In this Tuesday, May 19, 2015 file photo, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton speaks to small business owners at the Bike Tech cycling shop in Cedar Falls, Iowa.Charlie Neibergall/The Associated Press
It might be a rough few months for Hillary Clinton.
Last Friday, the State Department released almost 900 pages of e-mails from Ms. Clinton's time as Secretary of State. The e-mails pertain specifically to the 2012 terror attacks in Benghazi that resulted in the deaths of four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens.
The e-mails are in some ways a preview of a much larger disclosure – the pending publication of 55,000 pages of Clinton e-mails that are the subject of a Freedom of Information lawsuit. Those e-mails are expected to be released between now and January of next year.
Ms. Clinton has come under heavy criticism for her handling of e-mail communication while at the State Department. Not only did she use a private e-mail server – a practice frowned upon by security experts, transparency activists and even the Obama administration itself – she also unilaterally decided what material constituted relevant public records, handed those over to the State Department, and then deleted all her e-mails from her personal server. Now, some of what remains is starting to be disclosed.
The bad news for Ms. Clinton's cadre of critics is that there exists no smoking gun among the newly released Benghazi e-mails – no damning evidence that the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate was at the centre of some grand Benghazi conspiracy, or behaved with reckless negligence in relation to the attacks that left four Americans dead.
Instead, what emerges from a review of the 300 or so e-mails is a department scrambling to react to a high-profile terror operation – and deeply worried about how the public is perceiving that reaction.
In the lead-up to the Benghazi attacks, there were myriad indicators that the security situation in Libya was in dire shape. In an e-mail dated April 10, 2011, Ms. Clinton's long-time aide Huma Abedin relays to the Secretary of State that Mr. Stevens – at the time a special representative in Libya – feels that the "the situation in Ajdabiyah has worsened to the point where Stevens is considering departure from Benghazi."
In June of that year, a State Department staffer alerts Ms. Clinton that there is information about a "credible threat" against the hotel that the department's team in Libya is using. These concerns predate the Benghazi attacks by more than a year.
The first mention of the Benghazi attack by Ms. Clinton to be found in the released e-mails comes in a single-sentence missive on the night of the attack – September 11, 2012.
"Cheryl told me the Libyans confirmed his death," Ms. Clinton writes to three of her senior staffers. "Should we announce tonight or wait until morning?"
In the subject line of that e-mail, Ms. Clinton appears to get Mr. Stevens's name wrong, calling him "Chris Smith."
What follows is a barrage of e-mails over the next few days trying to co-ordinate the State Department's response to the attack. Early on, Ms. Clinton and her aides appear to closely consider the theory that the attack was part of a response to an anti-Muslim video posted online that sparked angry condemnation throughout many parts of the Muslim world.
One of the first references to the video, titled Innocence of Muslims, as a potential motive for the attacks comes in a briefing note from long-time Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal. For decades, Mr. Blumenthal, a former journalist, served as one of the most vocal supporters of both Ms. Clinton and her husband – so much so that he was given a job in the Clinton White House in the 1990s. Indeed, during Ms. Clinton's first campaign for President, Mr. Blumenthal was so scathing in his criticism of her rival Barack Obama that later, when Ms. Clinton tried to hire her old friend in the State Department, the White House reportedly vetoed the move.
That, however, didn't stop Mr. Blumenthal from frequently offering various pieces of information to Ms. Clinton throughout her tenure at State. These (at least the ones publicly disclosed) usually took the form of intelligence assessments, which Mr. Blumenthal regularly wrote were attributable to "[sources] with direct access to the Libyan National Transitional Council, as well as the highest levels of European Governments, and Western Intelligence and security services." Ms. Clinton frequently passed on these e-mails to her staffers at the State Department.
In one such e-mail, dated just one day after the Benghazi attacks, Mr. Blumenthal mentions that a senior security officer told the President of the General National Congress of Libya that the attacks were "inspired by what many devout Libyans viewed as a sacrilegious Internet video on the prophet Mohammed originating in America."
It would later emerge that, rather than a spontaneous response to that video, the attacks were part of a premeditated operation. Many critics would seize on the issue as proof of incompetence – or a cover-up – on the part of the Obama administration.
It quickly becomes clear that Ms. Clinton and her team were deeply worried by such criticism. Ms. Clinton's team began collecting and forwarding news stories and editorials about the attacks, as well as transcripts of what Ms. Clinton and other officials said publicly in the days immediately following the attacks.
"You never said spontaneous or characterized the motives," says one of Ms. Clinton's staffers in an e-mail to his boss two weeks after the incident. "[In fact] you were careful in your first statement to say we were assessing motive and method. The way you treated the video in the Libya context was to say that some sought to *justify* the attack on that basis."
Interspersed with these e-mails are dozens of other short missives – including thank-you and condolence notes addressed to Ms. Clinton after her first public statements on the killed Americans, and bitter complaints from Ms. Clinton's staffers about journalists and stories they felt were unfair.
However, the 300 e-mails released this month constitute the tip of the iceberg. The next batch of documents is scheduled to be made public on June 30. And then, if all goes according to schedule, there will be another round of disclosures every 60 days, until all the non-exempt portions of some 30,000 e-mails are finally made public.
The State Department has proposed a January deadline to get all the documents vetted and released. If that deadline holds, the last of the Clinton e-mails will be made public just a few weeks before the first Democratic presidential nomination votes get under way.