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Lucylastic -> RE: Hillary's E-Mails (3/24/2015 6:57:00 AM)
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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/23/us/politics/in-clinton-emails-on-benghazi-a-rare-glimpse-at-her-concerns.html?emc=edit_na_20150323&nlid=68672635&_r=0
The roughly 300 emails from Mrs. Clinton’s private account that were turned over last month to a House committee investigating the attack showed the secretary and her aides closely monitoring the fallout from the tragedy, which threatened to damage her image and reflect poorly on the State Department.
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They provided no evidence that Mrs. Clinton, as the most incendiary Republican attacks have suggested, issued a “stand down” order to halt American forces responding to the violence in Benghazi, or took part in a broad cover-up of the administration’s response, according to senior American officials.
But they did show that Mrs. Clinton’s top aides at times corresponded with her about State Department matters from their personal email accounts, raising questions about her recent assertions that she made it her practice to email aides at their government addresses so the messages would be preserved, in compliance with federal record-keeping regulations.
The emails have not been made public, and The New York Times was not permitted to review them. But four senior government officials offered descriptions of some of the key messages, on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to jeopardize their access to secret information.
A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton said she and her aides had used their email accounts appropriately, while a spokesman for the Republican-controlled House committee declined to comment.
The correspondence offered a glimpse inside the secretary of state’s inbox — and her elusive email personality — including during those dark days just after the attack. Mrs. Clinton exclusively used a private email account that was housed on a server at her home in Chappaqua, N.Y., while she was secretary of state, which kept many of the messages secret.
Strikingly, given that she has set off an uproar over her emails, Mrs. Clinton is not a verbose correspondent. At times, she sends her highly regarded foreign policy adviser, Jake Sullivan, an email containing a news article, with a simple instruction: Please print. (Mrs. Clinton, though she has taken to Twitter and embraced other forms of modern technology, appears to like to read articles on paper.)
There were also the more mundane messages that crowd many government workers’ inboxes: scheduling, logistics, even a news alert about a breaking story from Politico, forwarded to the secretary by a senior aide.
The emails showed Mrs. Clinton and her inner circle reacting as the administration’s view of what happened in Benghazi changed, and the messages shed some light on a pivotal moment in the attack’s aftermath involving Susan E. Rice, then the ambassador to the United Nations.
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On Sept. 16, five days after the attack, Ms. Rice appeared on several Sunday news programs, including ABC’s “This Week,” to offer the administration’s view on the attack. Some conservatives suggested that Ms. Rice took on the role of public spokeswoman in those first few days after the attacks so that Mrs. Clinton could duck the controversy. (Ms. Rice has said that Mrs. Clinton declined to appear because she was tired after a grueling week.)
The emails do not settle that question, the senior officials said. But they do suggest that Mrs. Clinton and her aides were ultimately relieved that she had not gone as far as Ms. Rice had in her description of the attacks.
The day that Ms. Rice appeared on the shows, Mr. Sullivan, who served as Mrs. Clinton’s deputy chief of staff and is one of her most trusted advisers, emailed Mrs. Clinton a transcript of Ms. Rice’s remarks on ABC’s “This Week.” Mr. Sullivan’s message was brief, but he appeared pleased by how it had gone. Ms. Rice, on the show, described it as a spontaneous eruption of violence, triggered by an offensive anti-Muslim video.
“She did make clear our view that this started spontaneously then evolved,” Mr. Sullivan wrote to Mrs. Clinton.
But in the days that followed, the administration’s view of what occurred grew more complicated. Amid intense criticism from Republicans, who accused the White House of playing down the attack in an election year, administration officials began to call it “a terrorist attack.” Ms. Rice’s initial description of the attack as spontaneous came under intense scrutiny.
Two weeks after that first email assessing Ms. Rice’s appearance, Mr. Sullivan sent Mrs. Clinton a very different email. This time, he appeared to reassure the secretary of state that she had avoided the problems Ms. Rice was confronting. He told Mrs. Clinton that he had reviewed her public remarks since the attack and that she had avoided the language that had landed Ms. Rice in trouble.
“You never said ‘spontaneous’ or characterized their motivations,” Mr. Sullivan wrote.
The 300 emails are a small fraction of those Mrs. Clinton has handed over to the State Department.
Last summer, State Department lawyers responding to document requests from the House committee investigating Benghazi found correspondence showing Mrs. Clinton used a private email account. The lawyers determined that they needed all of Mrs. Clinton’s emails to respond to the committee requests.
In December, Mrs. Clinton turned over 30,000 of her emails to the State Department, and the department sent the House committee the 300 related to Benghazi or Libya.
The scrutiny of how she used email has created the first test of her all-but-announced presidential campaign. At the time she was secretary of state, federal regulations said agencies that allow employees to use private email addresses, “must ensure that federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency record-keeping system.”
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Nick Merrill, the spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, defended the aides’ use of personal email, saying that it was “their practice to primarily use their work email when conducting state business, with only the tiniest fraction of the more than one million emails they sent or received involving their personal accounts.”
Some may not be satisfied with that explanation or the records Mrs. Clinton has provided. Trey Gowdy, the South Carolina Republican who chairs the House Select Committee on Benghazi, has said he suspected Mrs. Clinton has not turned over all the Benghazi-related emails, and has asked Mrs. Clinton to turn over her server to a neutral party to examine all of her emails, including ones she deleted, to determine if others should be provided to his panel.
Mr. Gowdy’s committee is also likely to press Mrs. Clinton on why her advisers occasionally used personal email accounts to communicate with her. At least four of Mrs. Clinton’s closest advisers at the State Department did so, including her chief of staff, Cheryl Mills; senior adviser, Philippe Reines; personal aide, Huma Abedin; and Mr. Sullivan.
Elijah E. Cummings, the Maryland Democrat and ranking member on the committee, said in a statement that “instead of having emails leaked piecemeal — and mischaracterized,” the committee’s chairman, Mr. Gowdy, “should release all of them — as Secretary Clinton has asked — so the American people can read them for themselves.”
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