Republicans accuse Clinton of 'scheme to conceal' emails from public view

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/mar/05/republicans-accuse-hillary-clinton-emails

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Republicans accused Hillary Clinton of perpetrating “a scheme to conceal” her emails from the public as the first controversy of her silent campaign swirled around the presumptive presidential frontrunner.

Senior State Department officials do not expect to release any of Clinton’s 50,000 pages of personal email related to government business “for several months”, a senior official told the Guardian. The former secretary’s de facto presidential operation already faces accusations of secrecy, malpractice and endangering classified information to hackers.

Related: Hillary Clinton is learning another hard lesson in presidential campaigning

Looming above such allegations are questions about how an unknown team of Clinton’s associates vetted emails, using unknown criteria and withholding an unknown number of emails that may have exposed classified information to security breaches. Clinton’s inner circle has not signalled whether details are forthcoming, as her lead spokesperson referred reporters to a sole statement and other allies aggressively impugned reports on the brewing scandal.

John Kerry, the secretary of state, said at a news conference in Saudi Arabia: “We will undertake this task as rapidly as possible in order to make sure that we’re dealing with the sheer volume of this in a responsible way.

“I think we have all the ones that are state-dot-gov, which are appropriately the ones in the purview of the department. But let me check on that when I get home.”

Only hours before Clinton called for the public release of some of the 50,000 pages that her team vetted and submitted to the State Department, House Republicans had subpoenaed the emails for content related to Benghazi, Clinton’s allies had engaged in a vitriolic PR war with journalists, and cybersecurity experts had voiced concerns of the stark vulnerabilities of the US’s top diplomat running email from her own private server.

Federal law requires officials to preserve their emails on department servers. Clinton’s aides sent the department some of the emails only two months ago, years after she left office, in response to a State Department request.

Instead of using government email, Clinton reportedly ran a personal email system through a private server at her home in Chappaqua, New York.

“I want the public to see my email,” Clinton wrote in a tweet on Wednesday. “I asked State to release them. They said they will review them for release as soon as possible.”

A spokesperson for Representative Trey Gowdy, the head of the House committee looking into Benghazi, issued a swift response.

“The former secretary’s tweet does not answer questions about why this was not done when she left office, the integrity of the emails while she controlled them, the scheme to conceal them, or the failure to provide them in logical course,” Gowdy’s office said in a statement.

Clinton avoided any mention of the emails in a speech in Washington on Tuesday, a day after the story broke. She also ignored questions from a photographer on Thursday and reportedly will not take questions at an event later this month meant to honor journalists for incisive political reportage.

Clinton’s spokesperson, Nick Merrill, has maintained that the former secretary is not guilty of any wrongdoing and has complied with all government requests. Unnamed aides have told news outlets that Clinton assumed emails sent within the department would be automatically archived.

Related: Five burning questions for Hillary Clinton about those private emails

Some journalists allege that the Clinton team used personal email accounts to thwart public record requests, a claim that Clinton’s associates have denied. Likely presidential candidate Jeb Bush also used a private email server as the Republican governor of Florida, and has already released thousands of emails.

Also on Wednesday, House Republicans issued subpoenas to continue their investigation into the 2012 Benghazi attack that killed an American ambassador, during which time Clinton was secretary. Republicans have tried to use that incident to accuse Clinton of wrongdoing or negligence, but outside partisan lines voters have proven disinterested or dissatisfied on the issue.

Representative Ed Royce suggested Republicans will now turn the microscope on Clinton’s email practice, saying “the allegations that secretary Clinton sought to sidestep the law merit robust scrutiny”.

Democrats have reacted cautiously or not at all to the controversy, with most avoiding any public remarks on the emails as they fled a snowstorm descending on Washington DC. Representative Elijah Cummings, ranking member of the Benghazi committee, told reporters, “I’m not trying to defend Hillary Clinton,” before urging the emails’ release in a timely manner.

Tad Devine, a strategist for Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, told the Guardian that the story “doesn’t have an impact on Bernie. It does have an impact on Hillary.” While Devine thought that “this was a real issue and needs to be dealt with explained at a candidate level,” it still wouldn’t resonate with Democratic primary voters. A spokesman for former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley did not respond to a request for comment.

Clinton’s poll numbers have been slipping in recent months, especially in potential swing states, but it remains unclear whether voters will see the the former secretary’s emails as a major campaign issue – barring new revelations in the coming months. George Washington University political scientist John Sides suggested on Twitter that the controversy simply arrived too early to matter: “In October 2016, no persuadable voter will be thinking about Hillary Clinton’s email account.”

Partisans of the Clinton camp agreed. Georgetown professor and Clinton adviser Paul Begala said that the emails will have “zero effect on 2016”.

Journalists and conservative activist groups have long tried to gain access to Clinton’s emails, as is their right under the Freedom of Information Act. The State Department had repeatedly answered Foia requests by saying they didn’t have the information. The question now is what information is actually in the 55,000 pages of emails that Clinton turned over.

Matt Whitaker, the executive director of the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (Fact), a rightwing group that promotes government accountability, said he was hoping to find new information in the emails about the relationship between Clinton’s time at the State Department and her work as part of the Clinton family’s sprawling philanthropic organization – and the potential interplay with heads of state.

“With functionally the same staff as the State Department,” the Clinton Foundation has raised a quarter of a billion dollars, said Whitaker a former US attorney.

Whitaker, like other conservative watchdogs, remained pessimistic that his group would get “a lot of meaningful response to our requests”. Whitaker said that the Clinton State Department had been so opaque that “we don’t know what to expect”.

Jeff Bechdel, a spokesman for the conservative group America Rising, insisted that the former secretary “gets to determine what the State Department gets and what they don’t”.

“We just can’t say what’s out there at this point,” he said.

In contrast, Jill Ferrell, a spokesperson for the conservative accountability group Judicial Watch, was far more optimistic about her group’s follow-ups on the email, which were focused on the Benghazi incident.

Ferrell said her group had built a timeline using emails from other State Department officials and that new requests could help flesh out that cobbled-together narrative. Ferrell saw Clinton as “deliberately misleading [the American people] leading up to the [2012] election”.

The Associated Press, which has been seeking documents from the State Department for nearly five years and is considering a lawsuit. “We believe it’s critically important that government officials and agencies be held accountable to the voters,” the AP’s top lawyer, Karen Kaiser, told the Guardian in a statement.

Republican Senator John McCain proposed a simple solution for Clinton that he has enjoyed for years: don’t use email at all. Speaking to MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, McCain joked that he fears writing something he would regret after giving in to his “even temperament”.

“Frankly, I don’t have any trouble communicating without it,” he said.