How do you solve a problem like Bill Clinton?
An exasperated Hillary Clinton wondered how to keep her husband in check after a newspaper report questioned her husband’s loyalty to President Obama and suggested Bill could cost him re-election in 2012, a newly released State Department email revealed.
State Department counselor and Hillary friend Cheryl Mills sent her a Washington Post story headlined, “Bill Clinton’s ego could cost Obama in November,” on June 6, 2012.
“What can be done?” Clinton replied less than two hours later.
The exchange was one of a new batch of 550 private emails the State Department released Saturday. Of those, 84 were labeled “confidential,” the lowest level of classification. Three others, detailing Clinton’s role in some of the most pressing foreign policy crises of the Obama administration, were classified “secret.”
The government coughed up the messages following a federal judge’s order last May for the department to unload a trove of 1,700 records in a monthly trickle.
Federal officials did not label the emails as classified at the time but later found that scores of them contained sensitive diplomatic communications.
The three “secret” emails revealed Saturday dealt with the former secretary of state doing damage control after a US raid killed Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011, and an Egypt-Israeli border conflict at the Sinai Peninsula in August 2012.
In one email, State policy planning chief Jake Sullivan asked Clinton to calm down a “hysterical” US Ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Munter, who joined then-Sen. John Kerry in Pakistan two weeks after the bin Laden raid for high-stakes diplomatic talks.
“Can you get me the facts (such as they are) before I talk with Kerry?” Clinton replied.
The emails regarding Egypt’s attacks in the Sinai Peninsula and US-Israeli relations were highly redacted.
Others dealt with less highly charged topics.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel invited her in August 2012 to appear at Chicago’s Ideas Week on Oct. 8 to talk about the “state of the union.”
And Henry Kissinger wanted to speak with Clinton and said the topic was “personal,” Clinton aide Monica Hanley wrote to Clinton on June 17, 2012.
The State Department has so far classified 22 emails as “top secret” and 21 as “secret” among the 33,000 that traveled through Clinton’s server between 2009 and 2013.
Clinton has apologized for using work-related emails on a personal server amid heavy criticism but insisted she never broke federal law.
The issue has become campaign fodder among Republican presidential hopefuls throughout the primary season.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz released a campaign ad Friday showing an actress portraying Clinton destroying a computer with a baseball bat in a spoof of the cult comedy “Office Space.”