Finding a job in the Hillary Clinton State Department for the daughter of then-Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin was not an easy task, emails released on Friday show. It was summer 2009 and there were a “limited number of slots” in the Office of War Crimes Issues, the State Department sub-agency where Harkin hoped to find a job for his daughter Jenny. But the powerful Hawkeye State Democrat, now retired, was persistent, calling Clinton several times and contacting the White House in order to find gainful employment for his kid, a Georgetown University law school graduate.

The Daily Caller first reported in August on emails showing Clinton and her aides scrambling to accommodate Harkin. Those messages indicated that Clinton, her chief of staff Cheryl Mills, and State’s under secretary for management, Patrick Kennedy, had to move heaven and earth to obtain a job spot for the younger Harkin, who obtained an undergraduate degree from Princeton. (RELATED: After Lobbying Hillary, Democratic Senator’s Daughter Was Hired At State Dept.)

New emails released on Friday, just days before Monday’s Iowa caucuses, shed more light on the demands made by Harkin and on the State Department’s frustration in trying to meet them. They show that Stephen Rapp, a former Iowa state representative who Obama tapped to serve as ambassador-at-large in the Office of War Crimes Issues, proposed to Mills the idea of using legislation to increase the number jobs allocated for political appointments, known as Schedule C positions.

Harkin’s high pressure tactics paid off. Jenny Harkin was hired at the Office of War Crimes Issues in 2010. She left the agency in 2012 and currently works for the the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Now, Tom Harkin is trying to secure a job for Clinton — as President of the United States. The highly-visible 76-year-old endorsed the former secretary of state for president in August. That compared to Harkin’s decision to withhold his endorsement in the 2008 Democratic primary until then-Illinois Sen. Barack Obama had mathematically secured the nomination.

‘Job’

In an Aug. 31, 2009 email with the subject line “Job,” Harkin appeared to ask Rapp for an update on his daughter’s job prospects.

“What happened last week? Have a call in to both Clinton and Schiliro,” he wrote, referring to Phil Schiliro, the White House director of legislative affairs. “Will talk with them sometime today. Anything I should know prior to these calls?”

Rapp forwarded the email to Mills, asked her if she had “any success with the latest argument for restoring to State the Sch. C positions that were taken away?”

“If not, I know Sen. Harkin in [sic] on Appropriations-Foreign Ops. and I think would be willing to push,” Rapp added.

Mills replied that she had not had success pushing the issue of restoring Schedule C appointments, but said that there was “mild receptivity to the concept.”

She indicated that she was going to “ping” the White House again.

Mills and Rapp exchanged other emails, the contents of which are mostly redacted. But in one, Rapp suggested that the pressure from Harkin was burdensome.

“This is what I have feared and why I flew to Washington last week,” he wrote, adding later in the email that “it makes me look forward to dealing with Sri Lanka.”

‘Limited number of slots’

Emails released last year by the State Department show that Harkin’s first inquiries about the job his daughter began in Aug. 2009.

On Aug. 17, 2009, a Clinton assistant emailed Mills and other Clinton aides, Huma Abedin and Heather Samuelson, informing them that Harkin was calling for Clinton to find out about the “status of her pending employment at the State Department.”

Samuelson, who has recently worked on Clinton’s legal team, responded to the email saying that Rapp seemed open to bringing Harkin on board at the Office of War Crimes Issues but that “the office is very small with a limited number of slots.”

Other emails show that Harkin reached out to Clinton over the next several weeks. He called her on Aug. 24, 2009 and twice again on Aug. 31, the day before he emailed Rapp.

The conversations between Clinton, Mills and Kennedy, a powerful career diplomat who oversees personnel issues at the State Department, show how difficult it was to bring Harkin on board.

On Sept. 4, 2009, Kennedy emailed Mills stating, “As you know [redacted] has been working through the ways to a identify a slot in S/WCI for [redacted].” The bulk of the email is redacted.

Mills forwarded Kennedy’s email to Clinton the next day, writing: “Remind me to discuss with you how I want to play this out.”

“We have to discuss soon so I can close the loop on this.” Clinton replied to Mills the next day.

[dcquiz] Clinton and company’s help for the Harkins likely did not break any laws. But it does provide a behind-the-scenes look at political horse trading that politicians like Harkin and Clinton likely prefer to keep hidden. Harkin did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

Ken Boehm, the chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, an ethics watchdog group, said that while it is hard to prove an exact quid pro quo, the email exchanges suggest that that is the case.

“Thanks to the Hillary Clinton emails being released, it appears beyond any doubt that Clinton yielded to political favoritism to get the daughter of Iowa Senator Harkin a job at the State Department,” he told The Daily Caller.

“There’s an old saying in politics,” he added: “Sometimes things are what they look like.”

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