A new cache of Hillary Clinton‘s emails released on Tuesday surfaced a damning revelation: her inability to operate a fax machine.
Hillary Clinton, figuring out how to work a fax machine pic.twitter.com/oJ2KxOtfJ6
— Dave Levinthal (@davelevinthal) July 1, 2015
In an exchange with top aide Huma Abedin on December 2009, Clinton struggles with receiving a fax. (To be fair, those things really can be a pain in the rear.)
Abedin: “Can you hang up the fax line, they will call again and try fax.”
Clinton: “I thought it was supposed to be off hook to work?”
Abedin: “Yes but hang up one more time. So they can reestablish the line.”
Clinton: “I did.”
Abedin: “Just pick up the phone and hang it up. And leave it hung up.”
Clinton: “I’ve done it twice now.”
Another humorous exchange involves the use of the word “twittering” by Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s chief-of-staff. “[We] should not be twittering in the Secretary’s name since she is not the person actually twittering,” wrote Mills.
Responding to Mills, Alec Ross, Clinton’s top tech advisor, replied: “I do not believe there is Twittering in the Secretary’s name. The Twittering is from DipNote, the State Department’s Blog. It will occasionally quote the Secretary but the Twittering should not be done in her name.”
In another email to aide Lona Valmoro, Clinton says she learned about a cabinet meeting from an unlikely source. “I heard on the radio that there is a Cabinet mtg this am. Is there? Can I go? If not, who are we sending?” Clinton asked in June 2009.
“It is actually not a full cabinet meeting today,” Valmoro replied. “We were welcome to send a representative though, not sure if we have anyone going.”
There’s no definitive proof that Clinton intentionally hid any damaging emails to protect her reputation. Nevertheless, she skirted the rules concerning federal public-records laws when she deciding to forgo using a government email account and store work emails on a server at her private home in upstate New York.
While Clinton’s political opponents are likely disappointed by the lack of scandalous material, there are several more caches to come. By court order, the State Department will be making public new batches of Clinton’s work emails through January 2016.
Photo via Karl Baron/Flickr (CC BY 2.0) | Remix by Max Fleishman