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WATCH: Hillary Email Scandal Press Conference

WATCH: Hillary Email Scandal Press Conference

Hillary to emerge from behind stonewall for tightly controlled press conference

Late yesterday, Hillary announced she would hold a press conference to address EmailGate — a paltry 8 days after the blossoming scandal graced the pages of the New York Times. Though there were no mentions as to whether her foreign government sugar daddy problem would be given any airtime.

According to Department of State spokeswoman Marie Harf, Clinton released 55,000 pages of her emails to the Department of State in December. Of those 55,000 pages, 850 were passed along to the House Select Committee on Benghazi as being relevant to the investigation.

True to Arkansas Underwood form (to borrow a phrase from Rick Wilson), members of the media were shocked to learn that press credentials had to be requested 24 hours prior to the press conference, essentially the exact minute the press conference announcement was made (though the initial announcement gave no specific information).

Per MSNBC’s Alex Seitz-Wald:

“It’s appearing at the UN, which has a notoriously difficult credentialing process. So there’s going to be a restriction on the number of reporters who can come in. You had to apply 24 hours in advance for press passes. So I don’t know if it is intentional or not, but there will definitely be a limited number than if they held it at, say, a hotel or somewhere else in New York where they could be expected to be mobbed by every reporter and their mother in the city.”

According to Politico, Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill explained the credential situation to On Media:

News of Clinton’s press conference didn’t leak until Tuesday morning, just hours before the event was scheduled to take place.

But Nick Merrill, a Clinton spokesperson, told On Media that his team had been working “into the wee hours of the morning… to give members of the press a heads up as we confirmed the details, and this morning are continuing to work with USUN [the United States mission to the United Nations] to help us get journalists access.”

“I just sent a mass note to [the] press giving them instructions on how to [get access to the event] with the help of USUN, and we are going to do our best to include anyone that wasn’t already coming,” Merrill said. “It’s important to us that those who want to get in and cover the events can do so.”

Raising eyebrows, the Washington Post’s editorial board released a statement last night calling on Hillary to publicly answer to EmailGate saying, “if she wants to demonstrate the strength of character and judgment required to be president, Ms. Clinton should hold a news conference and answer all the unanswered questions about her e-mails.”

The statement also debunked the notion that EmailGate is purely Benghazi driven:

But this is not primarily about Benghazi. Instead, it is about how Ms. Clinton responds to legitimate questions about her judgment and her record; it is about how she would function as president. Dispatching friendly politicians and former aides to television news shows to dismiss the issue as just politics does not help her cause. If she is elected president, can Americans expect a similar response when she faces difficult questions — one 26-word tweet and a cloud of obfuscation from her friends?

This morning, Democrats on the House Select Committee on Benghazi wrote a letter to Secretary Kerry asking that the 850 pages of Clinton’s emails received by the committee be made public. They reasoned DOS review of the 55,000 pages on record would take a substantial amount of time, so the the smaller batch (850) should be reviewed for release first.

According to Yahoo News, Hillary hasn’t fielded substantial press questions since September at an event in Iowa.

Which brings us here:

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Comments

legacyrepublican | March 10, 2015 at 1:37 pm

But doesn’t Hillary have “Secretary of State Accident Forgiveness” so her polling rates don’t go down?

Hillary introduced as “a future president.” I had to reach for a barf bag.

The sub-head should have read:

“Hillary to emerge from behind stonewall for tightly controlled press conference behind an even higher stonewall”

I am starting to think that this issue could have contagion to sitting administration officials. If the following two assumptions are true, did Obama (or another administration official) break the law?

(1) President Obama knew that Hillary was using a private email account.
(2) President Obama sent emails to Hillary’s private email account that contained or discussed classified information.

    VetHusbandFather in reply to nebel. | March 10, 2015 at 4:15 pm

    Apparently he has confirmed that he sent emails to her private account, but our supposedly tech savvy president has now claimed that he didn’t know it was a private email account.

    Sammy Finkelman in reply to nebel. | March 11, 2015 at 11:21 am

    The answer to that appears to have been buried in one of the statements Hillary Clinton made at her press conference. It was kind of like a flabbergasting lie or spin, while technically mostly the truth.

