Hillary Clinton: ‘I Want the Public to See My Email’ (Updated)

Is the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s clandestine approach to email, involving her exclusive use of a personal email account while secretary of state, about transparency or partisan politicking in the run-up to the 2016 presidential campaign season?

The likely answer: both.

Regardless, the end result is the same; the story is out, and now Clinton’s camp is obliged to showcase its most advanced crisis-control maneuvers.

After The New York Times delighted untold throngs of Clinton detractors with its inopportune report, released Monday, about her studied avoidance of explicitly required email protocol while serving as the top-ranking member of President Obama’s State Department, she waited a beat or two before responding.

When she did, late Wednesday evening, she chose a medium that has bolstered her public image in recent years: Twitter. “I want the public to see my email. I asked State to release them,” Clinton tweeted. “They said they will review them for release as soon as possible.”

As The Huffington Post’s Igor Bobic noted Thursday, Clinton’s email records are unsurprisingly of interest to House members conducting an ongoing congressional inquest into the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya:

Clinton’s advisers submitted some 50,000 pages of emails to the State Department two months ago at the government’s request, but critics maintained that using private email allowed Clinton to pick and choose which documents to submit with no way to verify the process. A House panel investigating the 2012 terror attacks in Benghazi, Libya, on Wednesday issued a subpoena for any and all of Clinton’s private emails related to the attack.

Indeed, the State Department on Thursday backed up Clinton’s tweet, issuing a statement confirming that a review of the former secretary of state’s emails will shortly commence, “using a normal process that guides such releases,” and added that, because of the “sheer volume” of material involved, “this review will take some time to complete.”

That should give Clinton’s right-wing opponents plenty of time to bust out the heavy artillery.

Update: The same goes for, as CNN put it, “[t]he Democratic Party’s anyone-but-Hillary wing.”

–Posted by Kasia Anderson