Email bombshells from Hillary's secret account show she didn't know when cabinet meetings were held, was dumbfounded by a fax machine and emailed aides to fetch her iced tea
- State Department published a massive tranche of Hillary Clinton's emails Tuesday night from her days as secretary of state
- Judge ordered the release in response to a Freedom Of Information Act lawsuit
- Tuesday's revelation covers barely 3,000 of the 55,000 pages that must go online by the end of the year; 9:00 p.m. release suggested State Department tried to bury it
- Funny moments (Clinton can't work a fax machine) vied with imperious messages (telling aides to fetch her iced tea) and confusing references to someone on her calendar named 'Santa'
Hillary
Clinton's emails have been a subject of partisan finger-pointing and
hand-wringing since the revelation in April that she had used a private
home-brew server to store her messages during the four years she was
secretary of state.
And
on Tuesday the State Department released the first in a series of
document-dumps comprising about 3,000 of the 55,000 pages Clinton turned
over to State late last year.
They
describe the ordinary and the shocking – everything from meeting
recaps to the involvement in the agency of Sidney Blumenthal, Clinton's
2008 election hatchet-man who had officially been exiled from the
administration.
They
also paint the onetime first lady and New York senator as
technologically maladroit – she was all thumbs with an office fax
machine – and distant enough from her husband Bill that their aides kept
each informed about the other's doings.
She
used her email to let aides know she was thirsy. 'Pls call Sarah and
ask her if she can get me some iced tea,' one message read.
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Emails
released: Some 3,000 of the 55,000 pages of correspondence from Hillary
Clinton during her time as secretary of state were released on Tuesday.
The Democratic presidential candidate was earlier seen the same day out
near her campaign headquarters in Brooklyn, New York City
And
then there's 'Santa' Nikkels– the Chappaqua, N.Y. hairdresser on
Clinton's meeting schedule who kept her from making it to the airport on
time.
'I'm
seeing Santa at 8:30,' she wrote her deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin
six months after taking office, 'so [we] won't take off until closer to
9:30.'
Buried
in the din of thousands of people devouring the emails Tuesday night,
though, was something more ominous for Clinton insiders: news that the
State Department had decided to treat some two dozen of the messages as
'classified' – ruling as lawyers vetted the material that some of it was
too sensitive to expose publicly.
Clinton
and her campaign surrogates insisted beginning in April that her
private email server was never a national security risk and never housed
classified documents.
But
State spokesman Alex Gerlach acknowledged Tuesday night that 'portions
of 25 emails were subsequently upgraded' to the classification level
'confidential' – a notch below 'secret.'
WHO'S SANTA? The mysterious character
in the Clinton saga could be a hairdresser, a trainer, a Secret Service
agent or even a dog-sitter but the State Department isn't saying
THIRSTY: Hillary Clinton got so comfortable with email that by late 2009 she was using it to tell aides to bring her iced tea
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
checks her Blackberry phone alongside Korean Foreign Minister Kim
Sung-hwan in November 2011 while on an official trip to South Korea
'It is routine to upgrade information to classified status during the FOIA [Freedom Of Information Act] process,' he said.
The
emails show that there was nothing routine, however, about the
relationship between Clinton's State Department and her 'old friend'
Sidney Blumenthal, the man who flung spears at Barack Obama on her
behalf throughout the bruising 2008 Democratic presidential campaign
season.
Blumenthal
was unofficially exiled from the Obama administration because the White
House saw him as untrustworthy. Hillary tried, unsuccessfuly, to hire
him anyway.
When she hit a dead end, Clinton put him on payroll with her family foundation at a rate of $10,000 per month.
From
that perch, he sent Hillary a steady stream of intelligence briefings
on Libya, including some around the time of the deadly 2012 terror
attacks.
During an Iowa campaign stop in May, Clinton told reporters that Blumenthal had sent her 'unsolicited emails' containing advice.
But in 2009 she was in regular contact with him to ask for his counsel, the latest released emails show.
'Are you still awake?' she emailed him at 10:35 one October night. 'I will call if you are.'
WHAT'S THAT SCREECHING SOUND? It took
15 minutes for a Clinton senior staffer to teach her why it?s a bad idea
to take a fax machine's handset off the hook when someone is trying to
send a fax
JUST LIKE US! Clinton and her deputy
chief of staff Huma Abedin discussed weighty matters of state like which
private jet to reserve for a trip
Clinton has also sought to downplay any thought that she was actually using information from Blumenthal in her work.
But on at least one occasion, she passed his thoughts to her most senior aides.
'The
speechwriting crew is taking Sid's points below and massaging them into
a set of remarks,' her policy planning chief Jake Sullivan told her in
an email.
The 'Sid' factor threatens to proide Clinton's opponents with ammunition against her in 2016.
He
was gathering intelligence for her on the sly, outside the regular
chain of command, and with no legal oversight. He was also being paid by
the same Clinton Foundation that was simultaneously accepting
multimillion-dollar donations from foreign companies and governments.
Blumenthal
also tried to get Hillary interested in an ultimately unsuccessful
scheme to elect former British Prime Minister Tony Blair to the
presidency of the European Council. 'Tony is somewhat downcast on his
chances,' Blumenthal wrote, suggesting Clinton might 'weigh in' with top
European diplomats on his behalf.
'Your part in this may yet be important,' he wrote.
Correspondence:
The majority of the emails loop in Huma Abedin who is Hillary Clinton's
vice chairwoman of her 2016 campaign for President
Blumenthal's
deep-burrowed connections in Clintonland are old news, but the number
of people who managed to keep Clinton’s private email address a secret
is surprising.
