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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.