    People don’t pick up on these things – maybe you cant pick up on all these things.

    She made a very active effort to conceal from the White House what she was doing, while telling a lie about why – a lie that makes little or no sense. (and I’m not enough of an expert on this to tell which of those two it is. I’m guessing very little sense, but still a smidgen of sense unless you understand White House email regulations thoroughly.)

    Hillary Clinton said:

    …it was my practice to email government officials on their state or other .gov accounts so that the emails were immediately captured and preserved.

    Now, there are different rules governing the White House than there are governing the rest of the executive branch, and in order to address the requirements I was under, I did exactly what I have said. I emailed two people, and I not only knew, I expected that then to be captured in the State Department or any other government agency that I was emailing to at a .gov account.

    OK.

    What she is saying is that she directly sent email only to two people in the White House (neither of whom was probably Barack Obama personally, but might have been his chief of staff and national security adviser) and when she did, she copied the email sent from [email protected] to some state,gov e-mail, as she was supposed to do with ALL her work-related email sent from [email protected]!

    She was deceiving them!

    And by the way, here’s another question. What was that e-mail address she copied mail addressed to the White House to? We heard she didn’t use any state.gov e-mail. Did she reserve one just for this purpose – to capture e-mail sent to a whitehouse.gov address?

    And whatever rules are different for White House e-mail are probably for e-mail originating in the White House, not e-mail being sent there..

    I mean how could it apply to email being sent there? Does everybody who might e-mail the White House know about those rules, and how could it apply to anyone not serving in the Executive Branch?

    Now maybe you could talk about replies. So when whoever replied, it would go to a state.gov address because these high ranking people weren’t, let’s assume, allowed to send e-mail to just anyone from a their whitehouse.gov addresses

    Even if this is the kind of answer she has in mind, or would give under cross-examination, notice how she is vague, assumes you know things which you probably don’t and never explicitly states them, says other things that only make sense if you assume something other than the truth, and if you do know, it’s full of non-sequitors.

    Re: assume something other than the truth: I mean, at one point she says:

    And I have to add, even if I had had two devices, which is obviously permitted — many people do that —

    This makes it sound like the bias is in favor of having only one device or email both personal and official. You’re permitted two devices. You’re permitted to have your own smartphone, yes. But if you had only one, it would have too be the government one!

    And then she says:

    you would still have to put the responsibility where it belongs, which is on the official.

    That’s true. We learned that from the Lois Lerner investigation. But you’d be much more afraid of going outside the system if you had to do that contemporaneously, and for some things, like forwarding government e-mail outside the government, you’d really have no excuse. But now she can hide that and declare the forwarding of mail to be non-work related.

Unbelievable. She’s doing her usual stump speech on women.

    I hope she’s cluing them in on her key to success: marry “the right man” and stick with him, no matter how many humiliations he subjects you to.

    Seriously. Unlike other self-made female politicians, nobody ever would have heard of Hillary Rodham had she not married Bill Clinton.

    This is why the young, even young Democrats, see her as a dinosaur. She’s only where she is because of who she married. That’s not a thing anymore.

Some of those tweets are brilliant. Thank you for putting together that list for us to follow!

She’s dancing as fast as she can. She lies.

If Hillary did not email any classified information on her email, then the State Department is wasting time and money to review her emails before releasing them.

The news here seems to be that she has deleted or “got rid of” 30,000 emails.

That crazy broad actually claimed she met her obligations to archive her emails by making sure they were addressed to other .gov accounts? What about the official emails that were sent to other private addresses?

The Progressive way: Make everyone else responsible for YOUR actions.

Did she actually say that her home server was more secure because the Secret Service was guarding the home? She can’t be that dumb, can she?

She denies ever having sent classified information in any of her e-mails, but I didn’t hear her deny ever having received classified information in an e-mail. I find it hard to believe that she was never sent classified info given her position.

    Such as say, oh, Sidney Blumenthal. Since I hear it was when Sid’s email was hacked by “Guccifer” that all this first began to come to light to begin with.

She says she never sent or received classified information by email.

OK, then, case closed, nothing to see here because her word is gospel, folks. Take that to bank and try to cash it.

