Just in time for Canada Day, the State Department has loosed upon the world a trove of Hillary Clinton's State Department emails, forcing reporters across this great land of ours to comb through the cache, searching for ... you know, some stuff. What have we learned from the first pass? Mostly that the exercise was more or less deeply unsatisfying for everyone involved.
Don't get me wrong. Some things in this email dump are worth reporting on. For instance, we now know that members of the Obama administration knew that a personal email address for Clinton existed, to which they infrequently sent correspondence. It's a little less clear whether anyone knew the specifics of Clinton's server arrangement or her philosophy of selective archival. As Real Clear Politics' Andrew Desiderio reported, White House press secretary Josh Earnest stated that "President Obama discussed official matters with Clinton via her private email account, but he insisted the president was unaware of the home server." In a tweet, former Obama aide-de-camp David Axelrod said the same.
There is also the suggestion that the White House perhaps knew that Clinton had eschewed the use of a standard-issue State Department email address. A June 8, 2009, email from Clinton adviser Cheryl Mills informs Clinton that Axelrod wanted her email address. Obviously, if Clinton's got an email address in the "state.gov" domain, that request is never sent.
What else? All kinds of people regularly bring their problems and requests and exciting opportunities to the secretary of State, apparently. Maybe even more so when your husband runs an international philanthropic organization? One highlight from this clutch of electronic correspondence is that Cherie Blair, wife of former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, "repeatedly pressured Hillary Clinton to meet a leading Qatari royal when Clinton was US secretary of state," the Guardian reports.
Additionally, thanks to these emails, we know that while Clinton has managed to pass the "Mark Penn Test," she still has a few hilariously embarrassing (and camera-hungry) people like Lanny Davis and The Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild in her orbit.
Also, that time Clinton and her adviser Huma Abedin heroically battled a fax machine to a draw. Which is good news for Clinton, since now she can point to this episode any time a critic accuses her of being out of touch with ordinary people.
Ahh, the modern email dump! It begins with the alluring promise of revelations and frequently ends with an email chain about a troublesome piece of office equipment. Reporters can't resist the impulse to gorge themselves on what amounts to a pile of fresh, raw information. But, as is often the case, the meal is an empty calorie (though gluten-free!) affair.
Back in 2011, I pulled a double-shift in the salt mines of Sarah Palin's old emails. It was an activity that I predicted in advance would essentially be a waste of everybody's time -- a big dumb media-driven pseudo-event that would, finally, allow Palin to find some satisfaction at the expense of her ancient enemy, the mainstream media.
And I was by and large correct. Yes, I managed to get a story for my troubles -- I used that old email cache to chronicle the electric 48-hour period in which Palin went from near-obscurity to certain celebrity as Arizona Sen. John McCain tapped her to be his running mate. It was an interesting window into a world of close friends and political aides experiencing the shock and wonder of those two days, but it wasn't exactly a story that met the world's expectations for that effort.
Flash forward to 2015, and Palin is of the mind that Clinton, and her emails, should be subjected to the same scrutiny that she once was. Palin is right!
But Palin's not likely to get a full measure of enjoyment here, since this compendium of Clinton correspondence is but a tranche of a (presumably) larger whole. And this tranche has been through both the State Department's standard filter as well as Clinton's own bespoke method of sanitization. As Vox's Jonathan Allen notes, one shouldn't get one's hopes up about this email dump allowing reporters to go all fish-barrel-smoking gun on Clinton's State Department tenure, because "these emails are a distraction, a haystack from which any needles may already have been removed."
There's another set -- or at least there was -- on a private server at Clinton's house. Clinton unilaterally decided which of her emails belonged in the public domain and which were personal. Then she wiped her server clean. You can almost imagine Clinton having a good belly laugh at the scores of reporters who are now poring through the documents she handed over without a fight. Sometimes, we can't tell the difference between steak and a chew toy.
Of course, it's not as simple as all that. Whatever amusement Clinton may derive from the thought of the media slogging through this relatively boring cross-section of her inbox is likely to be short-lived, because everyone is already aware that another, perhaps spicier, selection either exists or once existed.
For example, as The New York Times reported last week, at least 15 emails were excluded -- either in whole or in part -- from the raft of correspondence that Clinton handed over to the State Department to scrutinize for this particular email dump. (These additional emails came to light after Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal handed over emails of his own, which, as the Washington Examiner's Sarah Westwood reported, pertained to "the scramble for oil contracts in Libya and the shortcomings of the NATO-led military intervention for which she advocated.") For this reason alone, it's unlikely Clinton is having that "good belly laugh" at our expense.
But that's not the only reason. As history shows, Clinton's been burned by emails before. The history of the fractious, backbiting campaign staff that led to the demise of her 2008 candidacy was told by the Atlantic's Josh Green -- primarily by means of all the intra-campaign emails he managed to ferret out by playing various Clinton aides against one another in a bitter war of blame avoidance. As Green told The Huffington Post's Sam Stein, Clinton was "cc'ed" on all the emails that constituted her campaign's "dirty laundry."
"Isn't it obvious why she [set up her own email server]?" Green said. "If I were coming out of the 2008 campaign, the last thing on earth I would ever want to do is let some asshole reporter like me see an email with her name on it." That would go a long way to explain why Clinton opted to keep all of her email correspondence locked down as tight as possible.
And yet one can't get past just how incredibly short-sighted this strategy was. Had she just used a government email address to conduct some significant portion of routine State Department business, it's likely that she'd have no email scandal dogging her now. And as I previously mused, this has created a problem that is, in all likelihood, impossible to solve.
The Guardian's Megan Carpentier put a finer point on it back in March:
Clearly, Clinton's using a private email account in lieu of an official email was going to come out; clearly the second it did, people were going to speculate that, in said account, she will have been stupid enough to agree to some sort of actionable quid pro quo with Clinton Foundation donors despite that being the singular bone of contention at her 2009 confirmation hearings. And, perhaps even more obviously, a whole bunch of people were going to proclaim that, in using her private email server, she was just proving right the critics who have long said that the Clintons think themselves invincible.
It's just so unfathomably stupid to have nonetheless relied on a private email account to conduct official business that Clinton's supporters and defenders (at least, the ones less stupid and venal than Lanny Davis) should honestly be asking themselves what the fuck she was ever thinking.
Clinton essentially has two options now. The first is to do what Vox's Allen suggests, and "give her server and any other relevant material to an independent third party to review if any of the information can be salvaged and if any of it truly belongs in the public domain." The upside of this option is that Clinton settles the issue of transparency. The obvious downside is that she eats some pain, and she eats it coming or going: either the excluded material contains something damning or embarrassing; or it doesn't include something damning or embarrassing, and we all wonder why exactly she put everyone through all this michegas in the first place.
Her second option is to continue in her refusal to tender her server to a neutral party, and the question of what she might be hiding lingers longer in the campaign ether. In this scenario, maybe nothing new or revelatory seeps out. But on the other side of the cost-benefit analysis, her "honest and trustworthy" polling numbers (which are already upside-down) are going to haunt her presidential run like a creepy troll on New Jersey real estate. This polling tidbit would then basically make its way into every single story about her campaign.
And that matters ... somewhat. It would matter a lot more if said tidbit set Clinton apart from some grand American tradition of trustworthy politicians running in a corruption-free electoral system. That, of course, is not the case: There's a reason it takes zero hands to count the number of politicians who were dissuaded from running for office because the public didn't trust them.
So Clinton will let it ride and go with what's behind door number 2. In the meantime, rest assured, she's taking no pleasure in watching reporters comb through even this antiseptic collection of missives.
Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not?
Before You Go
