Subject: Re: NYT: In Clinton Emails on Benghazi, a Rare Glimpse at Her Concerns
From: Cheryl Mills <[email-masked]>
To: Jennifer Palmieri <[email-masked]>
Cc: John Podesta <[email-masked]>, Nick Merrill <[email-masked]>, Philippe Reines <[email-masked]>, Jake Sullivan <[email-masked]>, Heather Samuelson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Mar 2015 09:50:09 -0400

so what are next steps then?

On Mon, Mar 23, 2015 at 9:18 AM, Jennifer Palmieri <
[email-masked]> wrote:

> That is a good idea - the level set with NYT.  Pretty strong hand we have
> to start discussions with.
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> On Mar 23, 2015, at 9:01 AM, John Podesta <[email-masked]> wrote:
>
> Nick,
> Great job in fighting this to more or less of a draw. Even with spoon
> feeding from Gowdy's staff, this story is smoke without even the warmth of
> a fire. We might want to think about how we use this to try to level set
> with the Times hierarchy.
>
> JP
> --Sent from my iPad--
> [email-masked]
> For scheduling: [email-masked]
>
> On Mar 23, 2015, at 6:21 AM, Nick Merrill <[email-masked]> wrote:
>
>
>
> http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/03/23/us/politics/in-clinton-emails-on-benghazi-a-rare-glimpse-at-her-concerns.html?referrer=
>
>   In Clinton Emails on Benghazi, a Rare Glimpse at Her Concerns
> By Michael S. Schmidt
>
>  WASHINGTON -- It was a grueling hearing. A month after the September 2012
> attack on the United States diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, House
> Republicans grilled a top State Department official about security lapses
> at the outpost.
>
> Later that day, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/hillary_rodham_clinton/index.html?inline=nyt-per> tapped
> out an email to a close adviser: "Did we survive the day?" she wrote.
>
> "Survive, yes," the adviser emailed back, adding that he would continue to
> gauge reaction the next morning.
>
> The roughly 300 emails from Mrs. Clinton's private account that were
> turned over last month to a House committee investigating the attack showed
> the secretary and her aides closely monitoring the fallout from the
> tragedy, which threatened to damage her image and reflect poorly on the
> State Department.
>
> They provided no evidence that Mrs. Clinton, as the most incendiary
> Republican attacks have suggested, issued a "stand down" order to halt
> American forces responding to the violence in Benghazi, or took part in a
> broad cover-up of the administration's response, according to senior
> American officials.
>
> But they did show that Mrs. Clinton's top aides at times corresponded with
> her about State Department matters from their personal email accounts,
> raising questions about her recent assertions that she made it her practice
> to email aides at their government addresses so the messages would be
> preserved, in compliance with federal record-keeping regulations.
>
> The emails have not been made public, and The New York Times was not
> permitted to review them. But four senior government officials offered
> descriptions of some of the key messages, on the condition of anonymity
> because they did not want to jeopardize their access to secret information.
>
> A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton said she and her aides had used their email
> accounts appropriately, while a spokesman for the Republican-controlled
> House committee declined to comment.
>
> The correspondence offered a glimpse inside the secretary of state's inbox
> -- and her elusive email personality -- including during those dark days just
> after the attack. Mrs. Clinton exclusively used a private email account
> that was housed on a server at her home in Chappaqua, N.Y., while she was
> secretary of state, which kept many of the messages secret.
>
> Strikingly, given that she has set off an uproar over her emails, Mrs.
> Clinton is not a verbose correspondent. At times, she sends her highly
> regarded foreign policy adviser, Jake Sullivan, an email containing a news
> article, with a simple instruction: Please print. (Mrs. Clinton, though she
> has taken to Twitter and embraced other forms of modern technology, appears
> to like to read articles on paper.)
>
> There were also the more mundane messages that crowd many government
> workers' inboxes: scheduling, logistics, even a news alert about a breaking
> story from Politico, forwarded to the secretary by a senior aide.
>
> The emails showed Mrs. Clinton and her inner circle reacting as the
> administration's view of what happened in Benghazi changed, and the
> messages shed some light on a pivotal moment in the attack's aftermath
> involving Susan E. Rice, then the ambassador to the United Nations.
>
> On Sept. 16, five days after the attack, Ms. Rice appeared on several
> Sunday news programs, including ABC's "This Week," to offer the
> administration's view on the attack. Some conservatives suggested that Ms.
> Rice took on the role of public spokeswoman in those first few days after
> the attacks so that Mrs. Clinton could duck the controversy. (Ms. Rice has
> said that Mrs. Clinton declined to appear because she was tired after a
> grueling week.)
>
> The emails do not settle that question, the senior officials said. But
> they do suggest that Mrs. Clinton and her aides were ultimately relieved
