So much for a smooth Clinton campaign

By Stephen Collinson, CNN

http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/05/politics/clinton-emails-election-2016/index.html

Washington (CNN) Hillary Clinton's biggest challenge to a smooth launch of her 2016 campaign is a familiar one: Herself.

At the very least, the controversy over her exclusive use of personal -- instead of official -- email while Secretary of State threatens to further complicate her expected 2016 White House candidacy. The news is all the more challenging for Clinton after stinging criticism of foreign donations to her family's philanthropic foundation and her comments about her personal wealth.

But the email saga -- complete with echoes of scandals from the 1990s -- is perhaps the starkest reminder yet of the daunting risk Democrats are taking. The party is heading into a presidential campaign with a likely candidate who is a world figure with a proven domestic appeal -- see the 18 million primary votes she snagged in 2008 -- but who also has significant political vulnerabilities.

Clinton's stuttering last few months represent the kind of rough political patch that a strong Democratic primary opponent could exploit.

But Clinton's grip on the Democratic Party is so strong that no leading power broker is criticizing her, in the knowledge that the party lacks any other heavy-hitters for 2016. There is certainly no one with the star power or clout to capitalize on Clinton's troubles like Barack Obama did so successfully in 2008.

"I don't see there is any credible challenger," said one Democratic strategist, voicing the private belief of many in the party.

While Sen. Elizabeth Warren is a rock star for the Democratic grass roots for her populist anti-Wall Street rhetoric, few in the party see her as a strong potential general election candidate. Vice President Joe Biden is biding his time and is beloved among Democrats, but would be an extreme long shot to beat Clinton. Another possible runner, former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, polls lower than the margin of error in early surveys of the race.

It is testimony to the power of Hillary and Bill Clinton among Democrats that there are few prominent party figures willing to go on the record to voice doubts about the former secretary of state. It may also be a sign that key party figures realize that while Clinton may have flaws, she represents the only realistic chance of the party pulling off the rare feat of winning three presidential elections in a row.

But if there is no Democrat to take her down, Republicans believe that the email saga is another chance to severely weaken Clinton.

They say the question of Clinton's emails may reverberate deep into the campaign, because it fits a critical narrative that the Clinton way of politics is underhanded and often skirts the rules. Republican lawmakers, meanwhile, have the power to take the drama in unexpected directions as -- armed with subpoenas -- they plow through pages of turned over documents.

Though Clinton's defenders insist she did nothing "nefarious," and say she turned over 55,000 emails to the State Department last year, Republican National Committee spokesman Michael Short said Clinton set up a "homebrewed" server system to "skirt" federal transparency regulations for top officials.

Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist who worked for Mitt Romney's presidential campaigns, said the controversy would help the eventual GOP nominee build a case against Clinton.

"It may look like it is an transparency issue right now, but the bigger problem for the Clinton campaign is that this is going to morph into a character issue for Hillary Clinton," Madden said.

Republicans demands that more emails be turned over could also fuel other efforts by Clinton's foes on Capitol Hill, including those running the probe into the murder of U.S. ambassador Chris Stevens in Benghazi, Libya, while she was secretary of state.

All of this, combined with the lack of any clear sense as to the values and themes that are compelling a new Clinton campaign -- other than a historic quest to be the first woman president -- is contributing to a sense of uncertainty around her prospective White House effort.

"A crucial part of a campaign of a successful campaign roll out is momentum," said Madden.

"This reminds the public of Clinton hangovers they had .... or every scandal that has been litigated. It is just drama after drama with them."

Privately, some Democrats are getting nervous that the kind of disarray that helped pull Clinton's 2008 campaign apart might be resurfacing -- even as others argue this is very much an arcane Beltway storm that is unlikely to trouble heartland voters.

Some are asking how a politician who has been as thoroughly investigated as Clinton, and who knew she might run for president again, would ever make a decision to sidestep official State Department email accounts.

And if it turns out the server Clinton set up to handle her email at her New York home was not sufficiently secure, the episode could take a much more serious turn and threaten her ability to argue that she's strong on national security.

Still, the email episode seems well down the list of blockbuster scandals the Clintons have survived -- so it's possible its impact could turn out to be peripheral to her political ambitions.

If so, it would mark the latest twist in an extraordinary tale of missteps and redemption that the Clintons have lived on repeat for much of their 40 years in politics.

Tracy Sefl, a senior advisor for the group "Ready for Hillary," detected no great concern about the email flap among elected officials at an "Emily's List" dinner headlined by Clinton this week.

