Hillary Clinton, while plenty busy with her day job, also kept a close eye on her political image while helming the State Department, new emails show.
The State Department released the latest batch of Clinton’s emails Wednesday. This round includes 3,849 documents and mostly covers 2010 and 2011.
They show that the secretary of state calibrated her interactions with the press to bolster how she was viewed by the public. Passing along a CNN/ORC poll from March 2011 that showed Clinton’s favorability rating then at 65%, communications aide Philippe Reines wrote: “This is why we cooperate with so many profiles.”
That September, top aide Huma Abedin emailed Clinton with a Bloomberg article about whether her popularity is prompting “buyer’s remorse” from Obama backers.
The State Department is processing 55,000 pages of emails that Clinton’s lawyers turned over. New tranches of emails are being released at the end of each month under a federal judge’s order — but only after those emails are picked through by officials from a group of U.S. intelligence agencies to make sure sensitive information isn’t made public.
Here are some of the interesting tidbits from Wednesday’s email release:
Abedin accessed Clinton’s emails
Abedin, Clinton’s close aide, appeared to have access — at least at times — to Clinton’s email account.
She responded to a note policy adviser Jake Sullivan had sent to Clinton’s account, on the secretary of state’s behalf.
“Hey its huma,” Abedin wrote from Clinton’s account. “She can’t talk right now.”
“She will call when she gets in car. What flight u on? Can u email me on other email?”
An urgent call about Netanyahu’s ‘short fuse’
Before meeting with U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice needed to talk to Clinton.
And it had to do with the “short fuse” of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Rice wrote to Clinton: “I would like to share the outcome of the meeting I had with Netanyahu today. I need some guidance from you urgently, and before I talk to SG (at Netanyahu’s short fuse request).”
Clinton defends the terms ‘mother’ and ‘father’
In January 2011, the State Department was set to replace the terms “mother” and “father” with the gender-neutral “parent” in reports of overseas births.
Clinton caught wind of this bureaucratic change and then halted it publicly. She also expressed serious reservations privately.
In an email to chief of staff Cheryl Mills, Clinton wrote: “I’m not defending that decision, which I disagree w and knew nothing about, in front of this Congress. I couuld w letting people in nontraditional families choose another descriptor so long as we retained the presumption of mother and father.”
Wrestling with the White House’s phone operator
When California Rep. Diane Watson announced her retirement in 2010, Clinton wanted to talk with her — but it turns out it’s not easy verifying your identity when you’re the most famous female politician on earth.
“I’d like to call her,” Clinton wrote to Abedin. “But right now I’m fighting w the WH operator who doesn’t believe I am who I say and wants my direct office line even tho I’m not there and I just have him my home # and the State Dept # and I told him I had no idea what my direct office # was since I didn’t call myself and I just hung up and am calling thru Ops like a proper and properly dependent Secretary of State–no independent dialing allowed.”
Barbara Mikulski, unedited
Maryland Sen. Barbara Mikulski wrote to Clinton in January 2010 that in the Senate, they were facing “The. Mass. Catastrophe.”
It was a note about Mikulski missing Clinton since she’d given up her seat to join Obama’s administration, and the political trouble Democrats — still struggling to pass Obama’s health care law — faced there.
The long-time serving Maryland senator told Clinton about a behind-closed-doors caucus meeting where Democrats expressed frustration. She wrote: “this wk in caucus we were avolcano ready to erupt—real frustration with. Pres white house team and tin ear/ thin plans to deal with. Deep. Economic. Anxiety.”
Mikulski added: “Middle class feels their way of life. Slippingaway. And dems. Are only offering spending plans. Not solutions”
An endorsement from Bush world
Anita McBride, who was first lady Laura Bush’s White House chief of staff, offered kind words in a March 2011 email to State Department staffer Melanne Verveer. Verveer forwarded it to Clinton.
She wrote that she’d had dinner with longtime Reaganites who had told her, “I feel safe with Hillary.”
“We are so fortunate she is where she is. I know it’s so damn hard,” McBride wrote. “I’ll pray for her. We need her.”
She added: “I can’t tell you how grateful I am as an American for Hillary’s leadership and hard work. Really – it kind of makes me weepy – and it does make me proud.”
Mark Penn kept at Obama
Mark Penn was a controversial messaging guru in Clinton’s 2008 Democratic primary campaign — and it appears he never warmed to the president.
In June 2010, he wrote to Clinton that the Obama administration has an “inadequate plan for long-term innovation and growth.”
In November 2010, he criticized the White House’s handling of WikiLeaks. “The administration’s response seems quite weak to me,” he wrote.