Hillary Clinton, then the secretary of state, checks her BlackBerry in a military plane in 2011. Some say Clinton’s use of a personal e-mail account while secretary of state will most likely be forgotten long before the 2016 election.KEVIN LAMARQUE/The New York Times
Imagine Hillary Clinton, clearly annoyed at the question and with all the integrity she can muster, looking directly into the TV cameras and insisting to doubting Americans: "I did not have e-mail with that mullah."
Ms. Clinton, former first lady and U.S. senator for New York, for four years globetrotting secretary of state and now the overwhelming favourite for Democratic presidential candidate in 2016, may have stumbled before the race has started.
Just when it seemed there couldn't possibly be any more skeletons in the Clintons' closets, the mystery of the secret e-mail server in their Chappaqua mansion may be the time bomb that blows up her candidacy, which – until now – looked like a triumphal procession to the party nomination rather than any real contest.
HDR22@clintonemail.com, apparently for Hillary Diane Rodham, her maiden name, turns out to be the address the former U.S. sectary of state used during her peripatetic four years as America's foreign policy czar. She spent more than 400 days travelling, visited 112 countries, flew more than 1.6 million kilometres and fired off tens of thousands of e-mails on the blue BlackBerry that was hardly ever out of her left hand.
Except that no one knows quite how many e-mails, nor what they contained, nor to whom they were addressed because, it turns out, Ms. Clinton opted to use a private address and a private e-mail server rigged up by an IT expert long associated with her family's political fortunes.
Gleeful Republicans believe Ms. Clinton – hardly a smooth, avuncular campaigner like her husband, Bill – can be trounced in 2016. They regard the revelations about her e-mail preferences as manna from political heaven.
Rumoured troves of Ms. Clinton's secret e-mails, hidden from archivists and the nosy media, if they don't actually exist, fit neatly with the Republican accusatory narrative of the Clintons as a sleazy political pair who have behaved – for decades – as though the rules don't apply to them.
When news of Ms. Clinton's preference for keeping all her e-mails away from secure government servers (and, caustic critics suggest, legal obligations to keep records for historical purposes and to meet Freedom of Information requirements) the presumptive Democratic candidate was slow to react.
She still hasn't publicly addressed the growing political storm but did turn to Twitter: "I want the public to see my email. I asked State to release them," she tweeted.
Months after she quit as secretary of state, Ms. Clinton or her aides turned over 55,000 pages of e-mails, or 55,000 e-mails – both variations have been reported – culled from her private server to the state department. The e-mails were selected by her, or her aides, and supposedly met government requirements for record preservation. Just how many were left out and whether they were all personal exchanges with Chelsea about making her a grandmother or something more substantive remains unknown.
Demands that Ms. Clinton turn over all her e-mails and allow government officials to determine which were official business and, under the law, must become part of the historical record have so far fallen on deaf ears in Chappaqua.
There may be innocent and entirely reasonable explanations for HDR22@clintonemail.com. There may be no significant damage to contain but both her advocates and adversaries are tooling up as a major fight is brewing.
Clinton defenders are out in force, claiming for instance, that Republicans, including former state secretary Colin Powell also use private e-mail addresses. True, to a degree. But nothing has yet surfaced to suggest that other cabinet secretaries who maintained personal e-mail addresses didn't also have official addresses and use the latter for official business. So far, only Ms. Clinton seems to have used only a private address, and a server under her personal control, for all of her digital correspondence in her official capacity as secretary of state.
Equally dubious is the vague claim that all classified or sensitive correspondence was sent by her aides and thus was properly encrypted and is already saved in government archives.
Clearly, Republicans aren't convinced by the claims of her aides that the arrangement was legal and in no way designed to obstruct access. Already gunning for Ms. Clinton over what she knew and when she knew it in connection with the killing of the U.S. ambassador to Libya in Benghazi, the discovery that she ran the department and conducted her diplomacy with an off-government e-mail address has reinvigorated her adversaries.
The special House of Representatives committee investigating the attack – perhaps Ms. Clinton's greatest political vulnerability of her state department watch – has issued fresh subpoenas demanding all the e-mails she sent from her non-government e-mail address related to the Benghazi affair.
Her political enemies are moving to commingle the already simmering controversy over the hundreds of millions raised by the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation with her preference for non-government e-mail addresses and servers.
"It makes you wonder," said Reince Priebus, the Republican national committee chairman. "Did she use the private e-mails so she could conduct diplomacy and fundraising at the same time?"
The foundation resumed taking multimillion-dollar donations from foreign governments after Ms. Clinton stepped down as state secretary.
Even if there's no substantive fire behind the smoke swirling from revelations that Ms. Clinton was HDR22@clintonemail.com to friends and foreign potentates alike during her four years in Foggy Bottom, the perception of an integrity gap could still be politically ruinous.
Just ask John Kerry, the current Secretary of State. A decade ago, Mr. Kerry, then the Democratic presidential nominee seeking to oust president George W. Bush, touted his military record as a young naval officer who volunteered for a dangerous assignment commanding small launches in the Mekong Delta during the Vietnam war. Instead, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth launched a devastating campaign questioning Mr. Kerry's integrity and suggesting his medals for valour and being repeatedly wounded were undeserved.
For Ms. Clinton, who has survived decades of accusations, ranging from her stunningly profitable dealings in cattle futures to the murky Whitewater land investment, the e-mail controversy may prove a brouhaha that doesn't derail her presidential ambitions.
But, for her adversaries, a fresh scandal that fits neatly with the portrayal of the Clintons as secretive and always operating on the margins of legality may be the perfect fodder for a political smear campaign about Ms. Clinton's integrity and fitness for the presidency.