US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton addresses a press conference at the Bella Centre in Copenhagen on December 17, 2009 on the 11th day of the COP15 UN Climate Change Conference.Alex Wong
Three controversies will keep cropping up for Hillary Clinton now that she has launched a second bid for the U.S. presidency.
Her historic candidacy in 2008 – no other female presidential candidate had gotten so far – ended after a hard-fought state-by-state battle against Barack Obama.
"Although we weren't able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it's got about 18 million cracks in it," Ms. Clinton told supporters in her 2008 concession speech, referencing the 18 million votes she got during the primaries.
In 2016, Ms. Clinton aims to break through. She has a formidable record in government, a campaign machine ready to go and a fundraising head start. Any challenger will think carefully before stepping into the race. But that could change quickly if she falters.
Any of the ongoing controversies could complicate her path to the Democratic party nomination and becoming the first female president in the United States.
Private e-mail
As U.S. secretary of state, Ms. Clinton exclusively used a private e-mail address, hdr22@clintonemail.com, through a server that was set up at her home in New York state. The first reports of this emerged in March, 2015.
Questions quickly arose about the security of the server and whether any federal rules were broken.
Ms. Clinton said she complied with the letter and the spirit of the law – which, she argued, allows for the use of private e-mail addresses so long as records of those e-mails are preserved by the appropriate federal agency.
She argued that most of her work e-mails were sent to State Department staff and records of those e-mails will be traceable on its servers. She has also said that she further complied with federal rules by handing over 55,000 pages from over 30,000 work-related e-mails to the State Department. Another 30,000 personal e-mails, which she says related to her daughter's wedding, her mom's funeral and routine daily private matters, have been wiped clean from the server.
Use of a private e-mail by a senior government official is nothing new. President George W. Bush reportedly used a private e-mail to write foreign leaders.
But the controversy is not going away because there will likely be subpoenas for Ms. Clinton to appear before congressional committees, and at some point over the next couple of the months the State Department will release Ms. Clinton's work-related e-mails.And there are bigger questions: Did Ms. Clinton hand over all her work-related e-mails, or hold back some of them? And was she trying to avoid oversight of her correspondence by using a private e-mail and server?
Underlying those questions is the issue of trust. A Quinnipiac poll released in the run-up to her presidential bid shows that her favourability ratings have taken a hit among voters in key states during recent weeks.
"Voters do think she is a strong leader – a key metric – but unless she can change the honesty perception, running as a competent but dishonest candidate has serious potential problems," said the authors of the poll.
Benghazi
The Clinton team will tout its candidate's role as the country's top diplomat: logging more than 1.5 million kilometres while repairing the U.S. image abroad following the Bush presidency.
But to some of her opponents, her time as secretary of state is defined by the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four people, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens.
Since then, the question of whether the Obama administration did enough to protect its ambassador and other staff has dogged key officials.
In January, 2013, then-secretary of state Clinton appeared before the House and Senate Committees on Foreign Relations and said she had not seen the requests from the ambassador and others for more security. She also said she took responsibility for the lapses in security that made the consulate vulnerable.
The six-hour session included Republican Senator Rand Paul – who is now running to be the Republican presidential nominee – telling Ms. Clinton he would have fired her if he were president.
A year later, a Senate report said more than half a dozen intelligence reports pointing to security threats leading up to the attack had been ignored by the State Department.
The Benghazi controversy continues to simmer and many of Ms. Clinton's opponents believe there was a cover-up.
A Republican-led House committee is investigating the Benghazi attack and says it expects Ms. Clinton to appear. Republican members on the committee also say they want the e-mail server from the Clinton residence handed over.
They believe that Ms. Clinton's e-mails could answer some of the lingering questions about the Benghazi attack.
"Why were requests for additional security denied? Why was our response not sufficient? Why were some members of the administration slow to acknowledge a terrorist attack had actually occurred? It is simply unacceptable for so many questions to remain unanswered," said Republican Representative Susan Brooks in a radio address last month.
Foreign donations
On Sunday, fresh from launching her presidential bid, Ms. Clinton left the board of the family foundation led by her husband, ex-president Bill Clinton, amid conflict of interest concerns involving donations from foreign sources.
"Are you going to trust an individual who has taken that much money from a foreign source? Where's your loyalty?" asked Texas Governor Rick Perry, a possible Republican presidential candidate, during a CNN interview in February.
Ms. Clinton has not personally taken money from foreign governments, as her opponents imply. But the foundation she has been closely associated with certainly has – Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Oman being just some of the donors.
The controversy centres around the Clinton Foundation, started by Mr. Clinton and renamed the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation in 2013. It works to promote health, economic growth and protection of the environment around the world. When it comes to money, it relies on the former president's fundraising talents – and often, donations flow in from foreign governments.
When she became secretary of state, an effort was made to protect Ms. Clinton from any appearance that her independence as the country's top diplomat could be compromised. The foundation reached an agreement with the Obama administration that it would only accept donations from foreign governments that had contributed in the past. Those governments were not allowed to exceed previous contribution levels.
Once Ms. Clinton left her position as secretary of state, the foundation could accept higher donations and contributions from new governments – which is what happened when she stepped down in 2013.
That brought the scale of dependence on foreign donations into the spotlight.
A Washington Post report earlier this year showed that the foundation had raised $2-billion (U.S.) since it started in 2001 and that a third of donations over $1-million came from foreign governments.
The Post also reported that the foundation had accepted donations from seven governments during Ms. Clinton's State Department tenure – and that one of them, a $500,000 donation from Algeria to the foundation for Haiti relief aid coincided with the Algerian government lobbying the State Department on human-rights issues. Except for the Algerian donation, the other donations did not violate the ethics agreement with the Obama administration, the newspaper added.
As Ms. Clinton's presidential bid ramps up, the family foundation will once again have to address the extent to which it should limit foreign government contributions and, in doing so, cut off a Republican line of attack.