State releases more than 1,900 Clinton emails
The State Department on Tuesday released 3,000 pages of emails from the private server former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used while in office.
The correspondence, released online, covers March through December 2009.
The 1,925 emails cover a broad spectrum of the seemingly everyday activities required to run the State Department, including arranging phone calls with foreign leaders at all times of day and night.
{mosads}Clinton sent several messages at the end of her work day to her longtime aide, Huma Abedin, often asking whether there was anything else she needed to know.
Some emails touch on White House aides trying to get Clinton’s personal email address, including then-Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and then-Senior Advisor to the President David Axelrod.
The messages include several from Clinton ally Sidney Blumenthal, who offered his take on various policy issues in Europe.
Among the messages, on July 11, 2009, Clinton received an email from “Jimmy” — presumably former President Jimmy Carter — titled “N. Korea.”
The message seems to be about freeing journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee, who were charged and held with illegal passage into the Stalinist state. It reads:
“Hillary: As I explained to you on the phone, I don’t think it is appropriate to tell them that I will come only if they agree in advance to release the women. Your response was, in effect, ‘They have already agreed.’ Is this correct? If not, I will go, by commercial airline if necessary, representing The Carter Center, and try to induce them to approve the release. JC”
Clinton forwarded the message on to a redacted email account with the comment “fyi.”
Not all messages dealt with such weighty issues. In a Sept. 20, 2009, message to an aide, Clinton wrote in the subject line: “Pls call Sarah and ask her if she can get me some iced tea.”
On June 18, 2009, Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) sent Clinton well wishes after she fell and hurt herself.
“Oops. When I wanted you to trip the light fantastic. I didn’t mean that literally. Be careful. Do the therapy. Get well,” Mikulski wrote.
Clinton replied 12 days later thanking the lawmaker for her kind words.
On June 2, 2009, Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s chief of staff, emailed some in Clinton’s inner circle asking who was in charge of the department’s Twitter account, after a mention in Newsweek that Clinton herself ran it.
“We should not be twittering in the Secretary’s name since she is not the person actually twittering,” she said.
Another staffer replied that the Twitter account in question was from DipNote, the department’s blog. Mills forwarded the info to Clinton.
The batch also includes run-of-the-mill messages about staff birthdays and promotions, and a somewhat comical back-and-forth between Clinton and Abedin over how to use a fax machine.
In one email — titled “Don’t laugh!!” — Clinton asked an aide about carpets in China.
“Can you contact your protocol friend in China and ask him if I could get photos of the carpets of the rooms I met in w POTUS during the recent trip?” Clinton wrote. “I loved their designs and the way they appeared carved. Any chance we can get this?”
In May, a District of Columbia judge ordered the State Department to release Clinton’s emails in batches ever 30 days, rejecting an agency plan to roll them out in early 2016.
The release will meet the court’s mandate that it match at least 7 percent of Clinton’s message traffic, department spokesman John Kirby said during a Tuesday press briefing.
Kirby tried to explain the strange timing of the release.
“You have to understand the enormity of the task here. It is a lot of stuff to go through,” he told reporters, adding the agency was “working right up to the deadline” to get the emails out.
Questions over Clinton’s use of a private server while serving as secretary of State have dogged her candidacy since she entered the White House race in April.
Also on Tuesday, the State Department handed over 3,600 pages of correspondence to the House Select Committee on Benghazi.
The emails from Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations at the time of the deadly 2012 assault, Mills and former Clinton aide Jake Sullivan were provided under a subpoena the GOP-controlled panel issued in March.
In a letter accompanying the document delivery, Clinton’s old agency said that “to the extent the materials produced relate to your inquiry, we do not believe they change the fundamental facts of the attacks on Benghazi.”
Four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, were killed in the attacks on the diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya.
Roughly 300 emails from Clinton’s personal server that were related to the attacks were released in May.
That batch of emails did not include some messages Clinton received from Blumenthal in which he discussed Libya. Blumenthal himself turned the memos over to the select committee after being subpoenaed.
The State Department said last week it didn’t have 15 emails that Clinton received from Blumenthal, leading panel chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) and others to renew calls for her to turn the server over to a third party so it can be checked for any missing data.
– Updated at 11:20 p.m.
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