Come on, guys. I mean, come on. Remember when we all just let Nixon’s 18 missing minutes slide, because he promised us there wasn’t anything important in there anyway?

This is exactly like that.

This is just like a deposition, but it isn’t under oath.

It IS on record. Now, she’s pinned. LOVE THAT.

Didn’t send any classified info? Bollocks…!!!

Now we go to work…

Heh!

Wait, is that an admission the server was physically at her residence? I’d heard “her people” say that wasn’t proven and it was the sign of an uneducated rube to assume as much.

Sammy Finkelman | March 10, 2015 at 4:05 pm

There’s almost a live blog here, in the updates:

http://althouse.blogspot.com/2015/03/hillary-will-hold-brief-press.html

Her defense is she “opted for convenience” (??) and that “the vast majority of” her work email went to work email addresses and were therefore preserved, and she has now provided State Department with all her emails “that could possibly be work related.

And as for her deciding what is work-related and what is not, she is “very confident of the process that we conducted” and when Americans will see the email that is going to be released they’ll be satisfied (because there won’t be any non-work related emails included, or because there will be some that are pretty obviously not work related?)

And even if she had used 2 devices to keep work and personal email separate, people could still question her decisions as to what to send on the personal device and what to send on the work device. (Yeah, but the decisions would have to be made contemporaneously, and that makes a big difference.)

As for security, the server was set up for Bill Clinton, and it is physically guarded by the Secret Service (and electronically guarded against hackers by Bill Clinton and his IT people, but she won’t say that.)

Hillary: I did it because I wanted to and I intend to keep doing it. Anyone who has a problem with that can go f- themselves.
Later, losers. (raises middle finger while walking away)

Somewhere … a Cherokee pony awaits its’ rider for a midnight ride through Lexington and Concord.

Well anyway, the Republicans are bad people because 47 guys and a letter and Iran or something.

Dissent is now treason until you are instructed otherwise.

inspectorudy | March 10, 2015 at 5:00 pm

This looks like a good chance Running Brave Warren will jump into the soup. Talk about another woman who can turn off a crowd in a hurry!

Midwest Rhino | March 10, 2015 at 5:20 pm

She was pretty much stuck with “those 55,000 are everything”, and “nothing classified ever on the home server”.

Not sure where that leaves her with emails to non-dotgov recipients of state business. If those are in the 55,000, then she was storing/”archiving” state business at home (other than those stored on dotgov recipient computers), which may itself not be legal. And then there is the issue of no oversight over the business except her own people. That is not the point of archiving, whether it was precisely stated as law or not.

She’s had time to cover a lot of bases before coming out on this, but may be compromised.

    It also leaves the question of who did the sorting as to what was personal and what was not. If Hillary decided what was personal herself, and simply deleted the mail, and had things set up so that anything deleted was also deleted on her own server, then short of forensics those emails are lost forever, and the 55,000 delivered to State are the ones that survived Hillary’s own pruning. If that’s not the case, then Hillary had people sort through her email, decide what was personal, and THEN they were deleted. Inquiring minds want to know of course.

    But yeah, this is why Gowdy was referred to State by Hillary’s lawyer in theory: They are the emails that survived her screening process undeleted.

http://twitchy.com/2015/03/10/this-convenience-line-is-baloney-armed-services-committee-spokesman-posts-epic-hillary-takedown/

X-military guy just flays poor Ol’ Walleyes. So many lies. So little time to fisk them all…

On the issue of “55,000” emails… One of the things that litigators do to OBSCURE information is provide MOUNTAINS of information to their opponents. Obama and the Clintons are notorious for this.

Didya notice that she never looked her questioners in the eye when she answered? She didn’t even look at them.

“You can’t hide your lyin’ eyes
And your smile is a thin disguise
I thought by now you’d realize
There ain’t no way to hide your lyin’ eyes
There ain’t no way to hide your lyin’ eyes
Honey, you can’t hide your lyin’ eyes”

Sammy Finkelman | March 11, 2015 at 11:25 am

I don’t know why she would be worried about that.

Do you need to look in her eyes?

You can tell it from the transcript!