Subject: Script
From: Dan Schwerin <[email-masked]>
To: Jennifer Palmieri <[email-masked]>, John Podesta <[email-masked]>, Jim Margolis <[email-masked]>, Robby Mook <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 21 Aug 2015 22:32:57 -0400

Shorter script that's still similar enough that she'll recognize it:

Hello. I thought you might find it useful to have some answers to share with your friends if they ask about all these news stories out there about my email habits when I was Secretary of State.  So I want to take some time to try and explain it to you directly, in one place, at one time, as best as I can. 

Please bear with me because parts are confusing, and like many of you, I don't understand all of the technological aspects.  [But when you hear all the facts, I think you’ll agree that all the political noise over this issue is just that – political noise.]  

In 2007, when I was a U.S. Senator, I got my first Blackberry. I used it to keep up with the news, with friends & family - and yes, I also got my fair share of unsolicited forwards that sometimes made me laugh and sometimes made me want to throw it away.  In short, I used email like most people. 

Fast forward to 2009.  One of my husband's staff members bought the domain name clintonemail.com so his team could switch from the various email providers they were relying on to one consolidated system.  I joined them.  

This was all before I started my new job as Secretary of State. Had President Obama not asked me to join his team, if I had stayed in the U.S. Senate, I still would have switched to this new email. 

And when I did get to State, ‎ it seemed simpler to have just the one address. After all, my predecessors at State had not relied on Department email.  In hindsight, though, this has proven anything but simple. 

That's the explanation - but it's no excuse. There's a difference between allowed to do and smart to do. I shouldn't have done it this way. I should have set the standard that others‎ were expected to meet. To do it all again, I would have used two email addresses. 

But I can't do it all again. I can only tell you it was a mistake, regret it, explain it, and help State and others fix any challenges it caused. 

That's what I did. Now I want to explain what I didn't do.

I didn’t keep my email secret. Whenever I emailed, it was from my address. Whenever people emailed me, it was to ‎my account. Work, personal, whatever. And yes, I continued to get my fair share of unsolicited forwards.

I also didn't do this to skirt rules.  And I didn’t do it to avoid having my records preserved.  When State asked former Secretaries of State who served in the era of electronic communications to help fill out the archival record, I did so, printing 55,000 pages of email including anything related to my work at the State Department. To get a sense of how outdated some of the government’s archiving practices are, we had to print all 55,000 pages because that's what the rules demand. Believe me, printing more than 30,000 email instead of handing them over electronically isn't something anyone does by choice.

That's 30,000 more emails than every other former Secretary produced combined . 

And yes, there were 30,000 more messages that were completely personal and had nothing to do with official business. 

I do believe transparency in government is important. And by this point, there isn't much you don't know about me. My finances are out there. My medical history is out there. You know how much I've made, where I've gone, what I'm allergic to. 

But what wasn't work wasn't the government's business. ‎So I didn't keep those emails.  I didn't print them. I knew no matter what I decided to do with them, I was in for criticism. So I chose to keep a modicum of privacy. I hope you can understand that. 

Now I want to address the most serious aspect. 

When it came to classified information, I certainly never used my Blackberry.  And that had nothing to do with using a personal email address. If I had been [email-masked] I could not have used it for classified information either. At the State Department, mobile devices aren't used to communicate secrets.  Almost everything of a classified nature was presented to me via paper or in person. When I traveled, elaborate steps were taken. ‎Secure phones were set up, secure tents were constructed. More than once when a tent was set up in some far-away hotel, I was told to read the classified material with the blanket over my head. No, that's not a joke. I took my responsibilities in safeguarding our nation's secrets seriously. So did my team did. Everyone at the State Department did .

‎This process of looking backwards to see if something should have been classified at the time is fine. I don't want anything released to the public that puts us at risk. And we’re all learning that different agencies have very different views and procedures about what should be classified and what shouldn’t. What's not fine is to criticize people – especially career officials who have devoted their lives to serving our country -- for handling what they didn't know might be deemed classified years later by another part of the government. That's an impossible standard to meet. Members of Congress and their staff also handled some of these messages.  Some articles being written about this issue today contain classified information. Should someone sending that article to a colleague be told in 2020 that they broke the rules? I hope not. 

As for the security of my email, ‎in more than a little bit of irony, every day we learn of a new hack by the Chinese, by the Russians. That millions of Americans' personal information has been stolen. 

As Secretary I was proud of what we accomplished. I was proud of the thousands of people who've dedicated themselves to public service‎ - including those who came into State with me and left with me. I was proud of them then, I'm proud of them now.  

I wish that a video was enough to address this. I know it isn't though. But I wanted to try to put everything in one place. 

Along those lines, after nearly a year of offering to come up at any time anyplace, in October I'll be on Capitol Hill before the committee looking at the tragic events of September 2012 in Benghazi, Libya. They wanted to talk to me behind closed doors, but I insisted on all of you being able to see what I was asked and how I answered.

I'm sure this issue will come up. It's unclear to me how it will help us understand what happened in Benghazi or how to help prevent future tragedies - but I'm going to do my best to answer whatever they ask.

And while I can't predict the future, let me finish by taking a stab:

‎• There will be many more email to pour through. 

• Some will be serious, some will be embarrassing.

‎• You know I'm not great with a fax, but you're also going to learn my secret salad dressing recipe and who sent me LinkedIn requests. (And whose I didn't accept!)

• There will be more dramatic leaks and assertions that prove to be untrue.

But at some point, you're going to have them all. And if you suffer through all 55,000 pages, you'll be able to judge for yourself. 

Which is how it's supposed to work. 

If you've made it this far, thank you for watching.