Despite
the collective shock inside the D.C. beltway when news of the
off-the-books account surfaced, many of Washington's most influential
Democrats were already in on it.
Political
operative David Axelrod had her email address almost from the start,
specifically asking her chief of staff for it in 2009, but claimed just
weeks ago that he was unaware of it.
Treasury
Secretary Jack Lew and then-White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel
wrote to her at the now-infamous 'HDR22@clintonemail.com.'
So
did outgoing Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski; socialite 1-percenter
Lynn Forester de Rothschild; Bill Clinton-era former National Security
Adviser Sandy Berger; former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s wife
Cherie; retired U.S. Army General Wesley Clark; liberal think tank chief
John Podesta of the Center for American Progress; and lawyer-lobbyist
Lanny Davis – who was later shamed for taking millions from West African
strongmen.
In one of the odder exchanges, Clinton urged Podesta to 'please wear socks to bed to keep your feet warm'.
DISTANT: When Bill Clinton accepted a
United Nations offer to serve as a special envoy to Haiti, he never told
his wife. The news reached her after Bill's aide told Hillary's aide
Also in the loop was Brian Greenspun, the publisher of the Las Vegas Sun – a newspaper that endorsed Clinton in 2008.
The
Sun published a story shortly after Clinton launched her campaign,
advising her on how to avoid repeating her Democratic primary collapse
of eight years ago.
'Excite Latinos and Asian-Americans,' the paper's reporter wrote, and 'Take advantage of the Harry Reid machine.'
The
emails released Tuesday night cover the calendar year 2009, when there
was not yet any inkling of what would happen three years later in the
Libyan city of Benghazi.
Republicans
have bet a slice of their election credibility on the premise that
Clinton's incompetence opened the door to the 2012 terror attack there
that killed a U.S. ambassador; and that her Machiavellian scheming was
central to a cover-up of the nature of the attack just weeks before
Obama stood for re-election.
Even
when State Department lawyers have vetted every page, journalists and
lawmakers may never know what Clinton deleted from the public record.
She claimed in April that she scrubbed the server of more than 31,000 emails which she deemed 'personal' in nature.
Twitter
let out a collective guffaw Tuesday night in the direction of a
December 2009 email exchange between Clinton and Abedin – who invested
15 minutes trying to teach her boss how the handset on a fax machine
worked.
Exclusive: Santa's Hair Salon in Chappaqua, which the emails disclosed was used by Hillary.
Arm's length: Bill Clinton in Oslo,
Norway, today with Norwegian foreign minister Boerge Brende. The emails
show he and Hillary often communicated to each other through their
aides.
'Can you hang up the fax line?' Abedin wrote. 'They will call again and try fax.'
'I thought it was supposed to be off [the] hook to work?' Clinton responded.
'Yes,' Abedin wrote, 'but hang up one more time. So they can establish the line.'
'I did,' Clinton replied.
'Just pick up [the] phone and hang it up. And leave it hung up,' Abedin shot back.
'I've done it twice now,' replied a befuddled Hillary.
It
was Abedin who emailed Clinton in July 2009 to ask her about her
preferred travel arrangements when a private jet wasn't available as
planned.
What
to do? Wait an extra three hours for a 19-passenger Gulfstream III
aircraft, or settle for the six-seat Learjet that's fueled and ready?
'The
g3 is delayed till 5pm wheels up,' Abedin wrote her. 'There is a lear
available at 2pm with 6 seats. Do u want to just leave at 5?'
In other instances it was chief of staff Cheryl Mills who shed light on Clinton's life.
When
former president Bill Clinton agreed to serve as the United Nations
Special Envoy to Haiti following a devastating 2009 earthquake, he
didn't tell her.
It
was Bill's trusted aide Doug Band who told Mills: 'Wjc [Bill] just told
SecGen [Ban Ki-moon] that he would do Haiti special envoy,' Band wrote
her.
'Wjc said he was going to call hrc [Hillary] but hasn't had time.'
Mills ricocheted the message to her own deputy in two minutes' time.
'You
need to walk this to HRC if she is not gone,' Mills wrote aide Nora
Toiv. 'I am also going to give WH [the White House] heads up.'
While
nothing in Tuesday night's release validates the GOP's hope for
evidence that Hillary is crooked or misused her office, another top
State Department official may have violated federal election law.
How many want to be president? The
emails revealed that Tony Blair (second from left with his wife Cherie
in 1998) felt his bid to be president of the European Council was
floundering. Sidney Blumenthal urged Hillary to support her and former
President Clinton's old friend in his campaign, which ultimately failed
Chief
Protocol Officer Capricia Penavic Marshall emailed Democratic political
consultant Paul Begala – and another recipient whose name the State
Department redacted – to thank him for helping raise a half-million
dollars to pay Clinton's bills from her failed presidential run.
'We
raised $500K from the email contest!!,' Marshall wrote. 'You all are
amazing - the world adores you! You put a serious hole in hrc debt!'
Federal
law forbids government employees from using taxpayer-funded resources,
including office computers and other devices, in connection with
political fundraising – even if the money collected goes to retire old
campaign costs.
'What we learned tonight is troubling,' Republican National Committee chairman Reice Priebus said in a statement Tuesday night.
'Administration
officials knew more than previously disclosed, Sidney Blumenthal was
involved with more than just providing Libya off-the-books intelligence,
and State Department officials were possibly fundraising on government
accounts.'
Priebus
called the revelations 'just the tip of the iceberg' and joined
congressional Republicans in demanding that she hand over to independent
investigators the actual computer hardware that once held the messages.
In correspondence with the House Select Committee on Benghazi, Clinton's attorney has insisted that's not going to happen.
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