in Oct 2009, 10 months after she took office, new regs from National Archives and Records Admin said agencies where employees were free to use private email systems “must ensure that federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency record keeping systems.”
• Clinton’s emails were backed up on a private server, not a govt one. But she argued that, because she had sent emails to “govt officials on their State or other .gov accounts so that the emails were immediately captured and preserved” she had complied with the rule. She didn’t address how emails she sent to people outside the govt had been preserved
• Clinton said that the server that housed her email address had been set up on property guarded by the Secret Service, and that there had been no security breaches (how would she even know?). She said she had never emailed classified material to anyone (she didn’t address whether she emailed “sensitive” material to anyone)
• It’s unclear if the emails were deleted irretrievably, and a spox for Clinton declined to elaborate on how she had erased the correspondence (reporters asked multiple questions – mistake – gave her the opportunity to cherry pick which ones to answer and meant many questions were left unanswered)
• Vid: Hillary Clinton admits to using an iPhone and a Blackberry during a Q&A at a Silicon Valley event, but after the vid ends, she adds that she has an iPad and an iPad mini
• Clinton’s explanation that it was more convenient to carry only one device seemed at odds with her remark last month at a tech conference in Silicon Valley, that she uses multiple devices, including iPads, an iPhone and a Blackberry. She said then: “I don’t throw anything away. I’m like two steps short of a hoarder.”
• At one point Tuesday, Clinton said the emails she had deleted contained “personal communications from my husband and me.” But on Sunday, a spox for Bill Clinton told reporters that the former president had “sent two emails in his life.”
• After the presser, Clinton’s office provided several new details about the email account and what she has provided to State. More than 100 govt officials knew about Clinton’s use of private email, her office said. She used her email only once to communicate with a foreign official, her office said
• In 2007, Clinton, then a NY senator and candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, accused the George W. Bush admin of using “secret WH email accounts” along with secret wiretaps and military tribunals. “You know, our Constitution is being shredded,” she said at the time
• The DoJ revealed that AG Eric Holder has used multiple govt email aliases (this isn’t rare – officials get swamped with emails). Also, former SecDef Chuck Hagel used a personal email address in at least one correspondence (not exactly earth-shattering) (Politico, me)
Democrats Irate Over GOP Iran Letter
• For the second day in a row, the WH lashed out at Senate Republicans for a highly unusual letter to Iranian leaders. “We feel that this was a blatant, flagrant and partisan attempt to interfere with the
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