Media becoming Hillary Clinton #39;s biggest rival?
Weighing implications for 2016 Watch Andrea Tantaros, Harris Faulkner, Katie Pavlich, and Kirsten Powers talk about Elections on Outnumbered.
By: Fox News
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Media becoming Hillary Clinton's biggest rival? - Video
You probably also saw that Clinton asked the State Department to release her emails to the public, and they have agreed to do so "as soon as possible."
Now, as the initial controversy over the episode is subsiding, we're beginning to get a clearer picture of what the State Department is doing to get Clinton's emails out of their boxes and into the public record.
The State Department has not put an exact time line on the process, but officials say the full review is expected to take "several months." However, a smaller subset of emails will be released sooner.
That subset contains about 300 emails -- totaling 900 pages -- which have already been turned over to the House Select Committee on Benghazi in response to a request related to their ongoing investigation of the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012.
After those have been made public, the department will complete the full review and ultimately release the entire cache of emails.
Well, not everything. The State Department is reviewing the emails to determine what information they can and cannot share with the public.
The review will follow the process laid out by the Freedom of Information Act -- commonly referred to as FOIA -- which includes several categories of information exempted from public release.
Staff at the State Department will have to sort through the 55,000 pages and "redact" any information that meets the exemption criteria before they release them, and it's that redaction process that's holding up the release.
FOIA's webpage lists nine fairly broad categories of exempted information which would be redacted from these emails if it's found. These include everything from trade secrets and confidential financial information to data that would constitute an invasion of personal privacy.
State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters on Thursday the State Department will also remove any emails "deemed not to be agency records" -- meaning emails that are personal in nature and do not pertain to State Department business.
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What will Hillary Clinton's email release look like? - CNN.com
On Thanksgiving Day in 1996, when Hillary Clinton was in the White House, she had a long conversation with her best friend, soulmate and confidante, Diane Blair. The two women had forged a relationship in the 1970s when they were both teaching in Fayetteville in Arkansas Bills home state and would remain close until Blairs death from cancer in 2000.
With the blunt honesty of a trusted friend, Blair raised with Clinton one of the most vexed problems that has bedevilled her years of public service: her toxic dealings with the press. Couldnt she avoid a lot of grief, Blair suggested, by developing friendlier relations even fake ones with media figures? And shouldnt she stop changing her hair so often?
Blair clearly touched a nerve, provoking a defiant riposte from the first lady. In todays context, at the end of a week in which Hillary Clinton has yet again found herself face-to-face with a sceptical press demanding answers about her use of a private email address while working as Americas top diplomat, her robust words almost two decades ago sound uncannily prescient.
Im a proud woman, Clinton began. Im not stupid; I know I should do more to suck up to the press. I know it confuses people when I change my hairdos. I know I have to compromise.
But then Clintons tone suddenly shifted. But Im just not going to, she said. Im a complex person and theyre just going to have to live with that. Im used to winning, and I intend to win on my own terms.
Win on my own terms the phrase would make a great title to a chronicle of the battles Clinton has fought under the public spotlight. It runs through her White House struggles to introduce healthcare reform and her war with what she famously dubbed the vast right-wing conspiracy. It was evident in her bruising clash with Barack Obama in her first unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 2008. And judging from this weeks events at the UN, where she treated reporters asking about her use of a private email server while secretary of state with a dismissiveness that verged on contempt, it looks like its becoming a storyline in the 2016 presidential campaign that she is expected to launch within weeks.
Clintons attitude towards the press is not the only insight that can be gleaned from the friendships that she made during her early years in Arkansas. Through Diane Blairs confidences, contained in private papers that were recently opened at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, and interviews with several other close friends in Fayetteville and Little Rock, seeds of many of her later achievements and troubles, strengths and flaws, can be seen to have been planted in the rich soil of Arkansas.
Saint or sinner? Feminist pioneer or self-interested careerist? Which is Hillary Clinton? Diane Blair herself pondered deeply that question, asking herself in one of her private notes why her great friend was so polarizing, why to her Hillary Clinton was funny, wicked and wacky yet to others she came across as a malevolent, power-mad, self-aggrandizing shrew.
That unanswered question, so pertinent today, can to some extent be answered from Clintons Arkansas days. Some of her most controversial qualities her fierce guarding of her privacy, the belief in doing things her own way, her fraught relationship with money are all visible in nascent form during the period 1974 when she moved to Fayetteville and then Little Rock, to 1993 when she entered the White House. So too are positive attributes that in the cut-and-thrust of the news cycle rarely enjoy an airing, such as her passionate embrace of womens and childrens rights, and her undiminished and unbreakable loyalty to those she loves.
