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!
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.