In hectic Hillary Clinton press conference, a penchant for privacy and control
Clinton says she deleted more than 30,000 private emails and will make her more than 30,000 work ones public
“I feel like this is classic Hillary,” a frustrated print reporter fumed to a cable news producer Tuesday afternoon.
The two were among the more than 50 journalists who stood in a slow-moving line at the United Nations in New York to obtain media passes to see former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton answer questions at a hastily arranged press conference with what wound up being a delayed start time. Some reporters waited more than two hours in a corridor in a side building before reaching the lone, overwhelmed U.N. employee issuing passes permitting entry into the U.N., which has stringent media access policies and can take days to credential reporters under normal circumstances.
That Clinton would choose to have her first press conference in nearly six months inside such a fortified citadel — and on just a few hours' notice — could be seen as emblematic of the pre-campaign she’s run so far. Her zeal for privacy — and control — has repeatedly landed her in hot water over the course of her public life and is once again at issue in the revelations about how she structured her email during her time as secretary of state.
The tight controls around the venue did not translate into softball questions for Clinton on Tuesday. As soon as she strode past a reproduction of Picasso’s “Guernica” and stood in front of the tightly packed and grumpy media throng, Clinton launched into a defense of her use of personal email, which she said did not compromise national security nor signal a lack of transparency on her part.
Clinton said she has handed over every email to the Department of State that was even remotely related to work — about 30,000 of them. “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email,” she added. Clinton almost never emailed foreign officials, either. She only exchanged one email with a foreign official — an unidentified leader based in the United Kingdom — and otherwise communicated entirely with foreign officials in person, through letters, or on the phone, her spokesman said in a statement.
The other half of her correspondence — more than 30,000 emails that Clinton and her aides deemed private — she deleted.
“I chose not to keep my private personal emails — emails about planning Chelsea’s wedding or my mother’s funeral arrangements, condolence notes to friends as well as yoga routines, family vacations, the other things you typically find in inboxes,” Clinton said. “No one wants their personal emails made public, and I think most people understand that and respect that privacy.”
When pressed to explain why she would delete so many emails, Clinton again stressed that they were private. “Because they were personal and private about matters that I believed were within the scope of my personal privacy and that particularly of other people,” she said. “They have nothing to do with work, but I didn’t see any reason to keep them.”
Clinton is right that she is under no legal obligation to turn over her private emails to the State Department, though the State Department now requires that all work-related emails be captured by a government server. But the controversy may prompt voters to ask why Clinton chose an email system that gave her the maximum possible control over the eventual disposition of her correspondence, as well as the power to simply delete it from a server that she also controls. It’s unclear if State Department plans to make public all the emails Clinton turned over will be able to erase the impression of unnecessary secrecy created by an email system Clinton said she turned to for “convenience.”
Clinton’s insistence on both her own privacy and Americans’ understanding of her need for it is a consistent theme across her life as first lady and then as a politician. During the Whitewater scandal in 1994, she held a press conference and acknowledged her complicated relationship with privacy.
“I do feel like I’ve always been a fairly private person leading a public life,” she said then, noting that she’d misgauged the public’s appetite for information from her as a public figure.
"I've always believed in a zone of privacy, and I told a friend the other day that I feel after resisting for a long time I've been rezoned," she said. "I now have a much better appreciation for what's expected."
Nearly 20 years later, her news conference made plain, Clinton finds herself again struggling to square that zone with public expectations.
Related video:
