This Week in Emails: A Few Helpful Resources

Friends -

Hope all of you are having a great and safe Labor Day weekend! 

Below is a compilation of news clips that I think you'll find helpful that have come out in the past week on emails. I'm also attaching a one pager on emails that lays out our key points.

Hope these materials are helpful. Thanks! 

- Adrienne 

This Week in Emails: A Few Helpful Resources

 

News about Hillary Clinton’s emails continue this week, with a number of new developments as well as key expert voices outside pushing back on some of the misleading attacks and arguments being pushed in the media and by other candidates.

 

·         Friday, Hillary Clinton did an extended interview with Andrea Mitchell in which she discussed in detail her views on the email situation, taking responsibility and calling it not the best choice, while also laying out some of the facts around the issue. The whole interview is worth a watch, but if you don’t have time, here’s the first question.

 

·         Anne Tomkins, the former U.S. Attorney who prosecuted David Petraeus, wrote an oped entitled “Petraeus Prosecutor: Clinton Committed No Crime” in which she detailed about the ways in which the two situations differ and noting that “Indeed, the State Department has confirmed that none of the information that has surfaced on Clinton’s server thus far was classified at the time it was sent or received. Additionally, the Justice Department indicated that its inquiry is not a criminal one and that Clinton is not the subject of the inquiry.”

 

·         Secretary of State John Kerry noted in an interview that “there is no evidence that something was transmitted that was classified at the time.” The story noted that “Kerry also took issue with comparisons between Clinton and whistleblowers whom the government goes after for leaking classified information.”

 

·         Rep. Adam Schiff, a member of the Benghazi Select Committee, wrote an oped in the New York Times arguing to “Disband the Benghazi Committee,” arguing the Select Committee became little more than a partisan tool to influence the presidential race, a dangerous precedent that will haunt Congress for decades.

 

·         Last week, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius wrote a column entitled “The Hillary Clinton E-mail  Scandal That Isn’t.”  Ignatius later repeated many his arguments on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, noting that “My only point is I couldn't find a case where this kind of activity had been prosecuted and that's just worth noting as we assemble our Clinton e-mail - and more thing, Joe, legally there is no difference between her using her private server and if she'd used State.gov, which is also not a classified system.” Sadly, you might not have heard them, since these and other parts of his comments were edited out on re-broadcast. Media Matters for America lays out the details here.

 

·         And finally, with yet another monthly release of emails from the State Department, yet again, we are seeing that these releases simply show both the hard work Hillary Clinton and the rest of the State Department team were doing, as well as the human and sometimes humorous side of her email exchanges. Also lost in the debate over emails is the importance of Clinton’s tenure in pushing innovation and use of technology in diplomacy, as laid out in a piece in re/code by the former Chief Information Officer of the US Information Agency.