Released emails reveal Lankan fury, debate over Clinton’s rape remarks

The recently released emails of US presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, reveal that Sri Lanka’s strong reaction to the then secretary of State, Hillary Clinton’s 2009 remarks over use of rape as an instrument of war unleashed an intense internal debate, which ultimately led to a partial retraction.

 

On Sep 30, 2009, Clinton said at the UNSC that rape had been “used as a tactic of war before in Bosnia, Burma and Sri Lanka and elsewhere”. This had led to a big outcry in Lanka, with an official protest being lodged.

 

The retraction came in the context of the victory that the Sri Lankan army achieved in its decade-long civil war against the Tigers with general international consensus that Colombo should be given space for its national reconciliation process.

 

The Sri Lanka government had lodged its protest on October 2. From the released emails of Clinton, it is clear there was an intense internal debate on how the response should be released and who it should be released by.

 

On Oct 3, 2009, Lissa Muscatine, a senior aide to Clinton, while sending a mail listing human rights violations including rape atrocities committed in Sri Lanka, acknowledged there had been a lack of due diligence prior to clearing Clinton’s statement.  “The problem is that it was not sent to SCA or East Asia and should have been. But the rest of the building signed off on it,” she wrote, referring to the South and Central Asia desk which covers Sri Lanka.

 

The then State department spokesperson Philip Crowley sent a draft of a statement to Clinton, as a possible response to the Sri Lankan government’s protest note. But, five minutes later, he wrote of Clinton being open to the idea of the response coming from someone else.

 

“She feels that this has generated a great deal of media commentary in various quarters, including prominent outlets in this country (LAT) and in Asia that we have no choice but to respond in a public way. Government supporters are saying that she is listening to the Tamil Diaspora,” Crowley wrote in an email to various Clinton aides. It hints at active lobbying in Washington on behalf of the Sri Lankan government to put pressure for a retraction.

 

Crowley said that a conference call with Clinton led to a consensus that US response to Sri Lanka should not be from Clinton to allow for some flexibility. “What this does is reinforces her statement, but gives the government a little something on recent experience and then goes the pivot to reconciliation and what they need to do now, reinforcing our current policy,” Crowley said.

A little later, Philippe I Reines, Clinton’s senior advisor, wrote that if the letter was sent by Melanne Verveer, ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues, it will be “far more confirming of HRC’s statement”, rather than from the spokesman “which will invariably read like a correction/retraction”. “I fear how the 3,000 outlets who have not even noticed the issue will react to this statement,” he added.

 

Verveer agreed. “We do not want to make this a bigger story, so if it makes sense for me to respond, I have no objection to course.”

 

Within 15 minutes, Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl D Mills said she had spoken to “HRC”. “We should do this from Melanne. She still wants to see a draft”.

 

Clinton herself wrote an email to Crowley, saying she was “happy” to have Melanne Verveer release the letter to the Sri Lankan ambassador, but emphasized that she wanted to see it.

 

An hour later, a text in language largely based on the original draft statement by the US spokesperson was sent to Hillary to review.

 

However, even after Verveer’s conciliatory letter was made public, Colombo was not placated. Few days later, the then Sri Lankan PM told a radio station that Clinton had forgotten the Monica Lewinsky episode and should focus on her own backyard, instead of making allegations of women being abused in other countries, the New Indian Express reports.

 

 

Hillary Clinton’s email controversy is older than her 2016 presidential campaign -- and it’s been forced into the headlines again Thursday and Friday when two top aides testify behind closed doors for a House committee.

 

The former secretary of state’s use of a private email server might not have been broken laws, particularly if her claims that she never knowingly shared information that was classified at the time holds true.

 

But the Justice Department’s investigation, the State Department’s processing and release of her emails, a House panel’s separate investigation and dozens of impending lawsuits are weighing on the 2016 Democratic presidential front-runner’s campaign.

 

Here’s what’s happened so far:

 

What did Clinton do?

 

News broke in March that Clinton used personal email addresses connected to a privately-owned server, rather than a government email, during her four years as President Barack Obama’s first-term secretary of state.

 

Some previous secretaries of state -- including Colin Powell -- have also used private email accounts, but Clinton’s approach was particularly controversial because it’s out of step with typical government practice now and gave Clinton a major measure of control over what remains private and what’s public.

 

Clinton’s lawyers turned over 55,000 pages of emails to the State Department, and the department has since processed those -- releasing some, under a judge’s orders, at the end of each month.

