Hillary Clinton Email Controversy

Overview

The Hillary Clinton Email Controversy is an ongoing political scandal involving former United States Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and her use of personal email accounts hosted on privately-managed servers, in lieu of official email accounts maintained on secured federal government servers, in conducting official businesses on behalf of the U.S. State Department during her tenure in the Obama administration. The scandal first came to the light of public attention in March 2015, shortly before Hillary Clinton announced her bid for the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Background

Concerns over the U.S. State Department officials' possible violations of federal government record-keeping procedures were initially raised by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in a "diplomatic security" manual for agency employees released in 2009.

Initial Discovery

On March 15th, 2013, the existence of Hillary Clinton's private e-mail address hosted at clintonemail.com was confirmed for the first time when Romanian hacker Marcel Lazar Lehel (better known by his pseudonym Guccifer) released a batch of email correspondences between Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior White House adviser to Bill Clinton during his presidency, and Hillary Clinton, the-then Secretary of State, which contained confidential memos relating to foreign affairs and regional security in Libya, including the 2012 attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi (shown below)

Notable Developments

The New York Times Report

However, the issue didn't come under the national spotlight until March 2nd, 2015, when the New York Times published an article reporting that Clinton never had a government-issued email address during her tenure at the State Department and what is more, she exclusively used her personal e-mail accounts for official communications as the Secretary of State, which may have violated the rules of recordkeeping and archiving federal officials' correspondences as laid out under the Federal Records Act.

Hillary Clinton's Initial Response

On March 10th, Hillary Clinton responded to the New York Times report by defending her use of private email accounts as a benign habit out of convenience and that her actions were in compliance with the federal regulations during a press conference at the United Nations Headquarters. In addition, Clinton stated that her staff would hand over copies of 30,000 email correspondences from her private account that were archived during her service at the State Department, while noting that another 32,000 emails from the same server had been deleted as they were deemed personal and private in nature.

Federal Investigation

In the weeks following the publication of the New York Times article, the focus of scrutiny in the news media began zeroing in on whether Clinton's email correspondences sent via her private, non-secure server during her years at the State Department contained any classified information. Though Clinton initially denied revealing any classified materials in her correspondences, but the subsequent inquiries and reviews of her emails found that classified information had been transmitted in at least four out of the 40 randomly selected samples. By June, the Federal Bureau of Investigations had launched a full-scale investigation to closely examine all 30,000 emails that were voluntarily submitted by Clinton's staff, while issuing a subpoena for Clinton's private server to be turned over as well. On August 12th, the FBI visited the location and seized the server, which they determined had been professionally wiped clean. The accusation was confirmed by Clinton's lawyer in front of Congress on August 19th^[5].

Discovery of Classified Satellite Images

On September 1st, The Washington Times^[6] reported that several instances of Clinton's emails contained highly sensitive surveillance data and imageries of the North Korean nuclear program gathered by U.S. spy satellites, which were marked unclassified at the time of the transmission but should have been assigned the highest level of secrecy, according to the Inspector General of the United States Intelligence Community.

FBI Recovery of Clinton's Personal Emails

On September 22nd, major media sources began reporting that the FBI had successfully recovered^[7] the 30,000 emails Hillary herself had deemed personal and deleted before officials were able to read their content. The recovered emails have not yet been released to the public and the FBI has offered no comment on what they contain, though sources who spoke under the condition of anonymity would say that the emails are being sorted into "work related" and "actually personal" categories, inferring Clinton had deleted emails that were not strictly person in nature as she claimed.

End of investigation

On July 5, 2016 FBI director James Comey held a press conference in which he announced that 110 classied emails were found on Clinton's server. He stated she was "extremely careless" in handling classified intelligence. Comey later advised Attorney General Loretta Lynch not press charges. On June 6, 2016 Loretta Lynch announced no charges would be pressed against Clinton.^[11] Some this considered to make Clinton seem "above the law".

Paul Combetta's Suspected Reddit Post

On September 8th, 2016, The New York Times^[13] reported that Paul Combetta, the computer specialist who deleted Clinton's emails despite being ordered by Congress to preserve them, had been granted immunity by the Justice Department during the investigation.

