On CBS' Face The Nation, Clinton Explains That Email Use As Secretary Of State Was “Fully Above Board”

Hillary Clinton On CBS' Face The Nation: My Email Use Was “Allowed” And “Fully Above Board.” Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton appeared on the September 20 edition of CBS' Face The Nation with John Dickerson. During the interview, Clinton explained that her email use during her tenure as secretary of state was “allowed” and “fully above board”:

JOHN DICKERSON: Questions about Benghazi have led to discovery of your personal server. If we use this episode as a way to think about the way would you run your presidency, let's say there's a meeting at Clinton headquarters, and you're with your staff, and you're saying, looking at the email situation from the day you decided, yes, to have the server, all the way to where we are now: what went well, what didn't go so well?

HILLARY CLINTON: Look, I've said that I didn't make the best choice. I should have used two separate email accounts, one personal, one work-related. What I did was allowed, it was fully above board. People in the government certainly knew that I was using a personal email. But I've tried to be transparent. And that includes releasing 55,000 pages, which is unprecedented, nobody else that I'm aware of has ever done that, plus turning over the server, plus testifying at the end of October. So I think that people have questions, I want to try to answer them.

DICKERSON: Was it a failure in judgment on your part?

CLINTON: Well, look, it was permitted, it was allowed, I did it. And I think that people can make their own judgments about that. But I've tried to be as transparent as I can.

DICKERSON: You talked a lot about transparency, that-- when we think about trust, and there has been a lot of talk about that in your campaign and voters having questions, they have questions, maybe related to this, trust and transparency are related, you've been transparent in the release of these emails but what about before? Because there was a period where you held on to the whole kit and caboodle before any investigators were asking for it, long after you were out of the State Department.

CLINTON: It wasn't that long. What I did was to send emails to people at their government accounts, which I had every reason to believe would be captured on the government systems. And when we were asked to help the State Department make sure they had everything from other secretaries of state, not just me, I'm the one who said, 'okay, great, I'll go through them again.' And we provided all of them and more than 90 percent were already in the system, and in fact I gave so many that were not work-related, just to be as comprehensive as possible, they're already sending back about 1,200 of them. Look, I did what was, as I said, allowed, I said it wasn't the best choice. And it turned out to be a mistake in retrospect, but at the time, and given the facts that most of them were in the government systems, people are going to get a chance to see all kinds of behind the scenes conversations, most of which I'm embarrassed to say are kind of boring.

DICKERSON: Just to button this up here, you've said you were sorry.

CLINTON: Yeah.

DICKERSON: What exactly are you sorry for and to whom?

CLINTON: Well, you know, I'm sorry that I made a choice that has raised all of these questions because I don't like reading that people have questions about what I did and how I did it. I'm proud of the work we did at the State Department. And I'm really proud of all the career professionals I worked with, I'm proud of the people who came in with me, and you know, we got sanctions on Iran, put together that international coalition, we got a new arms treaty with Russia, we did lot of really important work. And I want that to be the focus of what people know about my tenure at the State Department. [CBS, Face The Nation, 9/20/15]

Washington Post Blog Post Takes Issue With Clinton's Handling Of Email Situation

Washington Post Opinion Blog: Clinton's Email Practices “Were Inherently Non-Transparent At The Outset.” A September 21 Washington Post PostPartisan opinion blog post wrote that Clinton's Face The Nation interview demonstrated “her finest qualities: her command of issues and her competence,” and praised her as “natural and poised for much of the conversation,” noting that she “offer[ed] a plausible defense of her record at the State Department [and] offered an approach to foreign policy that emphasizes American leadership.” The post then asserted that the “legitimate concern about [Clinton's] State Department e-mail practices is that they were inherently non-transparent at the outset,” taking issue with her statement that her email use was “allowed” and “above board,” and concluded “One doesn't have to assume that she is withholding anything to conclude that this is a bad tradition for public servants”:

Clinton was natural and poised for much of the conversation, demonstrating her finest qualities: her command of issues and her competence. That may be because moderator John Dickerson started with a serious policy question -- what to do with the thousands of Syrian refugees seeking shelter from their country's brutal civil war. She gave a humane and but practical answer that didn't seem to have been generated by a focus group:

[...]

Not only did she offer a plausible defense of her record at the State Department, she offered an approach to foreign policy that emphasizes American leadership but neither relies on the hyperbole of the GOP side nor seems cautiously calibrated to appeal to the Democratic base. Moreover, she's firing a warning shot at Biden, showing that she would hang the Syria mess on him if he chose to get into the race.

But Clinton tensed up when Dickerson turned to the controversy surrounding her State Department e-mails. She repeatedly resorted to the claim that was she did was “allowed” and “above board,” and she insisted that other secretaries of state had done similar things before. Neither argument makes her choice to maintain her own e-mail server a good one. Nor does her repeated claim that she is being fully transparent now.

The legitimate concern about her State Department e-mail practices is that they were inherently non-transparent at the outset. She maintained private e-mail records while at State, and she and her lawyers got to choose which e-mail records to send back to State for record-keeping after she left. One doesn't have to assume that she is withholding anything to conclude that this is a bad tradition for public servants, if it is one. [The Washington Post, 9/21/15]

Justice Department Has Already Stated Clinton Had Legal Authority To Delete Personal Emails, And Could Have Done So Even From A Government Server

DOJ: “Former Secretary Clinton Had Authority To Delete Personal Emails Without Agency Supervision” And “Appropriately Could Have Done So” On A Government Server. The Associated Press reported on September 12 that Justice Department lawyers told a federal court that “there is no question that former Secretary Clinton had authority to delete personal emails without agency supervision -- she appropriately could have done so even if she were working on a government server”:

Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had the right to delete personal emails from her private server, the Justice Department told a federal court.

Lawyers for the government made the assertion in a filing this week with the U.S. District Court in Washington, part of a public records lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group that seeks access to Clinton's emails.

[...]

She has said that she sent and received about 60,000 emails during her four years in the Obama administration, about half of which were personal and deleted. The others were turned over to the State Department.

The FBI has been investigating the security of Clinton's email setup, which she said she used as a matter of convenience. She has since acknowledged that her use of a private email server to conduct government business was a mistake and apologized this week.

Clinton asserts that she had the right under government rules to decide which emails were private and to delete them. This week's filing puts the Justice Department's approval on Clinton's claim.

“There is no question that former Secretary Clinton had authority to delete personal emails without agency supervision -- she appropriately could have done so even if she were working on a government server,” attorneys from the Justice Department's civil division wrote. [Associated Press, 9/12/15]