 

But she didn’t hand in the server itself until last month, after five months of intense scrutiny over whether she flouted transparency laws or put government secrets at risk.

 

Why did she do it?

 

Clinton has chalked it all up to convenience, saying she preferred not to carry two phones -- one with a personal email address and one with a work email.

 

There’s some legitimacy to that: Government BlackBerrys could only include one address.

 

But having her own personal server also gave Clinton -- as well as her closest aides -- much greater control over which emails were accessible under public records requests.

 

Clinton acknowledged, both in March when her private email use was first reported and again in Iowa last month, that it “clearly wasn’t the best choice” to skip using a government email address.

 

What’s in the emails?

 

It’s mostly innocuous -- with Clinton asking for scheduling updates, fitting in trips to her hair stylist, checking on a strange trade dispute over gefilte fish and receiving notes about the balance of a career and a family from a top policy aide.

 

But the emails also offer insight into Clinton’s closest contacts. Among them: Sidney Blumenthal, who sent what Clinton has said were unsolicited -- yet were clearly warmly received -- notes with advice and guidance on domestic and international politics.

 

Many of the emails are, in part or in full, redacted. That makes it tough to tell what behind-the-scenes policy conversations were taking place as Clinton navigated tricky international waters.

 

Of the 7,000 emails released by the State Department this week, 125 were retroactively classified.

 

Did Clinton break the rules?

 

There are laws intended to keep government records transparent -- but one that requires officials to transfer emails sent to private addresses onto government servers wasn’t enacted until 2014, after Clinton departed the State Department.

 

Still, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan suggested last month that Clinton violated government policy and made the process of responding to open records requests more difficult.

 

“We wouldn’t be here today if this employee had followed government policy,” he said at a hearing on one of the dozens of lawsuits over Clinton’s emails.

 

Looming larger is the question of how classified information was handled -- the subject of a Justice Department investigation and the question that ultimately forced Clinton to turn over her private server to the FBI.

 

Clinton has insisted she never sent or received information that was classified at the time -- though many of her emails have been classified retroactively as the State Department has prepared them for release.

 

Was what she did illegal?

 

Probably not, said Anne M. Tomkins, the former U.S. attorney who oversaw the prosecution of Gen. David Petraeus over his having showed classified materials to his mistress and biographer.

 

Tomkins wrote this week in USA Today that Clinton committed no crime because she didn’t “knowingly” share classified materials.

 

“Clinton is not being investigated for knowingly sending or receiving classified materials improperly,” Tomkins wrote.

 

“Indeed, the State Department has confirmed that none of the information that has surfaced on Clinton’s server thus far was classified at the time it was sent or received,” she wrote. “Additionally, the Justice Department indicated that its inquiry is not a criminal one and that Clinton is not the subject of the inquiry.”

 

What’s classified, when was it made classified and why?

 

All government agencies are responsible for determining which of their own materials are classified.

 

But Clinton’s emails are being reviewed by a team of about 12 interagency officials, who are making recommendations on what should and shouldn’t be classified.

 

State Department spokesman John Kirby told reporters in August that “there’s an exhaustive, extensive review process for each and every email, which includes not just State Department reviewers going through them but having intelligence community reviewers with us at the time as we go through them in real-time to help make determinations.”

 

Kirby added, “Some of those determinations are fairly easy -- yes or no. Some of them require additional review and discussion.”

 

What’s next? What does this have to do with Congress? Are there lawsuits over the emails?

 

It’s not just the State Department’s email releases forcing fresh headlines about the issue.

 

The House’s Benghazi committee chaired by Rep. Trey Gowdy is calling two top Clinton aides in for closed-door depositions this week. Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s State Department chief of staff, will appear Thursday, while policy adviser Jake Sullivan is expected Friday.

 

Another former State Department employee Bryan Pagliano who worked on Clinton’s private email server has informed Congress that he will invoke the Fifth Amendment to avoid testifying before the House Select Committee.

 

Clinton herself will appear before the committee for an open hearing -- one likely to attract the most television cameras of any congressional hearing in recent memory -- on Oct. 22.

 

There are also dozens of lawsuits seeking Clinton’s emails. They range from news organizations like Gawker and The Associated Press to conservative groups like Judicial Watch.

 

The State Department said Tuesday that it will ask for all of those lawsuits to be consolidated under a single judge.