On September 19th, a post submitted to the /r/stackexchange subreddit in July 2014 was discovered by users on the /r/The_Donald^[14] subreddit, in which a user named "stonetear" asks for advice on removing a "VIP's (VERY VIP) email address from a bunch of archived email" (shown below). Many speculated that Stonetear was Combetta based on his personal email address "stonetear@gmail.com,"^[16] a 2011 forum post^[17] in which a user named Stonetear identifies himself as Paul, a Stonetear Etsy^[19] account which displays the name Paul Combetta and a 2002 Slashdot post in which a user named Stonetear claims he is "contracted to a state government."^[20]

While the original Reddit post was subsequently deleted, it had already been archived by Google cache.^[15] The following day, the Congressional Oversight committed began looking into the Reddit post in relation to their investigation on the deletion of Clinton's email archived. Meanwhile, the Congressional Science Committee threatened to subpoena the author of the Reddit post as part of their investigation into the security of Clinton's private server.^[21] Also on September 20th, Redditor ImWithPepe submitted an "I'm Rick Harrison" photoshop with Combetta's face superimposed on to the image (shown below). Within 24 hours, the post gained over 5,300 votes (83% upvoted) and 240 comments on /r/The_Donald.^[22]

In the coming days, several news sites published articles about the Reddit controversy, including Motherboard,^[12] Fortune,^[23] New York Post,^[24] US News^[25] and The Daily Dot.^[26]

James Comey Letter

On October 28th, 2016, James Comey sent a short letter^[27] to congress "supplementing" his previous testimony that the FBI investigation into the Clinton emails case was closed. The letter states that the FBI had learned of the existence of emails that may be pertinent to the investigation of "an unrelated case," and that Comey had allowed FBI investigators to review the emails to see if they contained classified information and assess if they were important to the investigation. The full text of Comey's letter reads:

In previous congressional testimony, l referred to the fact that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had completed its investigation of former Secretary Clinton's personal email server. Due to recent developments, I am writing to supplement my previous testimony.

In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation. I am writing to inform you that the investigative team briefed me on this yesterday, and I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.

Although the FBI cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant, and I cannot predict how long it will take us to complete this additional work, I believe it is important to update your Committees about our efforts in light of my previous testimony.

Sincerely yours,
James B. Comey
Director

The shortness, vagueness, and timing of Comey's letter less than two weeks before the 2016 United States Presidential Election received intense criticism from Democrats. Clinton responded at a rally the following day, calling Comey's decision to send the letter "deeply troubling" and "unprecedented," and called upon Comey to "put everything on the table," asking him to give voters complete information.^[28] Attorney General Loretta Lynch disagreed with Comey's decision to send the letter,^[29] citing a long-standing practice by the FBI to not comment on on-going investigations, particularly during a politically-charged election year.

It was later revealed that the "unrelated case" Comey was referring to was Anthony Weiner's Sexting Scandal. ^[30] The emails pertinent to the closed investigation into Clinton’s private email server were discovered on a computer belonging to Weiner, the estranged husband of Huma Abedin, a top Clinton aide. In an email Comey sent to FBI employees, he acknowledged that the FBI did not "know the significance of this newly discovered collection of emails.’’

Official Reactions

In the following week, Comey's decision was met with a wide range of reactions from both Republican and Democrat officials; Donald Trump said “the election might not be as rigged as I thought,”^[31] referring to his charges that the election was being rigged against him in response to polls suggesting his chances of winning were very low. Some Republicans lauded Comey for his decision to send the letter, including Republican chairman Jason Chaffetz of the House Oversight Committee who tweeted “Case reopened,” which set off media coverage misrepresenting the issue.^[32] Meanwhile, other Republicans, such as former White House ethics lawyer to the Bush administration Richard Painter, criticized Comey for “abuse” of power.^[33] He also suggested Comey violated the Hatch Act, which forbids federal employees from “using [their] official authority or influence for the purpose of interfering with or affecting the result of an election.”

News Media Coverage

Comey's reopening of the FBI investigation prompted speculations among Clinton supporters and some news media outlets that the decision may have been heavily influenced by an anti-Clinton bias within the bureau, with Rachel Maddow^[36] alleging that the entire investigation was in the first place connected to an anti-Clinton book funded by the conservative news site Breitbart and The Guardian^[37] similarly suggesting an extreme anti-Clinton bias within the FBI, citing multiple anonymous accounts from current and former officials in the Justice Department. In addition, Correct The Record tweeted a video clip of former New York City mayor and Trump supporter Rudy Giuliani saying that “we have a couple tricks up our sleeve” during his appearance on Fox News^[38] two days before Comey issued his first letter, further fueling the widespread speculations that the FBI's intent to reopen the case had been leaked to the Trump campaign in advance.

Investigation Report

On November 6th, 2016, Comey released a follow up letter informing the Congress that the FBI had completed its review of the emails and determined that the review of the additional documents were in accord with the bureau's earlier conclusion in July that Clinton would not face any charges in connection to her use of the private email servers. Comey thanked FBI officials for working “round the clock” to swiftly come to a conclusion regarding the investigation.

That same day, Pete Williams of NBC,^[34] tweeted that nearly all of the additional emails reviewed by the FBI were duplicates or personal emails.
Some Republicans criticized Comey for supposedly prematurely releasing the results. Newt Gingrich tweeted, “Comey must be under enormous political pressure to cave like this and announce something he can’t possibly know.”^[35]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References