Clinton team: Focus on emails partisan

‘Damage to Hillary’ aim, backers told

 In this Aug. 11, 2015 file photo, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton listens as she meets with voters during a campaign stop at River Valley Community College in Claremont, N.H.
In this Aug. 11, 2015 file photo, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton listens as she meets with voters during a campaign stop at River Valley Community College in Claremont, N.H.

WASHINGTON -- A day after Hillary Rodham Clinton turned her personal email server over to the Justice Department, her campaign assured supporters that the Democratic presidential candidate did not send classified information over her private account.

In a message sent to campaign backers, communications director Jen Palmieri dismissed inquiries by Congress and federal agencies into Clinton's use of a private account while she was secretary of state as partisan attacks "designed to do political damage to Hillary in the run-up to the election." Palmieri stressed that Clinton is not facing a criminal investigation, and said she remains "committed to cooperating" with federal investigations into her private account.

"The bottom line: This kind of nonsense comes with the territory of running for president," Palmieri wrote in the 720-word message. "We know it, Hillary knows it, and we expect it to continue from now until Election Day."

Aware that "you might hear some news over the next few days about Hillary Clinton's emails," Palmieri said she was reaching out to explain Clinton's side of things and urged supporters to study her explanation material to cut through the "misinformation" and "absorb the real story so that you know what to say the next time you hear about this around the dinner table or the water cooler."

The Clinton campaign's message came a day after Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, made public a letter from the Office of the Intelligence Community Inspector General to Congress saying that classification experts had determined that two emails that passed through Clinton's private server contained information that should have been labeled as top secret, the highest general level of classification.

Those two emails were among four that had previously been determined by the inspector general of the intelligence community to have been classified at the time they were sent.

Just as that news broke, Clinton's campaign said she has "directed her team to give her email server that was used" while she was secretary of state to the Justice Department, as the FBI investigates the potential mishandling of classified information. The campaign has framed the hand-over as voluntary and has not responded to questions about whether it was compelled by the Justice Department.

Republicans pounce

Republicans on the campaign trail and elsewhere were quick to pounce and have said the newest revelations point to Clinton malfeasance as secretary of state.

Within hours of the message being sent by Palmieri, one Republican lawmaker was calling for the Justice Department to launch a "criminal investigation" into the Clinton emails and suggesting that federal law enforcement had been foot-dragging on the case.

"If any other American had shown the same disregard for securing classified information that Hillary Clinton showed, the United States government would move quickly and decisively to hold them responsible," said Rep. Darrell Issa of California. "Months after we learned about Clinton's secret email server, the FBI and DOJ have finally mustered the motivation necessary to take it into their custody."

"This is something that isn't just a matter of her not being able to tell the truth," said Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican presidential candidate, on Wednesday. "This is something that has put national security at risk and highly questions her ability to be the commander in chief of the United States."

Clinton "committed a crime," billionaire Donald Trump said Tuesday night on Fox News, but that it's unlikely that Democrats, who "are all the prosecutors," will prosecute her.

"The fact is that, you look at what Hillary Clinton has been talking about and not talking about -- unwilling to answer the Keystone pipeline, now her server has been turned over to the FBI," New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie told conservative radio host Laura Ingraham on Wednesday. "Bernie Sanders is drawing 15,000-20,000 people because even the Democratic Party has figured out that she has no business being president of the United States."

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said: "All this means is that Hillary Clinton, in the face of FBI scrutiny, has decided she has run out of options. She knows she did something wrong and has run out of ways to cover it up."

Anticipating Republican attacks, Palmieri noted that "many of the Republican candidates for president have done the same things for which they're now criticizing Hillary."

"As governor, Jeb Bush owned his own private server, and his staff decided which emails he turned over as work-related from his private account. Bobby Jindal went a step further, using private email to communicate with his immediate staff but refusing to release his work-related emails. Scott Walker and Rick Perry had email issues themselves," she said.

Calls rebuffed

For months Clinton refused calls to give up the email server she used in her suburban New York City home to send and store email through a private account. She has defended her use of the server, saying she used it as a matter of convenience to limit the number of electronic devices she had to carry. She has said the server account never held classified information.

Officials are investigating whether classified information was improperly sent, though it's not clear whether the device will yield any information. Her attorney said in March that no emails from the main personal address she used while secretary of state are on the server or backup systems associated with it.

In March, Clinton said she exchanged about 60,000 emails in her four years in the Obama administration, about half of which were personal and were discarded. She turned over the other half to the State Department last December. The department is reviewing those emails and has begun releasing them to the public.

On Tuesday, Clinton attorney David Kendall gave to the Justice Department three thumb drives containing copies of work-related emails sent to and from her personal email addresses via her private server.

Kendall gave the thumb drives, containing copies of roughly 30,000 emails, to the FBI after the agency determined he could not remain in possession of the classified information contained in some of the emails, according to a U.S. official briefed on the matter who was not authorized to speak publicly. The State Department previously had said it was comfortable with Kendall keeping the emails at his Washington law office.

The inspector general for the intelligence community had told Congress that potentially hundreds of emails containing classified information are among the cache that Clinton provided to the State Department.

The State Department disputes that the emails were classified at that time.

"Department employees circulated these emails on unclassified systems in 2009 and 2011 and ultimately some were forwarded to Secretary Clinton," said State Department spokesman John Kirby. "They were not marked as classified."

Earlier this week, Clinton said in a sworn statement submitted to a federal judge that she has turned over to the State Department all emails from the server "that were or potentially were federal records." The statement, which carries her signature and was signed under penalty of perjury, echoed months of Clinton's past public statements about the matter.

Clinton's reliance on her private email account while at the State Department came to light as the House Select Committee on Benghazi conducted its probe into the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks in the Libyan city.

Clinton and her allies have long said the committee is politically motivated, an argument that Palmieri repeated in her message. The panel, she said, is "spending nearly $6 million in taxpayer money to conduct a partisan witch-hunt."

Information for this article was contributed by Ken Dilanian and Lisa Lerer of The Associated Press and by Jennifer Epstein, Terrence Dopp and Billy House of Bloomberg News.

A Section on 08/13/2015

Upcoming Events