> that she had not gone as far as Ms. Rice had in her description of the
> attacks.
>
> The day that Ms. Rice appeared on the shows, Mr. Sullivan, who served as
> Mrs. Clinton's deputy chief of staff and is one of her most trusted
> advisers, emailed Mrs. Clinton a transcript of Ms. Rice's remarks on ABC's
> "This Week." Mr. Sullivan's message was brief, but he appeared pleased by
> how it had gone. Ms. Rice, on the show, described it as a spontaneous
> eruption of violence, triggered by an offensive anti-Muslim video.
>
> "She did make clear our view that this started spontaneously then
> evolved," Mr. Sullivan wrote to Mrs. Clinton.
>
> But in the days that followed, the administration's view of what occurred
> grew more complicated. Amid intense criticism from Republicans, who accused
> the White House of playing down the attack in an election year,
> administration officials began to call it "a terrorist attack." Ms. Rice's
> initial description of the attack as spontaneous came under intense
> scrutiny.
>
> Two weeks after that first email assessing Ms. Rice's appearance, Mr.
> Sullivan sent Mrs. Clinton a very different email. This time, he appeared
> to reassure the secretary of state that she had avoided the problems Ms.
> Rice was confronting. He told Mrs. Clinton that he had reviewed her public
> remarks since the attack and that she had avoided the language that had
> landed Ms. Rice in trouble.
>
> "You never said 'spontaneous' or characterized their motivations," Mr.
> Sullivan wrote.
>
> The 300 emails are a small fraction of those Mrs. Clinton has handed over
> to the State Department.
>
> Last summer, State Department lawyers responding to document requests from
> the House committee investigating Benghazi found correspondence showing
> Mrs. Clinton used a private email account. The lawyers determined that they
> needed all of Mrs. Clinton's emails to respond to the committee requests.
>
> In December, Mrs. Clinton turned over 30,000 of her emails to the State
> Department, and the department sent the House committee the 300 related to
> Benghazi or Libya.
>
> The scrutiny of how she used email has created the first test of her
> all-but-announced presidential campaign. At the time she was secretary of
> state, federal regulations said agencies that allow employees to use
> private email addresses, "must ensure that federal records sent or received
> on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency record-keeping
> system."
>
> Nick Merrill, the spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, defended the aides' use of
> personal email, saying that it was "their practice to primarily use their
> work email when conducting state business, with only the tiniest fraction
> of the more than one million emails they sent or received involving their
> personal accounts."
>
> Some may not be satisfied with that explanation or the records Mrs.
> Clinton has provided. Trey Gowdy, the South Carolina Republican who chairs
> the House Select Committee on Benghazi, has said he suspected Mrs. Clinton
> has not turned over all the Benghazi-related emails, and has asked Mrs.
> Clinton to turn over her server to a neutral party to examine all of her
> emails, including ones she deleted, to determine if others should be
> provided to his panel.
>
> Mr. Gowdy's committee is also likely to press Mrs. Clinton on why her
> advisers occasionally used personal email accounts to communicate with her.
> At least four of Mrs. Clinton's closest advisers at the State Department
> did so, including her chief of staff, Cheryl Mills; senior adviser,
> Philippe Reines; personal aide, Huma Abedin; and Mr. Sullivan.
>
> Elijah E. Cummings, the Maryland Democrat and ranking member on the
> committee, said in a statement that "instead of having emails leaked
> piecemeal -- and mischaracterized," the committee's chairman, Mr. Gowdy,
> "should release all of them -- as Secretary Clinton has asked -- so the
> American people can read them for themselves."
>
>
>
>
>
> On Mar 22, 2015, at 10:08 PM, Cheryl Mills <[email-masked]> wrote:
>
>  K - no additions
>
> On Sun, Mar 22, 2015 at 10:07 PM, Philippe Reines <[email-masked]>
> wrote:
>
>>   Ours.
>>
>>
>>   From: CDM
>> Date: Sunday, March 22, 2015 at 10:07 PM
>> To: Nick Merrill
>> Cc: PIR, Jake Sullivan, Heather Samuelson, Jennifer Palmieri, John
>> Podesta
>> Subject: Re: NYT Latest
>>
>>   i can't figure out given the subject ambiguity if we are seeking to
>> have this graph speak to her behavior or others?
>>
>> On Sun, Mar 22, 2015 at 8:57 PM, Nick Merrill <[email-masked]>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>  Philippe, Heather, Jake and I spoke earlier and made a few tweaks.
>>> Specifically, we added some straight-forward language in the third
>>> paragraph that aims to do two things: give this guy some simple context for
>>> the emails he references, and nudge this ever-closer to putting it in the
>>> Benghazi box.
>>>
>>>  See below.
>>>
>>>  ------
>>>
>>>   Mike, please treat this reply as my on the record response to your
>>> questions.
>>>
>>>  There are any number of reasons why people emailed from their non-work
>>> accounts, and every one of them are perfectly understandable and allowable
>>> - evidenced by the simple fact that the State Department tells every
>>> employee they're allowed to and how to properly do so.
>>>
>>