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Where there’s a will to condemn, evidence will follow.

—Chinese proverb Those Damn Emails

Imagine you’re a kid sitting in history class thirty years from now learning about the 2016 presidential election, which brought to power the least experienced, least knowledgeable, least competent President our country has ever had. Something must have gone horribly wrong, you think. Then you hear that one issue dominated press coverage and public debate in that race more than any other. “Climate change?” you ask. “Health care?” “No,” your teacher responds. “Emails.”

Emails, she explains, were a primitive form of electronic communication that used to be all the rage. And the dumb decision by one presidential candidate to use a personal email account at the office—as many senior government officials had done in the past (and continued to do)—got more coverage than any other issue in the whole race. In fact, if you had turned on a network newscast in 2016, you were three times more likely to hear about those emails than about all the real issues combined.

“Was there a crime?” you ask. “Did it damage our national security?”

“No and no,” the teacher replies with a shrug.

Sound ridiculous? I agree.

For those of you in the present, you’ve most likely already heard more than your fill about my emails. Probably the last thing you want to read right now is more about those “damn emails,” as Bernie Sanders memorably put it. If so, skip to the next chapter—though I wish you’d read a few more pages to understand how it relates to what’s happening now. But there’s no doubt that a big part of me would also be very happy to never think about the whole mess ever again.

For months after the election, I tried to put it all out of my mind. It would do me no good to brood over my mistake. And it wasn’t healthy or productive to dwell on the ways I felt I’d been shivved by then-FBI Director Jim Comey—three times over the final five months of the campaign.

Then, to my surprise, my emails were suddenly front-page news again. On May 9, 2017, Donald Trump fired Comey. The White House distributed a memo by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein that excoriated Comey for his unprofessional handling of the investigation into my emails. They said that was the reason for firing him. (You read that right. Donald Trump said he fired Comey because of how unfair the email investigation was to . . . me.) Rosenstein cited the “nearly universal judgment” that Comey had made serious mistakes, in particular his decisions to disparage me in a July press conference and to inform Congress that he was reopening the investigation just eleven days before the election. Testifying before Congress on May 19, 2017, Rosenstein described Comey’s press conference as “profoundly wrong and unfair.”

I read Rosenstein’s memo in disbelief. Here was Trump’s number two man at the Justice Department putting in writing all the things I’d been thinking for months. Rosenstein cited the opinions of former Attorneys General and Deputy Attorneys General of both parties. It was as if, after more than two years of mass hysteria, the world had finally come to its senses.

But the story quickly fell apart. On national television, Trump told NBC’s Lester Holt that the real reason he fired Comey was the FBI’s investigation into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence. Or, as Trump called it, “this Russia thing.” I wasn’t surprised. Trump knew that, for all of Comey’s faults, he wouldn’t lie about the law. He had insisted that there was no case against me, despite Republican (and internal FBI) pressure to say there was, so when he confirmed the FBI’s Russia investigation to Congress in 2017, I figured he was on borrowed time.

Still, it was incredible to see Comey go from villain to martyr in five seconds flat.

To make sense of this, you have to be able to keep two different thoughts in your head at the same time: Rosenstein was right about the email investigation, and Comey was wrong. But Trump was wrong to fire Comey over Russia. Both of those statements are true. And both are frustrating.

As painful as it is to return to this maddening saga, it’s now more important than ever to try to understand how this issue ballooned into an election-tipping controversy. A lot of people still don’t understand what it was all about; they just know it was bad. And I can’t blame them: they were told that over and over again for a year and a half. For most of the general election campaign, the word email dominated all others when people were asked to name the first word that came to mind about me.

Right off the bat, let me say again that, yes, the decision to use personal email instead of an official government account was mine and mine alone. I own that. I never meant to mislead anyone, never kept my email use secret, and always took classified information seriously.

During the campaign, I tried endlessly to explain that I’d acted in good faith. I tried to apologize, though I knew the attacks being lobbed at me were untrue or wildly overstated, and motivated by partisan politics. Sometimes I dove deep into the tedious details. Other times I tried to rise above it all. Once I even told a bad joke. No matter what, I never found the right words. So let me try again:

It was a dumb mistake.

But an even dumber “scandal.”

