Yes, I’m here to provide the definitive overview of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email account while Secretary of State. Too often I hear of people who are generally concerned about ‘the emails’ but don’t specifically know what’s wrong and I wanted to provide a brief review. I’d love to save time and just host a link to an article explaining things, but, um, they’re mostly terrible or long and confusing

So, in the words of Mario, ‘Here we go!’

T-shirt available from SuperheroDen

(Update: this post from Yglesias is pretty good, but too long so I borrow heavily from it)

What’s this all about? Well, Hillary Clinton during her term as Secretary of State (2009–13) used a private email server instead of a state-department email account. For context, her predecessor Colin Powell had also done this and in 2009 gave Hillary tips on how he did it. Before him, Condoleeza Rice’s staff also used personal email accounts.

Q: Why did she set up a secret server while Secretary?

Well, this whole thing started when the Times ‘broke’ an article about her use of a private server but it wasn’t at all secret because that’s not how email accounts work. It wasn’t secret because at the top of every one of the ~60,000 emails she sent, it said it was from “@clintonemail.com“ so every single recipient (or person on a forwarded email) could see that it wasn’t a state.gov account. The reason it feels like a secret is because back when it was happening no one talked about it, but that’s because no one thought it was that big of a deal #BecauseItWasn’t. Even Ban Ki-Moon the Secretary General of the UN was in on the ‘secret’ because she sent him a fricken email. Also, before the NYT broke the story, when the State Department asked for her work-related emails, she um, gave them the emails (you can now read them all here).

A very rough list of HRC recipients via https://www.leaksapi.com/

Second, she didn’t set it up for her time as Secretary. The server was set up by Bill Clinton in 2001 before Gmail was a thing when he started a charitable foundation that’s helped millions of children with AIDs. Hillary also had an account, so she opted to keep using that account instead of dealing with the shitty IT policies of the State Department and not being able to use her personal blackberry. In retrospect probably not worth it, but, again, Colin Powell thought that was a reasonable option at the time.

Q But why did she delete 30,000-ish emails?

I’ll just go to Matt Yglesias on this:

After Hillary left office, the State Department told her she had to turn all her work-related emails over to them, so she tasked a legal team with determining which emails were work emails and which were not. She turned the work emails over because that’s what she was legally required to do. She deleted the others, presumably because she did not want Trey Gowdy and Jason Chaffetz [Republican members of the Benghazi commission] to rummage through her inbox leaking whatever they happened to find amusing to area journalists. Now, is it possible that Clinton’s legal team simply decided to entirely disregard the law and delete work-related emails? In some sense, sure. But there’s no evidence that this happened. Generally speaking, in life we assume it would be moderately difficult to hire a well-known law firm to destroy evidence for you without someone deciding to do the right thing and squeal.

The law firm in question was likely Williams and Connolly who would have an astonishing amount to lose if it ever became known they intentionally destroyed emails to protect Hillary. Here again, the nature of email also makes it *very* dangerous to try hiding/deleting important messages because the recipient could always later leak the email message (or get hacked).

Finally, some context, the Bush admin deleted around 5-22 million emails from his time in office. This was probably illegal because the 1978 Presidential Records Act required that the correspondence of the President and Vice President be preserved.

Q So, was it illegal for Hillary to not use a government State.gov account?

No. The policy for the state department at the time allowed it (from 2009 regulation, 36 CFR Chapter XII, Subchapter B, section 1236.22b):

“Agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that Federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency recordkeeping system.”

Only in 2014 was this rule updated to make it clear that officials should only directly use their official government accounts. Granted, what should have happened when she left office was that she turn over hardcopies (seriously) of all of her work-related emails. Instead she turned them over when the State Department noticed it didn’t have them and asked her for them. Fortunately, she could give them the records because they had been preserved.

Q But what about them classified emails?!?!

First, this has nothing to do with whether she used a personal or State.gov account- neither one is appropriate for classified materials. The classified angle was investigated because, um, nothing else was wrong with how she handled it. And again here, both Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice’s aids were later found to have classified material in their personal emails. The FBI has reviewed thousands of emails and only found 3 emails that contained, in part, information classified at the time. However, these emails weren’t marked clearly. What they should have is a header and footer that says ‘Secret’ or ‘Top Secret’ etc. The emails did not have any header, and instead only had a “(C)” written before a paragraph somewhere in the email denoting the information in that paragraph was the lowest safety level “Classified”.

So, technically, yes, she did send or receive classified information, but it’s reasonable that she didn’t do it knowingly because it was a single character ‘C’ before paragraphs in thousands of emails. So, her not noticing something in an email chain is really not that big of a deal. And given how overzealous classification standards are it’s likely that the information with the little C wasn’t that important. If it were actually important, someone likely would have bothered with a header.

For a sense of context, Republican leaders intentionally leaked confidential information for political gain from interviews in this very matter.

Look, vote for whomever you want, but this EMAILS! thing is the biggest nothing-burger story of the millenium and it should not influence your vote one way or the other. She used a server like the last guy said to, turned over the emails when asked, and sent/received no meaningfully secret information (and likely not knowingly). This story is only important if you ignore all of the context around it and pretend it’s unprecedented and terrible. The only story here is one of mild institutional incompetence where the State Department should have gotten better records-keeping/IT policies in place earlier. Hillary did nothing that wasn’t happening frequently at the time in the state department (and almost certainly in other Gov’t agencies). But I get why this stuff feels important- because networks have devoted more air time to this single issue than all combined discussion of both candidates actual policies.

Big picture, Hillary’s emails have been relatively clean, actually. I mean, if you released my emails I’d probably get indicted for something…

#ForScience

PS. If you’re wondering about the newest ‘scandal’ where FBI director James Comey announced to congress they were looking into some new emails, here’s a quick summary (good explainer here). The device they found is a laptop or something, almost certainly belonging to Anthony Weiner, (yes that Weiner) but the FBI hasn’t read any emails on the machine, and sent its letter before they even had a warrant to read them. And the emails may or not may not be from Hillary Clinton and may or may not be copies of emails they have already reviewed because that’s how email works. So, days before an election and against Department of Justice policies Comey sent a letter to congress saying that he found a box that may or may not have things in it, which may or may not be copies of things he has in his other boxes but he doesn’t yet have permission to look inside this box.