Remember when Hillary Clinton stood in front of a press gaggle at the United Nations and claimed that she used her personal email in order to simplify her communications routine, as her tiny little female brain was unable to account for two mobile devices at the same time, despite her quick adaptation to the iPad in addition to her phone? Sure, we all do. I missed lunch for it. The things I do for you people.
Well, it turns out that, once Clinton released her emails to the Associated Press, she was betrayed, somewhat ironically, by her real inability to use two devices. In at least one communication with her senior aide Huma Abedin, where Clinton mistakenly replied to a very important State Department email about drone debris in Pakistan, with a series of queries about benches and floral arrangements.
While limited, the emails offer one of the first looks into Clinton’s correspondence while secretary of state. The messages came from and were sent to her private email address, hosted on a server at her property in Chappaqua, New York, as opposed to a government-run email account.
They show that Clinton, on at least one occasion, accidentally mingled personal and work matters. In reply to a message sent in September 2011 by adviser Huma Abedin to Clinton’s personal email account, which contained an AP story about a drone strike in Pakistan, Clinton mistakenly replied with questions that appear to be about decorations.
“I like the idea of these,” she wrote to Abedin. “How high are they? What would the bench be made of? And I’d prefer two shelves or attractive boxes/baskets/ conmtainers (sic) on one. What do you think?”
Abedin replied, “Did u mean to send to me?” To which Clinton wrote, “No-sorry! Also, pls let me know if you got a reply from my ipad. I’m not sure replies go thru.”
The other emails between Clinton and her advisers provided by the State Department contained a summary of a 2011 meeting between Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and senior Egyptian officials in Cairo. It was uncensored and did not appear to contain sensitive information. That email was forwarded to Clinton’s private account from Abedin’s government email address.
The iPad was, of course, released more than a year after Clinton became Secretary of State, but the emails are from within a year of the iPad’s release, making Clinton something of an “early adopter” of the technology, which is very much at odds with the “technological ignoramus” card she played at the UN. Worse, the emails the AP obtained make it clear that Clinton did have a hard time separating personal email from work email, and now that all 30,000 emails on the server are gone, it’s hard to know whether some of the emails she marked as “personal” came from within conversations that were decidedly professional.
According to the AP, which asked her spokesperson for comment, Clinton’s aides now admit that then-Secretary Clinton did also use an iPad in addition to her Blackberry, but mostly to “read news clippings” and not primarily for email. Obviously because the latter was very difficult.
