Skip to content Skip to footer
|

Voters Will Be Left Hanging by State Department’s Clinton Email Slow-Walk

The department will wait until after the general election to publish many of Hillary Clinton’s emails, including correspondence about the TPP.

Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaks at the US embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, on November 19, 2009. (Photo: US Embassy Kabul Afghanistan)

The State Department is poised to wait until after the general election to publish informative emails sent and received through a private server by Hillary Clinton during her tenure as top US diplomat.

Correspondence revealing just how involved Secretary Clinton was in pushing the contentious Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) won’t be released until late November, the International Business Times reported on Monday.

Officials at State initially told reporter David Sirota that his Freedom of Information Act request for Secretary Clinton’s messages on TPP would be fulfilled by April of 2016. The department told the IB Times last week, however, that it won’t be able to comply with the request until Nov. 31 — a calendar date which doesn’t even exist, as there are only 30 days in the month.

The 12-nation international trade agreement has stalled in Congress with opposition coming from both sides of the political aisle. It has also animated the presidential race with GOP presumptive nominee Donald Trump rallying voters in opposition to the trade pact. Republicans on Capitol Hill have, generally speaking, been more supportive of the TPP than Democrats.

The Trump campaign has already seized on the department’s stonewalling. The businessman’s senior policy advisor, Stephen Miller, said on Monday that “Hillary Clinton’s TPP emails should absolutely be released, as her support for TPP threatens to permanently undermine US workers and sovereignty.”

He added in a statement to the IB Times that “Hillary is 100 percent controlled by corporate interests, including foreign corporate interests, and it is essential these emails see the light of day.”

Following the lead of the Associated Press, major media outlets declared Hillary Clinton the winner of the Democratic Primary on Monday night based on an anonymous survey of superdelegates.

Clinton claimed on the trail last year that she is opposed TPP in its current form. But as Secretary of State in 2012 she stated that the agreement “sets the gold standard in trade agreements.”

State Department FOIA intransigence has also foiled Vice News reporter Jason Koebler, who filed a documents request in March 2015 for internal department emails related to the security of Secretary Clinton’s private email server. The department notified Koebler last month that it won’t be able release the messages until December 2016 — a month after the election.

Another batch of emails from Secretary Clinton’s staff won’t be released until after 2090. In a court filing last week, the department claimed that it would take “75 years in total” to respond to a Republican National Committee request for all the email records belonging to Clinton’s top staff at State.

The department’s failure to comply with FOIA has been well documented since before the Clinton email kerfuffle. A January Inspector General report criticized State leadership for not better overseeing records requests. The department takes on average four and a half times longer to respond to FOIA requests than other federal agencies.

The slow-response rate may not be a result of an innocent lack of oversight, but instead a strategy to evade.

In April, the AP published emails from department officials discussing the botched ZunZuneo operation in Cuba, while taking solace in knowing that records on the program would be released via FOIA “six months from now,” with the public having forgotten about the story.

ZunZuneo referred to a social media program surreptitiously set up by the US Agency for International Development in Cuba in order to foment unrest against the Castro government.

Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn

Dear Truthout Community,

If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.

We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.

Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.

There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.

After the election, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?

It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.

We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.

We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.

Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment. We’re presently working to find 1500 new monthly donors to Truthout before the end of the year.

We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.

With love, rage, and solidarity,

Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy