فصل 58

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فصل 58

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58

Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping.

—Republican Majority Leader Representative Kevin McCarthy, on Fox News, September 29, 2015

Here’s where the story takes a turn into the partisan swamp. Republicans spent years shamelessly trying to score political points off the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, in September 2012. It was a tragedy, and I lay awake at night racking my brain about what more could have been done to stop it. After previous tragedies, including the bombings of our embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 that killed 241 Americans, and the bombings of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 that killed 12 Americans and hundreds of Africans, there were good-faith bipartisan efforts to learn lessons and improve security. But after the attacks in Benghazi, Republicans turned the deaths of four brave Americans into a partisan farce. They weren’t satisfied that seven congressional investigations (five of them led by Republicans) and an independent review board conducted thorough factual reviews and concluded that neither President Obama nor I were personally to blame for the tragedy. The Republican committee chairmen had done their jobs, but their leaders weren’t satisfied. They wanted to score more political points. So they set up a “new” special committee to damage me as much as possible.

As Kevin McCarthy, the number two House Republican, explained in his moment of rare and unintentional candor, something had to be done to hurt me. He was also trying to become Speaker and needed to impress the right wing.

It wasn’t until October 2015 that the Republicans finally asked me to testify. By then, the investigation into the terrorist attack had long since been overshadowed by their obsession with my emails. The Republicans running the committee had scrapped ten planned hearings about security and other issues, and instead focused solely on me. I had already testified about the attack in both the House and the Senate in 2013, so there wasn’t much new ground to cover. Nonetheless, I answered questions for eleven hours. As overtly partisan as the whole exercise was, I was happy to have the chance to set the record straight.

The Republicans had delivered a massive binder of emails and memos to me just before the hearing began, warning that they planned to ask about any or all of them. Some I’d never seen before. The questioners tried to outdo one another in search of a “Gotcha!” moment that would play on the news. It was all a little ham-handed. One Congressman pointed portentously to a paragraph in one of my emails, insisting it contained some damning revelation of wrongdoing. I directed his attention to the next paragraph, which proved the opposite. And so it went.

Afterward, the Republican chairman Trey Gowdy sheepishly admitted the whole exercise had failed to achieve much of anything. When asked what new information had emerged over eleven hours of grilling, he paused for several seconds and then couldn’t come up with anything. I was down the hall in a small conference room, where I hugged my staff, who had labored so hard to prepare me for the hearing. I invited them back to my house in Northwest Washington, where we ate takeout Indian food and decompressed.

The press agreed that the committee was a bust for the Republicans. But I was experienced enough in the ways of Washington scandals to know that some damage had already been done. Accusations repeated often enough have a way of sticking, or at least leaving behind a residue of slime you can never wipe off.

There is no question that former Secretary Clinton had authority to delete personal emails without agency supervision.

—Department of Justice court filing, September 2015

The Benghazi Committee sent the State Department a blizzard of requests for documents. In August 2014, among 15,000 pages of emails provided to the committee were eight emails to or from me. At the time, nobody raised any questions to me about why I was using a non-state.gov account.

A few months later, during the fall of 2014, the State Department, in an attempt to complete its record keeping, sent a letter to each of the four previous Secretaries of State—me, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Madeleine Albright—for copies of all work emails we might still have in our possession. None of the other Secretaries produced anything. Nothing about weapons of mass destruction and the deliberations that led up to the Iraq War. Nothing about the fallout over the mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison or the use of torture. Nothing at all. Madeleine said she never used email at the State Department. Neither did Condi, although senior aides of hers used personal email accounts. Powell said he didn’t keep any of his emails.

I directed my attorneys to collect and provide to the department any messages I had that could conceivably be considered related to official business. That came to more than 30,000 emails. They were intentionally expansive in what they determined to be work related. The State Department and the National Archives and Records Administration later determined that 1,258 of them were, in fact, purely personal, and did not need to be provided to the department.

More than 30,000 emails sounds like a lot. But that’s over four years, and a lot of those consisted of “Thx,” or “Pls Print”—or no reply at all. One of my aides once calculated the average number of emails he sent and received every day. Over four years, it was hundreds of thousands. That helps put the numbers in context.

Another 31,000 of the emails I had were personal and not related in any way to my job as Secretary of State. I got a lot of grief for saying they were about yoga sessions and wedding planning. But these messages also included communications with lawyers and doctors, information about my mother’s estate, reports from family and friends about things happening in their personal lives, both happy and sad—in short, clearly private personal content. Naturally I didn’t want strangers reading them.

So we checked to make sure we were following the rules, providing every relevant email I had, and deleted the personal ones.

Critics later pounced on the fact that I deleted my personal emails and accused me of acting improperly. But as the Justice Department said, the rules were clear, and they would have applied to personal emails sent on a government account as well. And for good reason: nobody wants his or her personal emails made public.

Lock her up!

—Trump advisor Michael Flynn at the Republican National Convention, July 18, 2016

This quote could have been pulled from nearly any Trump rally of the entire campaign, but there’s a certain poetic justice now in remembering how enthusiastic Michael Flynn was about sending me to jail.

The endless chants of “Lock her up!” once again exposed the viciousness of the Republican smear merchants and their most devoted followers. It was all depressingly familiar. For decades, political adversaries have accused me of every crime under the sun—even murder—and promised that I’d end up in jail one day.

You’d think that this history might have prompted fair-minded journalists to hesitate before setting off on another scandal jamboree. Or that voters might look at a long pattern of false accusations and be skeptical of new claims. But you’d be wrong. The vaguely remembered history of past pseudoscandals ended up reinforcing the general perception that “something shady must be going on with her” and fueling the much-discussed phenomenon of “Clinton fatigue.”

Throughout the 2016 campaign, I watched how lies insinuate themselves into people’s brains if hammered often enough. Fact checking is powerless to stop it. Friends of mine who made calls or knocked on doors for me would talk to people who said they couldn’t vote for me because I had killed someone, sold drugs, and committed any number of unreported crimes, including how I handled my emails. The attacks were repeated so frequently that many people took it as an article of faith that I must have done something wrong.

The hysteria over emails kicked off in earnest in March 2015. On a Saturday night, my attorney, David Kendall, received an email from the New York Times asking several questions about my email practices and asking for responses “by late Sunday or early Monday at the latest.” We scrambled to answer as many of the Times’s questions as we could. Clearly something was up. The Times article appeared online late Monday, March 2, with the headline “Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email Account at State Dept., Possibly Breaking Rules.”

As the Inspector General’s report eventually made clear, this was baloney. The Times observed darkly: “The revelation about the private email account echoes long-standing criticisms directed at both the former Secretary and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, for a lack of transparency and inclination toward secrecy.” It wasn’t until the eighth paragraph that the story noted, “Mrs. Clinton is not the first government official—or first Secretary of State—to use a personal email account on which to conduct official business.”

The Times’s argument was that using personal email reinforced the narrative that I had a penchant for secrecy, but I’ve always found that charge odd. People know more about me and Bill than anybody in public life. We’ve made public thirty-eight years of our tax returns (thirty-eight years more than a certain someone), all my State Department emails, the Clinton Foundation tax returns and donors, medical information—yet we were secretive? When we sometimes did draw a line after going further than anyone in public life to be transparent, we didn’t do it to be secretive—we did it to keep ourselves sane. Not to mention that someone trying to keep her email secret would be pretty dumb to use @clintonemail.com!

The facts didn’t stop the hamster wheel of Washington scandal from spinning into rapid motion, as other media outlets sought to follow a story that must be important, because the New York Times had put it on the front page.

In an effort to calm things down, two days after the Times article appeared, I called for the public release of all the emails I had provided the State Department. I knew that would be a level of transparency unheard of in public life. In fact, more of my emails are now publicly available than every other President, Vice President, and Cabinet Secretary in our country’s history combined. I had nothing to hide, and I thought that if the public actually read all of these thousands of messages, many people would see that my use of a personal account was never an attempt to cover up anything nefarious. The vast majority of the emails weren’t particularly newsworthy, which may be why the press focused on any gossipy nugget it could find and otherwise ignored the contents. There were no startling revelations, no dark secrets, no tales of wrongdoing or negligence. They did, however, reveal something I felt was worth seeing: the hard work and dedication of the men and women of the State Department.

Once people did start reading, I was amused by some of the reactions, as I always am when people discover that I am, in fact, a real person. “I was one of the most ardent Hillary haters on the planet . . . until I read her emails,” one writer declared. “I discovered a Hillary Clinton I didn’t even know existed,” she continued, “a woman who cared about employees who lost loved ones . . . who, without exception, took time to write notes of condolence and notes of congratulations, no matter how busy she was . . . who could be a tough negotiator and firm in her expectations, but still had a moment to write a friend with encouragement in tough times.” Unfortunately, most people didn’t read the emails; they just knew what the press and the Republicans said about them, so they figured they must contain some dark, mysterious secrets.

On March 10 I held a press conference. It wasn’t a pleasant experience. The press was ravenous, and I was rusty, having been out of partisan politics for several years. “Looking back, it would’ve been better if I’d simply used a second email account and carried a second phone,” I said. “But at the time, this didn’t seem like an issue.” That was true. And it didn’t satisfy anyone. Right then and there, I should have known there would never be some magical words to prove how silly it was and make it go away.

Losing the story to another news outlet would have been a far, far better outcome than publishing an unfair story and damaging the Times’s reputation for accuracy.

—New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan on July 27, 2015

Late on July 23, 2015, the Times delivered another bombshell. A front-page article headlined “Criminal Inquiry Is Sought in Clinton Email Use” reported that two Inspector Generals had asked the DOJ “to open a criminal investigation into whether sensitive government information was mishandled in connection with the personal email account Hillary Rodham Clinton used as Secretary of State.” Now my campaign had to deal with questions about whether I was being measured for an orange jumpsuit.

The Justice Department, however, clarified quickly that it had “received a referral related to the potential compromise of classified information” but “not a criminal referral.” The Times had to publish two corrections and an editor’s note explaining why it had “left readers with a confused picture.”

Representative Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the Benghazi Committee, helped explain what happened: “I spoke personally to the State Department Inspector General on Thursday, and he said he never asked the Justice Department to launch a criminal investigation of Secretary Clinton’s email usage. Instead, he told me the Intelligence Community IG [Inspector General] notified the Justice Department and Congress that they identified classified information in a few emails that were part of the FOIA review, and that none of those emails had been previously marked as classified.”

Looking back after the election, the Times described the mix-up as “a distinction without a difference,” because we now know that there was an investigation under way. But we also now know that there was a disagreement between the Department of Justice and the FBI about how to describe it appropriately. The DOJ’s approach, reflected in the clarification to the Times story issued by its spokesperson, was intended to adhere to the long-standing policy of not confirming or denying the existence of an investigation—a rule that Comey respected scrupulously when he refused to say anything at all about the investigation into possible ties between Russia and the Trump campaign. But when it came to my emails, he had plenty to say. Regardless, the Times got into trouble because it gave its readers only one side of the story. The paper’s Margaret Sullivan published a scathing postmortem headlined, “A Clinton Story Fraught with Inaccuracies: How It Happened and What Next?” Sullivan took the Times to task for its shoddy reporting. “You can’t put stories like this back in the bottle—they ripple through the entire news system,” she wrote. “It was, to put it mildly, a mess.”

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