Bombshell emails from Hillary's secret account show she didn't know when cabinet meetings were held, was dumbfounded by a fax machine and emailed aides to fetch her iced tea
Email bombshells from Hillary's secret account show she didn't know when cabinet meetings were held, was dumbfounded by a fax machine and emailed aides to fetch her iced tea
•State Department published a massive tranche of Hillary Clinton's emails Tuesday night from her days as secretary of state
•Judge ordered the release in response to a Freedom Of Information Act lawsuit
•Tuesday's revelation covers barely 3,000 of the 55,000 pages that must go online by the end of the year; 9:00 p.m. release suggested State Department tried to bury it
•Funny moments (Clinton can't work a fax machine) vied with imperious messages (telling aides to fetch her iced tea) and confusing references to someone on her calendar named 'Santa'
By David Martosko, Us Political Editor For Dailymail.com
Published: 00:49 EST, 1 July 2015 | Updated: 02:10 EST, 1 July 2015
Hillary Clinton's emails have been a subject of partisan finger-pointing and hand-wringing since the revelation in April that she had used a private home-brew server to store her messages during the four years she was secretary of state.
On Tuesday the State Department released the first in a series of document-dumps comprising about 3,000 of the 55,000 pages Clinton turned over to State late last year.
They describe the ordinary and the shocking – everything from ordinary meeting recaps to the involvement in the agency of Sidney Blumenthal, Clinton's 2008 election hatchet-man who had officially been exiled from the administration.
They also paint the onetime first lady and New York senator as technologically maladroit – she was all thumbs with an office fax machine – and distant enough from her husband Bill that their aides kept each informed about the other's doings.
She used her email to let aides know she was thirsy. 'Pls call Sarah and ask her if she can get me some iced tea,' one message read.
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And then there's 'Santa' – an unknown person apparently on Clinton's meeting schedule.
'I'm seeing Santa at 8:30,' she wrote her deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin six months after taking office, 'so won't take off until closer to 9:30.'
Despite the collective shock inside the D.C. beltway when news surfaced that Clinton had a secret email account, many of Washington's most influential Democrats were already in on it.
Political operative David Axelrod had her email address almost from the start, but claimed just weeks ago that he was unaware of it.
Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and then-White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel wrote to her at the now-infamous 'HDR22@clintonemail.com.'
So did outgoing Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski, liberal think tank chief John Podesta of the Center for American Progress, and lawyer-lobbyist Lanny Davis – who was later shamed for taking millions from West African strongmen.
Missing, so far, is any evidence of wrongdoing in the Benghazi saga.
Republicans have bet a slice of their election credibility on the premise that Clinton's incompetence opened the door to the 2012 terror attack that killed a U.S. ambassador; and that her Machiavellian scheming was central to a cover-up of the nature of the attack just weeks before Obama stood for re-election.
Even when State Department lawyers have vetted every page, journalists and lawmakers may never know what Clinton deleted from the public record.
She claimed in April that she scrubbed the server of more than 31,000 emails which she deemed 'personal' in nature.
Twitter let out a collective guffaw Tuesday night in the direction of a December 2009 email exchange between Clinton and Abedin – who invested 15 minutes trying to teach her boss how the handset on a fax machine worked.
'Can you hang up the fax line?' Abedin wrote. 'They will call again and try fax.'
'I thought it was supposed to be off [the] hook to work?' Clinton responded.
'Yes,' Abedin wrote, 'but hang up one more time. So they can establish the line.'
'I did,' Clinton replied.
'Just pick up [the] phone and hang it up. And leave it hung up,' Abedin shot back.
'I've done it twice now,' replied a befuddled Hillary.
It was Abedin who emailed Clinton in July 2009 to ask her about her preferred travel arrangements when a private jet wasn't available as planned.
What to do? Wait an extra three hours for a 19-passenger Gulfstream III aircraft, or settle for the six-seat Learjet that's fueled and ready?
'The g3 is delayed till 5pm wheels up,' Abedin wrote her. 'There is a lear available at 2pm with 6 seats. Do u want to just leave at 5?'
In other instances it was chief of staff Cheryl Mills who shed light on Clinton's life.
When former president Bill Clinton agreed to serve as the United Nations Special Envoy to Haiti following a devastating 2009 earthquake, he didn't tell her.
It was Bill's trusted aide Doug Band who told Mills: 'Wjc [Bill] just told SecGen [Ban Ki-moon] that he would do Haiti special envoy,' Band wrote her.
'Wjc said he was going to call hrc [Hillary] but hasn't had time.'
Mills ricocheted the message to her own deputy in two minutes' time.
'You need to walk this to HRC if she is not gone,' Mills wrote aide Nora Toiv. 'I am also going to give WH [the White House] heads up.'
WHAT WE LEARNED FROM HILLARY CLINTON'S STATE DEPARTMENT EMAILS RELEASED TUESDAY
1. Many of Washington's most influential Democrats had Hillary's secret address, including political operatives like David Axelrod, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski and liberal think tank chief John Podesta
2. Bill and Hillary Clinton apparently communicated through surrogates, with one Bill insider telling Hillary's chief of staff to let her know her husband had accepted a role as UN Special Envoy to Haiti
3. The State Department's top diplomatic protocol officer crowed to Hillary that an email contest run by political consultant Paul Begala helped her retire $500,000 of her campaign debt from the 2008 presidential race
4. Hillary's deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin pressed her to make tough decisions, like whether to delay a trip departure for three hours so she could take a larger private jet
5. The State Department was worried that reporters would discover Sidney Blumenthal, a Hillary campaign hatchet-man banned from the agency by President Obama, was still secretly advising her – and Blumenthal managed to spill he beans to an Associated Press reporter without knowing who he was talking to
6. Despite later claiming Blumenthal's frequent email memos were 'unsolicited' and of little value, Hillary later made some of his suggestions part of her foreign policy speeches
7. In June 2009 Hillary learned from a radio broadcast that President Obama was about to hold a cabinet meeting; she emailed her scheduler to ask 'Can I go?'
While nothing in Tuesday night's release validates the GOP's hope for evidence that Hillary is crooked or misused her office, another top State Department official may have violated federal election law.
Chief Protocol Officer Capricia Penavic Marshall emailed Democratic political consultant Paul Begala – and another recipient whose name the State Department redacted – to thank him for helping raise a half-million dollars to pay Clinton's bills from her failed presidential run.
'We raised $500K from the email contest!!,' Marshall wrote. 'You all are amazing - the world adores you! You put a serious hole in hrc debt!'
Federal law forbids government employees from using taxpayer-funded resources, including office computers and other devices, in connection with political fundraising – even if the money collected goes to retire old campaign costs.
'What we learned tonight is troubling,' Republican National Committee chairman Reice Priebus said in a statement Tuesday night.
'Administration officials knew more than previously disclosed, Sidney Blumenthal was involved with more than just providing Libya off-the-books intelligence, and State Department officials were possibly fundraising on government accounts.'
Priebus called the revelations 'just the tip of the iceberg' and joined congressional Republicans in demanding that she hand over to independent investigators the actual computer hardware that once held the messages.
In correspondence with the House Select Committee on Benghazi, Clinton's attorney has insisted that's not going to happen.
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