Michael Hirsh is national editor for Politico Magazine.

Is it possible server-gate will achieve the opposite of what Republicans want and make Hillary Clinton seem more personable—and popular? So far, at least, the emails released this week seem to evoke less a Foggy Bottom Machiavelli at work than a fairly ordinary (if entitled) person, always in a hurry, who relies on her aides for just about everything.

In various emails Clinton wants to know the schedule not of Benghazi cover-up meetings but that of her favorite TV shows; rather than asking aides to stonewall Congress, she wants them to procure skim milk for her tea. (Oh, and “pls remtind [sic] me to bring more tea cups from home,” adds the most powerful diplomat in the United States.) Finally—in what must be an attempt to secretly exert her influence in Washington—Hillary Clinton orders that she and her staff stay home on snow days.


If Clinton’s long-running problem until now is that the public mistrusts her—and the revelations about her private email server have only exacerbated this mistrust—the emails themselves appear to leave the opposite impression. They are, for the most part, utterly mundane, the chatter of daily diplomatic life at a high stratum of society and, all in all, prosaic rather than pernicious. If there’s plotting going on, it isn’t happening here—either that or Hillary Clinton has developed a very clever code. Does “bring some skim milk” really mean “destroy the documents”?

To be sure, the Clinton camp would like nothing better than to convey the idea that the email trove not only exonerates her but makes her look likeable. (“What dark secrets are in Clinton’s emails? She works from home on snow days, for one,” tweeted the pro-Clinton Super PAC Correct the Record.) And the Big Dump is far from over: Some 150 of the latest emails were deemed classified (after they were written) and redacted, and about two-thirds of the total emails, or some 20,000 or so pages, remain to be released.

Moreover, though the published emails relating to the 2012 Benghazi attacks that claimed the life of Amb. Chris Stevens and three other Americans—the ostensible reason for the GOP inquiry—mainly contain only terse comments from Clinton (“pls print” she often responds when her advisor Sidney Blumenthal and others send her numerous press accounts), her Republican opponents also complain of gaps in the email record, especially on Libya and Benghazi. Some of the current emails should also raise some eyebrows—particularly when it comes to the connection between Hillary’s official duties and the business that her husband Bill, who by her own admission was her “very important advisor,” was conducting at his Clinton Foundation, which set up high-level connections for important donors. On March 28, 2010, for example, she writes to Under Secretary of State (and former ambassador to Russia) Bill Burns, “My husband cannot go w PM Putin in mid-April because of his schedule, but he would be very interested in doing such events w the PM in the future. Will you pls pass on to the Russians? Thx. HRC.”

Even so, taken together with the previous email release in June, the latest batch seems to expose a more human side of Hillary Clinton than she usually dares to show. It’s a side that the public sees only in moments so rare they are still talked about, like her tears on the stump in New Hampshire in 2008. In fact, as secretary of state she often seems a little helpless—a quality perhaps not without charm after months in which Republicans have accused her of dark schemes. “Can you pls tell me how many times I voted against raising the debt limit?” Clinton asks at one point. And what would be a simple electronic search for most people becomes, for Clinton, a harried request for help: “Can you give me times for two TV shows: Parks and Recreation and The Good Wife?” she writes early in 2010. “I thought it was supposed to be off the hook to work,” she complains in a series of messages between her and personal aide Huma Abedin about her unwieldy fax machine.

“It shows that Hillary Clinton is one of us,” Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and an avowed Clinton supporter, tells POLITICO. “When the dust settles and people actually look at these emails they’re going to see only a hard-working, dedicated secretary of state who’s very much like them. I think it could really backfire for the Republicans.”

It may be quite some time, though, before that dust settles. Server-gate only seems to be heating up both politically and investigatively. Even as the Justice Department is reportedly looking into whether her controversial personal server was hacked, the former Clinton staffer who managed it plans to invoke his Fifth Amendment right not to answer incriminating questions before the House Benghazi Committee. According to one national security aide who has advised the committee, “The emails released so far have also undermined every single claim Clinton has personally made about her emails: There was no classified; [her friend Sidney] Blumenthal was sending unsolicited advice; she used one device for her convenience; she turned over all her records.”

Plainly the drip-drip of the server-gate scandal has had its toll. According to the ABC News/Washington Post poll this week, negative views of Clinton are now nearly their highest on record, with 53 percent now rating her unfavorably, up 8 points.

The aide adds that “there is a real concern with what is known legally as spoliation in this case—that relevant records subject to inquiry were destroyed or not preserved. No one with fiduciary obligation to the public was given the opportunity to review Clinton’s records before she decided to have her server ‘wiped,’ only those with a fiduciary obligation to her. She self-selected her public record—do you really think anything the press keeps terming a ‘smoking gun’ would be left?”

Aaron David Miller, a longtime Mideast negotiator who has worked under both Democratic and Republican secretaries of state, says Clinton could get in some trouble because, like her husband, she’s a “sharer” and amid the deluge of emails she sent and received, some might have been indiscreet or worse. “Both of them [Hillary and Bill] need to be connected. They love to communicate. James Baker was a much more private person. Same thing with Kissinger. These guys were not sharers. And she had a thousand different people on whom she could rely. She can ask any question she wants. … If you’re a secretary of state with a thousand different agendas, the vast majority are not going to be classified, but some information that was could have spilled over.”

Yet Miller and other State Department careerists also tend to back up the argument made by the Clinton camp all along: that most important and sensitive policy was not done by email. “It’s usually communicating by secure phones or secure conference rooms. Or in hotels.” In fact a number of the emails from Clinton to others are simply requests for chats offline, like, “Can you call me thru ops?” Or (often to Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills): “Can you talk tonight?” For example, regarding a talk with Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry on May 13, 2010, Clinton emails Jake Sullivan, “I’d like to set up a secure call sometime over the weekend or before I leave on Thursday.”

Much of the rest is favor seekers and sycophants, most of which prompt one-line replies from “H” that often give little indication of what she’ll ultimately decide. Among these correspondents is Cherie Blair, the wife of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who appears to be lobbying Clinton on behalf of the Qataris. After Clinton responds to an initial outreach from Blair about meeting with the Qatari crown prince, saying, “I would be happy to meet w him. How should I follow up to arrange a mutually agreeable time? All the best to you,” Blair writes: “Can you give me a telephone number the Qatar Crown Prince can ring you on and he will get in touch. Alternatively I can get his personal phone number for you. What is the best for you?”

But there is no recorded response from Hillary Clinton. Perhaps it will be in the next batch.