Hillary Clinton and Her E-mails

PHOTOGRAPH BY KEVIN LAMARQUE/AP

The latest Hillary Clinton flap has begun, prompted by a story in Tuesday’s Times revealing that, during Clinton’s four years as Secretary of State, she used a private e-mail account rather than a government-issued one. The story raised the possibility that this practice may have violated federal record-keeping requirements, and also raised possible security concerns, especially if she was using an e-mail account that wasn’t encrypted. Jason Baron, a former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration, told Michael S. Schmidt, of the Times, “I can recall no instance in my time at the National Archives when a high-ranking official at an executive-branch agency solely used a personal email account for the transaction of government business.”

I happened to be on Twitter last night, when the story broke, and the reaction must have almost crashed the site. After a couple of hours monitoring the responses, which included a tweet from Jeb Bush calling on Clinton to release all of her unclassified e-mails, I went to bed wondering: What the heck was that all about?

In the light of day, the question can be disassembled into three subsidiary queries: How did Clinton set up the private account? Why did it happen? And what are its implications, if any, for the 2016 campaign?

Senior government officials are typically allotted official e-mail accounts. Evidently, Secretary Clinton chose not to use one. In a statement released overnight, her spokesman said, “Like Secretaries of State before her, she used her own email account when engaging with any Department officials. For government business, she emailed them on their Department accounts, with every expectation they would be retained. ... Both the letter and spirit of the rules permitted State Department officials to use non-government emails, as long as appropriate records were preserved.”

The Times didn’t reveal which e-mail service Clinton chose, but, citing commercial records, Philip Bump, of the Washington Post, pointed out that, on January 13, 2009, the same day Clinton’s Senate confirmation hearings began, someone registered the domain name clintonemail.com with the technology firm Network Solutions.

Perhaps, this clears up a bit of the mystery—though knowing the domain name and registrar doesn’t say anything about what security measures, if any, Clinton took. Nor does it address the larger issue of whether legal counsel with the State Department signed off on the decision to use a private account. Did the Secret Service and the White House know about it? The Secret Service, in particular, is very concerned about security breaches. Early in President Obama’s term, we subsequently learned, its agents stripped him of his personal BlackBerry and provided him with a more secure version. (As far as I’ve seen, it hasn’t been revealed what sort of e-mail account the President uses.)

Now, to the question of why Clinton would have chosen to use a private account. There is a history here. In 2007, it emerged that some Bush Administration officials had been using non-White House e-mail accounts, the archives of which were subsequently deleted. At the time, Democrats and public-interest groups accused the Bushes of seeking to shield their correspondence from government record keepers, inquisitive Congressional committees, and journalists making Freedom of Information requests. (A story by Vox’s Max Fisher provides more details.)

Until the Clinton camp provides a convincing explanation to the contrary, many observers will assume that Hillary, too, was taking steps to shield her correspondence from prying eyes. Given her family’s history, that wouldn’t be particularly shocking.

In light of the scandals and enmity that have surrounded them, the Clintons have long taken an assiduous approach to guarding their records and their privacy. On one level, that’s perfectly understandable. By the start of 2008, Clinton had been embroiled in bitter partisan warfare for more than a decade and a half. Upon agreeing to become the Secretary of State, she would have known perfectly well that her political enemies, on Capitol Hill and elsewhere, would be seeking to put her down at every turn—making allegations, holding hearings, and demanding internal documents, including records of her personal communications. It’s also fair to assume that Clinton had at least half an eye on another Presidential campaign, during which those same political foes would scrutinize every record and document available from her time at Foggy Bottom.

Clinton’s concerns, assuming she indeed had them, turned out to be justified. Since the deadly assault in September, 2012, on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, House Republicans and others have spent an inordinate amount of time and effort trying to pin responsibility for the attack on her, demonstrating, along the way, that there are few tactics that they won’t stoop to in order to tar her image. Now, doubtless, they will try to use the e-mail flap to resurrect the Benghazi controversy.

Whether there will be broader political fallout is another matter. As the Times article pointed out, and the Clinton camp’s statement repeated, previous Secretaries of State, Colin Powell among them, have used private e-mail accounts for some (but not all) of their communications. That gives Hillary some cover. Journalists and Republican opposition-research teams will continue to dig, but, unless they can come up with something juicier and more specific, such as a damaging e-mail that was withheld from Congressional investigators, the story may not go much further.

Of course, these revelations become part of a steady drip of negative articles that are doing some damage to Clinton’s nascent Presidential bid, starting with the various revelations about the fund-raising activities of the Clinton Foundation, which my colleague Amy Davidson wrote about last week. There is a widespread feeling, among political professionals and the commentariat, that Clinton, having chosen to delay the launch of her campaign, might be on the point of losing control of its narrative. “We have had our head up our ass,” a former senior Clinton aide told Politico’s Gabriel Debenedetti and Glenn Thrush.

But it can also be argued that, by publishing these stories now, the media might end up doing Clinton a favor. In the public-relations industry, the standard method of managing potential crises is to get the worst news out early, seek to weather it, and then argue that subsequent revelations are mere wrinkles on a story that has already been told. In 2011 and 2012, Mitt Romney flouted this methodology. Instead of releasing his tax records, which showed that he had paid a very low tax rate, at the start of his campaign, he waited until a few months before the election. That hurt him, a lot.

Thanks to the efforts of the Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington _ Post_, at least some of the potentially damaging material on Clinton is out there already. By this time next year, will anybody be talking about Hillary’s personal e-mail account or the Clinton Foundation’s donors? We shall see.