"Each of them said with great conviction that their constituents could not care less about this," Sefl said. "Rather, their same constituents prefer to hear her ideas about issues that affect their lives. Yes, it's a familiar refrain, but that's because it remains true."

Both Clintons have long records of turning the heat of a political controversy away -- by showing that they are working hard for vulnerable middle class Americans who care little for Beltway scandal.

But Hillary Clinton is handicapped right now because she is not a declared candidate. She can't just get out on the stump and change the conversation or surround herself with loving crowds.

Some Democrats believe the last few days show the downside of Clinton's strategy not to jump into the race early, even though she lacks a serious primary opponent.

With this in mind, her late-night Tweet on Wednesday revealing that she had asked the State Department to reveal the content of her emails, only contributed to a feeling that she is dodging direct questions.

The White House, meanwhile, is in a tough spot as the row over Clinton emails becomes the latest point of tension in the long psychodrama between President Barack Obama and the Clintons.

It might not have been about Whitewater, Filegate, Travelgate or Monica Lewinsky but White House spokesman Josh Earnest got a small taste this week of what his 1990s predecessors like Mike McCurry faced when he was pummelled with questions about an alleged Clinton scandal.

Earnest's uncomfortable replies, in which he cited State Department procedures for the archiving of official email, appeared to be an attempt to insulate the White House from scandal while avoiding pitching the woman who is the best hope of preserving Obama's legacy deeper into the mire.

It's was an especially ironic moment, because Obama often implicitly invoked the Clinton wars to justify his push for a new kind of politics during his 2008 campaign.

A longtime Clinton ally admitted that there is an understanding in her camp now that the current flap could continue to fester.

"There is a sense among her allies that this story is complicated, and that it won't go away any time soon," the person said. "It won't matter in the end, given what a known quantity she already is across the political spectrum, but it will nonetheless linger.”

Hillary Clinton emails: Did she do anything wrong or not?

http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/06/politics/hillary-clinton-emails-was-there-wrongdoing/index.html

By Jeremy Diamond and Elise Labott, CNN

(CNN) Hillary Clinton's email use is under the microscope after reports revealed that Clinton exclusively used a personal email account during her time as secretary of state.

Clinton not only skipped out on getting a State Department email account, but used a private email server registered to her home address, which gave her and her aides more control over her email records.

Republicans didn't skip a beat, spending the week hammering the presumptive frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination over her secretive email habits as the news cycle mushroomed.

But did Clinton do anything wrong? Or has this become an overblown saga?

Did Clinton break any State Department rules?

As of now, there's no evidence that Clinton violated any State Department rules. But there's a chance she did.

There's no outright ban at the State Department on using a personal email address to conduct official government business.

But a 2005 State Department policy on "sensitive but unclassified information" explains that employees should conduct "normal day-to-day operations" through the State Department's official email system to protect the security of the emails' contents.

Clinton has now handed over 55,000 emails stemming from her duties as the U.S.'s chief diplomat, but there is no evidence yet that Clinton disclosed that type of sensitive information in those emails. That's because they have yet to be released.

Is the State Department looking into whether Clinton violated that policy?

Nope. State Department officials will comb through the 55,000 emails Clinton and her aides submitted to the department for review, but only to determine which emails should be publicly released in accordance with federal open records laws.

If she did, though, it wasn't just an oversight by Clinton and her aides, but any high-ranking official she exchanged emails with, who would have all seen that they were exchanging emails with Clinton's personal address.

Is there a precedent? Did her predecessors use private email?

They did. Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice both had personal email accounts during their time at the helm of the State Department.

Powell also used personal email to communicate with ambassadors, foreign ministers and his own State Department staff. He also had and used an official State Department email, though.

Rice also had both a State account and personal email address, but one of her aides told CNN that the former secretary of state "rarely used email during her tenure at State." And when she did, "her State email was the vehicle for official communication. She did not use personal email for official communication as secretary," the aide said.

And Rice's rare use of email may reveal why the Clinton email saga is a much bigger deal. Email is much more widely used today, especially by high-ranking officials, than it was when Rice became secretary of state ten years ago.

Is there a double standard here?

That's definitely the point Democrats are trying to make.

But while Powell may have used his personal email address to conduct State Department business, he also used a State Department account, which Clinton did not.

Beyond that, though, Clinton also used an email account that fed through its own server -- unlike a personal email account that goes through a service like Gmail or Yahoo, for example -- according to an Associated Press report.

And that's what's most eyebrow-raising.

Housing her email exchanges on her own server gave Clinton a lot more control over the fate of that correspondence. Clinton could have permanently deleted emails, for example.

