Email Scandal Casts Shadow on Campaign

Subject of an FBI investigation, the Democratic candidate has provided a personal hard drive and copies of her emails.

Paris — After lengthy hesitation, Hillary Clinton, topping polls for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. presidency, has finally agreed to furnish the hard drive of a personal computer that she used as an email server during her tenure as secretary of state (2009-2013).

Using her personal email account for work has made Mrs. Clinton the subject of an investigation by the Department of Justice. This investigation has undergone many unexpected developments and comprises a key element used by the candidate’s opponents in the campaign for the Democratic nomination.

The Law

In the U.S., elected [politicians] and senior officials are not allowed to use personal email boxes for activities related to their job responsibilities. This correspondence is considered an important part of their [professional] activity. American law, most notably the Federal Records Act, requires that one copy be kept for archiving. Unless they are classified as confidential or top-secret, these exchanges may be consulted by anyone who makes a request for them, through the Freedom of Information Act.

The 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, had experienced similar woes. After her personal Yahoo! account was hacked, the American press revealed that she had used that address to manage issues related to her term as Governor of Alaska. Before being turned against the Democratic Party, the case, in the midst of the presidential campaign, created a scandal that harmed Sarah Palin. The hacker, identified a few weeks later, was the son of an elected Democrat.

As head of American diplomacy, Hillary Clinton was sending and receiving a very large amount of confidential and sensitive information. Her email account should therefore have been subject to particularly substantial safeguards. But the personal account that she was using, and that worked with several servers — including the one located at her home — did not benefit from those measures, and was therefore easily vulnerable to a hack. Worse, certain basic protection measures seem not to have been followed — one of the domains linked to the account used an invalid security certificate.

Contents under Surveillance

These elements convey to Republicans — but also to many experts on computer security — that it is very likely that the messages passed through this account had at one time or another been read by hackers. For now, however, no proof of a sizable hack has been provided.

On Tuesday, investigators announced that among the 40 emails that they were able to examine, at least five contained classified information. Two of them contained information classified “top secret.” According to the State Department, “there are potentially hundreds of classified emails among the 30,000 that Mrs. Clinton provided to investigators.”

Mrs. Clinton and her team basically played for time. It took five months for the Department of Justice to obtain access to the hard drive of the server in the Secretary of State’s home. Mrs. Clinton’s team had erased the contents of the hard drive at the end of 2014, after having sent investigators a file presented as containing all the emails appearing on it.

Although from the beginning of the investigation Mrs. Clinton acknowledged having used it, she always said that no confidential document had passed through this email. The initial findings of the investigation show otherwise, but also note that the documents reviewed, even if they did contain much classified information, were not identified as such — an argument that could be used by Mrs. Clinton to argue her good faith.

On the other hand, the government investigation into the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, which ended in 2012 with the death of the ambassador, discovered in June that the file sent by Mrs. Clinton was not complete. Fifteen emails sent by the head of American diplomacy to Sidney Blumenthal, an old friend and adviser to Mrs. Clinton, were not included in the file: Mr. Blumenthal forwarded copies of all his exchanges with Mrs. Clinton to the investigators, at their request.

Consequences?

Hillary Clinton is far from being the first American political leader accused of illegal use of emails. Legal convictions are extremely rare, but the political consequences can be weighty. Mrs. Clinton has already been the subject of attacks accusing her of endangering the lives of American soldiers, and her opponents denounce her lack of transparency — which the Obama administration had, however, made one of its priorities.

Another very concrete consequence: On July 17, the inspector general of the State Department launched an extensive internal investigation into “the use of personal communication tools by five Secretaries of State and their close advisors.”