US UPDATE!!! Hillary Clinton’s Long Road to ‘Sorry’ Over Email Use

Hillary Rodham Clinton did not want to apologize.

For months, when advisers or friends gently suggested she say she was sorry for using a private email address and server while at the State Department, Mrs. Clinton would reply that her actions had been within the law and that the controversy was being manufactured by her political opponents and journalists. Apologizing, she argued, would only legitimize it.

On Tuesday, she relented. In an interview with ABC News, Mrs. Clinton said using a private email had been “a mistake,” adding: “I’m sorry about that.”

The tortured path to what some of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters saw as an overdue and essential step is the story of a presidential campaign in flux, adapting to unanticipated challenges it was not entirely prepared to handle – and of a candidate whose instincts, over a tumultuous lifetime in politics, have repeatedly guided her toward digging in, not giving in, when under attack.

But Mrs. Clinton, sliding in the polls — which show voters increasingly questioning her trustworthiness — does not want to see this shot at the presidency slip away. And the pleas from friends and advisers became more fervent almost a month ago, according to interviews with a half-dozen people with direct knowledge of the discussions, most of whom insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations.

Those frustrations came to a head during Mrs. Clinton’s late August vacation in the Hamptons, where she and former President Bill Clinton took walks on the beach, socialized and raised money for her campaign.

Mr. Clinton was adamant that his wife, who is not accused of breaking any laws or rules, had nothing to apologize for, according to people he spoke to. But he also repeatedly urged her aides to try harder to explain Mrs. Clinton’s actions to voters in a way that would persuade them she had done nothing wrong.

A number of her friends, meanwhile, separately suggested to Mrs. Clinton during the vacation that she needed to change her approach.

On a campaign stop in Iowa on Aug. 26, Mrs. Clinton began to strike a less defensive tone, saying her use of personal email “clearly wasn’t the best choice” and that “I take responsibility for that decision.”

But some of her advisers believed that Mrs. Clinton’s conciliatory remarks would need to be repeated and reinforced.

Early the week before Labor Day, the campaign organized two days of focus groups with voters. And on a call with the candidate afterward, a group of her top aides presented Mrs. Clinton with the results: They showed that the cacophony of coverage about her email was drowning out her campaign’s central message; voters were aware of the story and wanted to understand it better. And the focus group participants responded positively when they were shown video of Mrs. Clinton’s recent appearance in Iowa and witnessed her shift in tone.

“We’re confident that when voters are here and hear her say that it wasn’t the best choice and that she takes responsibility for the email situation, that they’re reassured,” Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, John D. Podesta, told reporters on Sept. 3.

Advertisement
Continue reading the main story

But Mrs. Clinton did not quickly – or easily – arrive at the word “sorry.”

In an interview with NBC News on Sept. 4, Mrs. Clinton seemed taken aback when asked if she would apologize to the American people. (So, too, were several of her strategists, who thought the question dramatically overstated the significance of the email controversy.) In the moment, Mrs. Clinton said only that she was sorry if some people were confused by it.

On Monday, in an interview with The Associated Press, Mrs. Clinton showed some contrition, but also said she didn’t need to apologize – because her email use “was allowed.”

Frustration reached a fever pitch among some of her supporters, who sounded an alarm in calls to Clinton campaign aides.

Some supporters who had their own direct relationships to Mrs. Clinton, and were exasperated defending her over a controversy they did not fully understand, reached out to her personally, after campaign aides suggested that doing so might accomplish more than merely conveying their concerns through the aides, according to people briefed on the exchanges.

By the morning of Mrs. Clinton’s interview with ABC News, her strategists were privately complaining that they were stuck arguing semantics with the news media, but also concluded that there was only one way out of it.

“The view is, hopefully, it puts everything to bed,” Marc Lasry, a hedge fund manager and longtime Clinton donor, said of her apology.

But the “I’m sorry” stumbles also signaled to some Democrats a potential weakness within Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. When she assembled her 2016 team, Mrs. Clinton tried to avoid the mishaps of her failed 2008 campaign, which was led by a small cadre of longtime loyalists and was often criticized for insularity and infighting, by hiring several newcomers for senior positions, including former aides to President Obama.

But those newer to her circle lacked the comfort level with Mrs. Clinton to assert themselves and insist she do what she was not inclined to. For better or for worse, her 2008 team was experienced at navigating controversy and managing the candidate.

Moreover, unlike in 2008, when the chief strategist and pollster Mark Penn was a dominant, if polarizing, figure, her campaign has been described by several Democrats working closely with it as making important decisions by committee, with several top aides weighing in. Mr. Podesta, who divides his time between Washington and New York, is revered among Democrats but his close relationship is with Mr. Clinton, whom he served as White House chief of staff, not with Mrs. Clinton.

All of which leaves the candidate heavily relying on her own instincts – instincts forged in the crucible of a lifetime’s experience with controversies large and small.

In her 2000 race for the Senate, it took Mrs. Clinton three days to apologize after an aide neglected to tip a waitress in upstate New York, and the faux pas blew up into a tabloid embarrassment. Only in 2014, after a painful loss in her first run for the White House when the issue cost her support, did she call her 2002 Senate vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq a mistake.

Advertisement
Continue reading the main story

As early as 1994, at what became known as her “pink press conference,” in which Mrs. Clinton won praise for spending 68 minutes fielding questions about the Whitewater scandal while wearing a rosy sweater-set, she breezily dismissed a question about why she and her husband had not done something differently: “Well, shoulda, coulda, woulda,” she said. “We didn’t.”

Even on Tuesday, after Mrs. Clinton’s apology on ABC News, at a taping of “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” later that day she again retreated to the idea that she was “sorry for all the confusion” her use of private email had caused.

Still, many Democrats took Mrs. Clinton’s less adversarial approach as evidence that she would be able to put a rough summer behind her, and that her advantages were being underestimated.

“There were performance issues, and the handling of the emails issue has been abysmal,” said David Axelrod, the former top adviser to President Barack Obama. “That said, she’s got a lot of assets that are really being undervalued – personal assets, in terms of her own strengths as a candidate, and organizational.”

But even if the candidate and her campaign begin to demonstrate the agility and sensitivity Mrs. Clinton’s supporters have clamored for, what happens next with regard to her emails is largely out of her hands, with the State Department sporadically releasing batches of her emails, the Republican-led House Select Committee on Benghazi calling Mrs. Clinton in for testimony on Oct. 22, and the F.B.I. investigating the security of her server.

Indeed, even as donors toured Mrs. Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn on Sept. 3 and were offered reassurances that the campaign was in a strong position, reports that an aide who had overseen her email server was invoking his Fifth Amendment right not to testify dominated cable news.

“The faster they can close this down, the better,” said Alan Patricof, a friend and donor of longstanding. “If Hillary had a choice, she’d get them to release every one of the emails tomorrow.”