Hillary Clinton is the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee. After a blowout win in California, the endorsements rolled in: Senator Elizabeth Warren, Vice President Joe Biden and President Barack Obama.
But before the former Secretary of State can formally accept the nomination at the party’s national convention in July, she still has one major concern clouding those prospects: her email scandal.
Clinton’s private email domain was registered on January 13, 2009--the same day that her confirmation hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee began for her appointment as Secretary of State. The domain was created by Justin Cooper, a Clinton aide, under the name clintonemail.com. Besides Hillary, husband Bill, daughter Chelsea and several aides received email accounts registered under the private domain. Clinton used this email instead of an official government address during her tenure as Secretary of State.
On September 11, 2012, during Clinton’s tenure, a group of Islamic militants attacked the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. The attack started around 9:40PM and lasted several hours, extending to the nearby CIA annex. As a result, U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other American citizens died, making this the first incident since 1979 in which a U.S. ambassador was killed on the line of duty.
After the attack several committees and investigations were opened to examine why and how it all happened and particularly whether there were security concerns that should have been addressed prior. Namely these committees were: the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, the House Committee on the Judiciary, the House Committee on Armed Services and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. In January 2013 Clinton spent six hours speaking in front of these House and Senate committees, mainly defending the Obama administration’s response to the attacks and its approach to security.
For Clinton’s Republican opponents however, the efforts of these committees was not enough. They demanded the formation of a new, House-select committee; the Select Committee on the Events Surrounding the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi was established in May 2014.
In August, the State Department gave the newly-formed committee 15,000 pages of documents relating to the Benghazi attacks. The committee noted that the documents included only eight emails to or from Clinton. Of the eight emails identified, some were sent from a private email account, whereas the origin of the others could not be identified.
In October of the same year the committee requested records from four previous Secretaries of State, including Clinton, under the Federal Records Act. Clinton turned over her emails from the private domain at the end of 2014.
It wasn’t until three months later that the media picked up on the story--even though the information had been public for two years when a hacker infiltrated the email account of Sidney Blumenthal, a former aide of Bill Clinton and Hillary’s confidant. The hack revealed a series of emails between Blumenthal and Clinton regarding intel on the Benghazi attack. It also revealed that Clinton’s emails were all sent from a private account.
At the time of the media frenzy, Nick Merril, Clinton’s press secretary, declared that the use of the private email was done under “letter and spirit of the rules.” Indeed, in October 2009, ten months after Clinton was named Secretary of State, the U.S. Code of federal regulations on handling electronic records was updated. The new rules stated that it was now legal for employees to use non-official emails accounts “to send and receive official electronic mail messages” as long as federal records of all emails are kept.
A day later Clinton herself tweeted that she had requested the State to release her emails.
I want the public to see my email. I asked State to release them. They said they will review them for release as soon as possible.
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) March 5, 2015
On March 10, 2015 Clinton held a press conference in which she tackled the controversy and justified her actions: “I opted for convenience to use my personal email account, which was allowed by the State Department, because I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails instead of two.”
In May 2015 the Benghazi committee made the first batch of these emails public. So far the State Department has publicly released more than 30,000 of Clinton’s own emails. Of these 22 were classified by the State Department as “top secret,” 65 as “secret” and 2,028 as “confidential.” And a judge recently ordered that a new batch of Hillary-related emails from her aides or private domain would be turned over to her Republican opponents.
Clinton’s problems are not limited solely to the public attention. In August 2015 it was reported that the FBI had begun an investigation of Clinton’s use of a private email system to verify whether the security of the emails had been breached and any classified information revealed. Several of Clinton’s current and former aides have already had closed hearings and reports suggest that Clinton herself will testify in front of the Bureau.
It turns out that Bernie Sanders was wrong: People do care about Hillary Clinton’s “damn emails.”
Update: On June 28 the Benghazi Committee released its final report, concluding after years of investigation that there is no evidence for culpability on the part of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
