http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/236577-report-clinton-emailed-aides-private-accounts-over-benghaziMarch 23, 2015, 08:11 am
Report: Clinton emailed aides’ private accounts about Benghazi
By Ben Kamisar
Hillary Clinton emailed with her top advisers at the State Department about the 2012 attacks in Benghazi on their own personal emails, despite repeated assurances that she contacted employees on their official addresses, The New York Times is reporting.
Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills and Deputy Chief of Staff Jake Sullivan, as well as senior aides Huma Abedin and Philippe Reines, all occasionally emailed Clinton with personal email addresses of their own, the newspaper reported.
The news comes as Clinton continues to face controversy related to her exclusive use of a private email address while at the State Department. Clinton's team partly justified that email address, which remained on a private server outside the grasp of State, by assuring reporters that it was "her practice to email government officials on their .gov accounts" in order to be sure that they were "immediately captured" as public records.
On top of the more than 30,000 emails that Clinton turned over to the State Department, the House Select Committee on Benghazi is reviewing about 300 that could be related to its investigation. While those emails are not yet public, the Times report sheds light on their content.
The emails reportedly do not lend credibility to allegations of a cover-up of the Benghazi attacks, but they do show her correspondence after a House hearing about a month after the September attacks. Clinton didn't testify until January, but another State Department official appeared at that hearing.
"Did we survive the day?" Clinton reportedly wrote in an email to an adviser.
"Survive, yes," the adviser responded, adding that he'll monitor the public's reaction, according to the Times.
The emails also reportedly show that Clinton's camp had initially been worried that she had publicly blamed the attacks on a spontaneous protest instead of an orchestrated terror attack. That initial characterization dogged then-United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice, who made the Sunday show rounds connecting the attacks to outcry from an anti-Muslim YouTube video.
But Rice was criticized for playing down the attack once the administration began to refer to it as an act of terror. Sullivan emailed Clinton to assure her that she never "characterized their motivation" as "spontaneous."
House Republicans, specifically in the select Benghazi committee, continue to spar with Clinton over her private emails. Committee Chairman Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C) officially requested that she turn over her private server so that an independent investigator can discover whether she deleted any official emails to hide them from public scrutiny.