Hillary Rodham was 27 when she came to Fayetteville, a progressive college town tucked in the north-west corner of the state. Fateville, she called it, poking fun at the local southern drawl. It wasnt fate that drew her here, though, so much as the relentless charm offensive Bill Clinton waged to attract her here, drawing her away from a potentially stellar legal career on the east coast.
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Hillary Clinton: running to win - but on her own terms
This was the week when Hillary Clintons highest aspiration, being president, collided with her deepest fear actually running for president.
Its not that Clinton craves a coronation, people close to her say, its just that she wants to forestall her leap into the sulfurous political lava as long as possible. The chaotic indignity of Tuesdays press conference on her use of a private email server as Secretary of State did nothing to change that opinion, or convince her to push up the campaign start date.
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The firestorm over the emails and earlier stories about the solicitation of foreign donations at the Clinton family charitable foundation have rattled the expanding crew of new operatives signing up for 2016 who havent experienced the maelstrom of a Clinton presidential campaign before. But the only two opinions that really count come from Hillary and Bill Clinton, and despite the carping of Democrats inside and outside their own circle they harbor few regrets about the way things have gone down so far.
Eighteen months ago who would imagined Hillary Clinton would have zero competition in the primaries? Thats pretty good, right? said one longtime Clinton insider, reflecting the prevailing view in the no-rush camp, which includes the Clintons and their longtime consigliore Cheryl Mills.
Everybody has an incentive to start this campaign the staff, the consultants who are working for nothing and want to get paid, you guys in the media everybody except Hillary Clinton, the person added. The goal here is to make this the shortest campaign possible. The emails thing didnt change that.
The danger, of course, is that the 20th Century political victors are ignoring 21st Century political reality and inviting the American body politic play by their idiosyncratic set of rules as they did by deciding to use Bill Clintons private server as a conduit for Hillary Clintons government correspondence. Moreover, as the press conference proved, its put her in the familiar and bizarre position of entering the 2016 campaign as both the strongest non-incumbent ever to seek the office and a wounded, vulnerable frontrunner.
Shell get past these sort of little dust-ups, but we really have to start having a conversation, says Iowa Democratic operative Tavis Hall, expressing the growing anxiousness of battleground Democrats eager for Clinton to hoist a flag to rally around.
The response to the emails controversy was hampered by the lack of a campaign team and the candidates reluctance to share details of her personal email server with the people who could defend her; Clintons people were rebuffed by surrogates who refused to appear on TV because they werent given details about the system, according to two potential surrogates interviewed by POLITICO. Moreover, it took eight days for Clinton to reluctantly agree to appear before the media and only then at the urging of her young campaign manager Robbie Mook and eminence-grise campaign chairman John Podesta.
Its clear they lack an apparatus. Shes a candidate without a campaign. Robert Gibbs, a former White House press secretary under President Obama told The Washington Post. And former Obama strategist David Axelrod told MSNBC he thought the campaigns sluggish response on the emails story was the result of a lack of answers from the Clinton campaign, or the nascent campaign.
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Hillary Clinton's fear of the trail
On March 2, the story broke that Hillary Clinton had possibly violated e-mail regulations while secretary of state.
You could almost hear the collective gasp in Washington: Oh, no, here we go again.
But the next evening, Clinton was feted at the Emilys List 30th-anniversary gala dinner as though nothing had happened. Only the trumpets were missing from what felt like her coronation as the Democratic presidential nominee and, possibly, the next president of the United States.
Fast-forward a dozen days and Clintons position in the presidential sweepstakes seems less assured, her inevitability not so inevitable.
The most perplexing question isnt about the e-mails themselves but why she put everything at risk over such a small detail, declining to segregate her personal and business e-mail.
There can only be one answer, and it isnt convenience, as Clinton claims. Think of another word that begins with the letter C: control.
Clinton claims she opted for the convenience of one cellphone and a personal server rather than use a government-issued phone for business and another device for personal matters. Too much stuff to lug around?
So the whole question of her conduct as secretary of state boils down to a few ounces of electronic equipment. Hate to say it, but only a woman could come up with such an excuse. Its all about the purse.
Plainly, Clinton didnt want anyone snooping around her virtual file cabinet. Who does? But this isnt the point. When you are secretary of state and are mulling a run for president, you steer clear of anything and anyone remotely questionable. No one should know this better.
Questions that merit serious consideration include whether the Clinton server was secure. Clinton insists that it was because her New York home, where the server lives, is protected by the Secret Service. Given the optional sobriety of agents these days, this is less than reassuring. Then, too, hacking doesnt require on-site handling.