Hillary Clinton adviser on email server: ‘They wanted to get away with it.’

October 26 at 9:49 AM


Hillary Rodham Clinton (AP Photo/Kevin Lamarque, Pool, File)

Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign has spent much of the past 18 months dismissing the controversy caused by her decision to set up a private email server while serving as Secretary of State as so much stuff and nonsense. A small error in judgment, which she has acknowledged, pushed into a massive issue by Republicans and lapped up by an unfriendly media.

Any time I write about the emails, the response from Clintonworld is immediate and predictable: Nothing to see here. Much ado about nothing. You are making this into an issue when there is no there there. And so on.

Turns out though that some of Clinton's most senior and most trusted advisors also quickly grasped why the email server story, which was broken by the New York Times' Michael Schmidt in March 2015, was so problematic for her political aspirations. That's clear from Roz Helderman's terrific story today in which she mines the emails released by WikiLeaks to show that there was considerable consternation with Clinton's decision-making tied to her emails.

Here's the key bit:

On the day the news broke that Hillary Clinton had used a private email account as secretary of state, the man who would soon be named to chair her presidential campaign fired off a note of distress, venting frustration about some of Clinton’s closest aides.

“Speaking of transparency, our friends Kendall, Cheryl and Phillipe sure weren’t forthcoming on the facts here,” John Podesta complained in the March 2015 note, referring to Clinton’s personal lawyer, David Kendall, as well as former State Department staffers Cheryl Mills and Philippe Reines.

“Why didn’t they get this stuff out like 18 months ago? So crazy,” replied Neera Tanden, a longtime Podesta friend who also has worked for Clinton. Then, answering her own question, Tanden wrote again: “I guess I know the answer. They wanted to get away with it.”

"They wanted to get away with it." Oomph.

What's clear from the WikiLeaks emails as surfaced in Roz's story is that people like Podesta and Tanden were stunned that the a) the decision had been made for Clinton to exclusively use a private email server (the first Secretary of State to do so) and b) annoyed that no one in her State Department inner circle had told them about the setup or made the executive decision to go public with it before the Times report.

That's not to say that Tanden, Podesta or anyone else in Clinton's inner circle believed (or believes) that Clinton had done anything illegal or untoward with her email setup. (Tanden makes clear at one point that she thinks the controversy is way larger than it should be based on the facts.)

But, what the emails do show is that Clinton's advisers (or at least some of them) quickly grasped that her email server setup -- and the way she was reacting to it -- were a major political problem. Why? Because it played into an existing narrative that Clinton thought the rules didn't apply to her and that, when caught red-handed doing something she probably shouldn't have, her first instinct was to lash out at her critics rather than consider apologizing.

"Everyone wants her to apologize," Tanden wrote Podesta on Sept. 4. "And she should. Apologies are like her Achilles heel.”

Yup. Throughout the fall, Clinton and her campaign sputtered and struggled to get the email issue behind her. Clinton would apologize -- as she did with ABC's David Muir in September -- but then would seem to walk back that apology by insisting no laws had been broken and she did nothing wrong.

Clinton seemed to view the entire thing through a legal lens; she was absolutely convinced there was no actual wrongdoing and viewed apologizing as an admission of sorts that there was. (She was not charged by the FBI in the matter, vindicating that belief.) But, as the WikiLeaks emails make clear, some on her team understood that her email server was a major political problem that she was exacerbating with the way she handled it.

All true. And all less relevant than it might have been if Republicans had nominated someone other than Donald Trump.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...tical-problem/