Former U.S. state secretary Hillary Clinton acknowledged she destroyed 32,000 e-mails from her private e-mail, but said it was justified as they were all of a personal nature and not related to State Department business.SAUL LOEB/AFP / Getty Images
Hillary Clinton's feisty albeit belated damage-control effort defending her decision to use a private e-mail server exclusively while she was President Barack Obama's secretary of state may have reassured supporters of the former first lady, but the many still-unexplained gaps in her answers have stoked a firestorm among enemies of the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate.
The brouhaha over hdr22@clintonemail.com isn't going away, anytime soon.
Whether Ms. Clinton's exclusive use of a private server and e-mail address – eschewing the U.S. State Department's – for both official government and personal communications was simply "convenient" as she claims, or a clever means of giving Hillary and Bill Clinton control over what becomes part of the historical record, it has set another round of partisan nastiness.
What's not yet clear is whether the controversy poses a serious threat to her quest for the Oval Office.
At the very least, Ms. Clinton will face more questioning by Republicans in Congress. For her first damage-control session, more than a week after the the news broke, Ms. Clinton picked her forum: the United Nations, away from the tougher Washington media pack. And she abruptly ended the raucous session Tuesday after only 20 minutes. Up on Capitol Hill, where Republicans now control both the House of Representatives and the Senate, the going will get much tougher and Ms. Clinton won't be the one deciding when it's over.
Ms. Clinton admits that she destroyed tens of thousands of e-mails after first culling those that involved government business and turning them over to the State Department at its request. The destruction of roughly 32,000 e-mails is okay, she insists, because they were all personal and didn't have anything to do with her service as U.S. state secretary. And, she adds, neither the public nor Republicans nor the prying media nor historians have any right to second-guess her.
"For any government employee, it is that government employee's responsibility to determine what's personal and what's work-related," Ms. Clinton said. "I went above and beyond what I was requested to do."
But there was no explanation as to why she waited nearly two years after she left office before turning over copies of the official e-mails to the State Department.
"In the end, I chose not to keep my personal e-mails – e-mails about planning Chelsea's wedding or my mother's funeral arrangements, condolence notes to friends, as well as yoga routines, family vacations, the other things you typically find in inboxes," Ms. Clinton said. "No one wants their personal e-mails made public and I think most people understand that and respect that privacy."
That's not out of character, given Bill and Hillary Clinton's long and troubled history of documents mislaid and fiercely adversarial approach to investigations. After all it was Ms. Clinton, then first lady, who claimed it was a "vast right-wing conspiracy" behind, then unproven, allegations that Mr. Clinton was having sex with a White House intern.
Republicans gunning for Ms. Clinton are openly doubtful that only personal e-mails were destroyed. And they want to know whether destroyed really means unrecoverable or just still lurking on the Clintons' private e-mail server in their estate in Chappaqua, N.Y.
U.S. Representative Trey Gowdy, the South Carolina Republican who heads the so-called Benghazi special committee investigating the killing of the U.S. ambassador to Libya, says he plans to call Ms. Clinton to demand she explain the decision to wipe out nearly half her e-mail files.
"We don't get to grade our own papers in life," Mr. Gowdy said. "She doesn't get to make that call."
He says he will issue a subpoena for all Ms. Clinton's e-mails related to the Benghazi killing. The former secretary of state is expected to face a tough grilling when she is called to testify to the committee which, until the latest revelations about e-mail erasures erupted, had largely been spinning its wheels.
An even bigger confrontation looms should Republicans seek to seize the actual server still sitting in the Clintons' home.
The Benghazi committee lacks the authority to demand access to the private server, but the full House of Representatives could issue a warrant to seize it if the Clintons refused a request.
Many Republicans, still smarting over the Senate's failure to convict Mr. Clinton after the House impeached him for lying about his sexual adventures in the Oval Office, would do anything to keep him from moving back into the White House as first husband.
House Speaker John Boehner has targeted the clintonemail.com server, not just the e-mails. "Secretary Clinton must turn over the server to a neutral arbiter who can inventory the records, make a complete, thorough accounting and impartial determination of which e-mails and records are official and the property of the federal government," his spokesman Michael Steel said.
Already there's an impasse. Ms. Clinton has said the server, set up by her husband after he left office presumably to keep his communications well outside the reach of the Freedom of Information Act, is off-limits.
"The server contains personal communications from my husband and me, and I believe I have met all of my responsibilities and the server will remain private," Ms. Clinton said. That, of course, raises the question as to why she felt the need to destroy all those e-mails about Chelsea's wedding and her mother's death.
Clinton supporters claim it's all an unfair witch hunt.
David Brock, founder and chairman of the Democratic PAC American Bridge says "the Clintons are held to a double standard when it comes to media scrutiny." In a published commentary, he called Ms. Clinton's decision to exclusively use a private server for both government and personal e-mails "perfectly usual, above-board behaviour" that is being "spun as secretive and unaccountable – while Republicans are left relatively unscathed."
But none of these Republicans are the undeclared but overwhelming favourite as their party's 2016 presidential candidate.
Any chance to damage Ms. Clinton's credibility would delight Republicans. Those with long memories recall then-Arkansas governor Mr. Clinton boasting during the 1992 campaign that his wife would be deeply involved in governing should he become president.
"Buy one, get one free," Mr. Clinton said then.
A rerun, with roles reversed, is a political a nightmare for Republicans, who sense a Clinton vulnerability over the e-mail secrecy to be exploited.