There's no evidence that she did, but Republicans are up in arms over the revelations as they continue their investigation into the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi -- which happened under Clinton's watch. The House select committee leading that investigation on Wednesday subpoenaed Clinton's emails related to the attack.

So with her own server, did she also got to handpick which emails went to the State Department for public release, right?

That's right, she and her aides made those calls.

But when Clinton was in office, emails on federal accounts weren't automatically archived either and Clinton and her aides would have done some handpicking as well.

She just submitted those emails? She didn't have to do that immediately?

Nope. During the time Clinton was in office, the Federal Records Act required government employees ensure personal emails tied to government business was conserved "in the appropriate agency record keeping system."

That law was updated in 2014, requiring official emails sent from a personal address be forwarded to an official government email within 20 days. That law came after Clinton left office.

So it looks like there's no smoking gun. But her decision to use a personal email account stored on her own private server raises questions, at best, especially when you're (likely) running for president. Anything else?

There's also a tinge of hypocrisy in the air.

During Clinton's personal-email-using, private-server-having tenure, U.S. Ambassador to Kenya Scott Gration was criticized and ultimately pushed out of his post in part for using a personal email address "for official government business, including Sensitive But Unclassified information."

Again, there's no evidence Clinton included "sensitive but unclassified information" in her emails, but a State Department investigation skewed the ambassador in question for using his personal email at all in his official capacity. (He also used an official government email.)

The 2012 Inspector General's report, which was released shortly after Gration resigned his post as the ambassador in Kenya, wrote that the use of personal email was against policy "except in emergencies" and repeatedly slams him for using "commercial email for official government business."

All the while, Clinton was exclusively using her personal email.

There's just one more tidbit revealed in a 2011 internal, unclassified, diplomatic cable from Clinton's office -- though there's no evidence she personally reviewed the cable. It gives the department's employees guidance on "securing personal e-mail accounts," Fox News reported.

One of the guidelines?

"Avoid conducting official Department business from your personal e-mail account."

Watchdog: State Dept. archiving issues go beyond Clinton's emails

http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/07/politics/hillary-clinton-emails-state-department/index.html

By Laura Koran, CNN

Washington (CNN)

An independent watchdog responsible for overseeing the State Department issued a new report Thursday that says there are significant problems in how the department handles requests for information from the public, and that some information held on private servers or in private accounts are being missed.

The office of the inspector general conducted a review of the department's freedom of information act response process after it was revealed that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used a private email server for official communications and that her emails were not archived until she turned them in at the State Department's request in December of 2014 -- nearly two years after she left office.

Secretary of State John Kerry asked the inspector general to conduct the review in March after Clinton's email practices became public, and in September appointed a "transparency coordinator," Janice Jacobs, to improve document preservation efforts going forward.

Jacobs' appointment was "born out of frustration" on Kerry's part that the State Department has come under fire by federal judges and members of Congress for not being responsive to requests by the public and Congress for documents, a senior official told CNN at the time.

While the State Department says Clinton's use of a private email server did not break any rules as they were written at that time, officials have readily acknowledged the strain these requests put on the department -- a strain that has caused some of the issues outlined in Thursday's report.

"OIG's past and current work demonstrates that department leadership has not played a meaningful role in overseeing or reviewing the quality of FOIA responses," the report states, adding that searches "do not consistently meet statutory and regulatory requirements for completeness and rarely meet requirements for timeliness."

Timeliness has been a recurring issue, the report concludes, noting that "although FOIA requires agencies to respond to requests within 20 working days, some requests involving the office of the secretary have taken more than 500 days to process."

The report ultimately issued four recommendations to the State Department, including staffing increases and better oversight from leadership.

State Department spokesman John Kirby said in a statement that the State Department is implementing the OIG's recommendations.

"We remain committed not only to transparency but to making our efforts in that regard as efficient as possible," Kirby said.

Conservative group Judicial Watch, which is suing the State Department over failure to provide records related to the employment of top Clinton aide Huma Abedin, said in a statement Thursday that the email controversy is "worsening."

"The State Department OIG report is half-baked but nonetheless devastating in laying out the violations of law and regulations by Hillary Clinton and her then-Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills," the group said in a statement. "Judicial Watch plans to share this report with several federal courts considering our requests for discovery about the Clinton email issue."

The report's release comes as the State Department's FOIA office is in the process of reviewing 55,000 pages of Clinton's emails for release. The department has published about three quarters of those emails so far, in some cases with redactions, and will be releasing approximately 2,900 more later Thursday.