It was like quicksand: the more you struggle, the deeper you sink. At times, I thought I must be going crazy. Other times, I was sure it was the world that had gone nuts. Sometimes I snapped at my staff. I was tempted to make voodoo dolls of certain members of the press and Congress and stick them full of pins. Mostly, I was furious at myself.

Given my inability to explain this mess, I decided to let other voices tell the story this time. I hope that it helps to better connect the dots and explain what did and, equally important, didn’t happen.

Nothing can undo what’s done, but it does help with my frustration—and that’s clearly good for my mental health!

Our best information is that she set it up as a matter of convenience.

—FBI Director Jim Comey, in congressional testimony, July 7, 2016

Yes, it was supposed to be convenient. Some doubted that explanation. But that’s what the FBI concluded after months of investigation. And it’s the truth.

A lot of young people today are used to carrying around multiple devices and having both a personal phone and one provided by their work. But I’m not a digital native. (I couldn’t even have told you what that term meant until fairly recently.) I didn’t send a single email while I was in the White House as First Lady or during most of my first term in the U.S. Senate. I’ve never used a computer at home or at work. It was not until about 2006 that I began sending and receiving emails on a BlackBerry phone. I had a plain old AT&T account like millions of other people, and used it both for work and personal email. That was my system, and it worked for me.

Adding another email account when I became Secretary of State would have meant juggling a second phone, since both accounts could not be on the same State Department device. I knew that former Secretary of State Colin Powell had used personal email exclusively. I also knew that email wasn’t where the bulk of a Secretary’s work was done. All this added up to me not giving this much thought when I took office—there was a lot else going on—although, of course, I now wish I had.

In early 2009, I moved my email account from AT&T’s server to one that my husband’s office had previously set up in our Chappaqua home, which is guarded by the Secret Service. People have asked, “Why did you set up that server?” But the answer is that I didn’t; the system was already there. My husband had been using an office server for years and had recently upgraded it. It made sense to me to have my email account on that same system. So I just moved my account onto it. I could keep using my BlackBerry in exactly the same way as I always had.

I emailed regularly with Chelsea and with Bill’s team—he does not personally use email, and we are still phone people—and with relatives and friends. But very little of my work was via email during the next four hectic years. I held lots of meetings, talked on the telephone (on both regular and secure lines), read stacks of briefing papers, and traveled nearly a million miles to 112 countries to see people face-to-face.

When we went back later on and collected all my work-related emails, we found a lot like this:

From:

H

To:

John Podesta

Sent:

Sunday, September 20, 2009 10:28 PM

Subject:

Re: When could we talk?

I’m on endless calls about the UN. Could I call you early tomorrow? Would btw 6:30 and 8:00 be too early? Please wear socks to bed to keep your feet warm.

Yes, that’s me telling my friend John to wear warm socks. Or, there’s this one, where I struggle to use my fax machine:

From:

H

To:

Huma Abedin

Sent:

Wednesday, December 23, 2009 2:50 PM

Subject:

Re: can you hang up the fax line, they will call again and try fax

I did.

—Original Message—

From:

Huma Abedin

To:

H

Sent:

Wed Dec 23 14:43:02 2009

Subject:

Re: can you hang up the fax line, they will call again and try fax

Yes but hang up one more time. So they can reestablish the line.

—Original Message—

From:

H

To:

Huma Abedin

Sent:

Wed Dec 23 14:39:39 2009

Subject:

Re: can you hang up the fax line, they will call again and try fax

I thought it was supposed to be off hook to work?

Here’s one more that still makes me chuckle:

From:

H

To:

Huma Abedin

Sent:

Wednesday, February 10, 2010 3:19 PM

Subject:

Re: Diane Watson to retire

I’d like to call her.

But right now I’m fighting w the WH operator who doesn’t believe I am who I say and wants my direct office line even tho I’m not there and I just [gave] him my home # and the State Dept # and I told him I had no idea what my direct office # was since I didn’t call myself and I just hung up and am calling thru Ops like a proper and properly dependent Secretary [of] State—no independent dialing allowed.

In the end, what was meant to be convenient turned out to be anything but. If I had known all that at the time, there’s no question I would have chosen a different system. Just about anything would have been better. Carving messages in stone and lugging them around town would have been better.