Secretaries of State: Hillary Rodham Clinton
In 2008, former First Lady and New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton ran for the Democratic Party's nomination for President. At first she was considered the front-runner, but she hadn't counted on Barack Obama's meteoric rise. Following the final Democratic primaries on June 3, 2008, Obama had gained enough delegates to become the presumptive nominee. In a speech before her supporters on June 7, Clinton ended her campaign and endorsed Obama. She had won 1,640 pledged delegates, but Obama had 1,763. Clinton had 286 superdelegates, but Obama had 395. Clinton and Obama each received over 17 million votes during the nomination process, both breaking the previous record. Clinton was the first woman to run in the primary or caucus of every state. Her campaign ended up severely in debt. She wrote off the $13 million that she lent to the campaign.
In mid-November 2008, Obama discussed with Clinton the possibility of her serving as U.S. Secretary of State in his administration. On November 20, she told Obama she would accept the job and on December 1, the President-elect formally announced that Clinton would be his nominee for Secretary of State. In order for her to serve in the post, her husband former President Bill Clinton agreed to accept several conditions and restrictions regarding his ongoing activities and fundraising efforts for the William J. Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative.
On January 21, 2009, Clinton was confirmed in the full Senate by a vote of 94–2. She took the oath of office of Secretary of State, resigning from the Senate later that day. She became the first former first lady to serve in the United States Cabinet. She spent her first days as Secretary of State calling world leaders and indicating that U.S. foreign policy would change direction from that of the Bush administration.
She participated in the Obama administration's debate regarding the war in Afghanistan and sided with the military's recommendations for a surge. She recommended that 40,000 troops be added, and opposed declaring a public deadline for withdrawal. She eventually supported Obama's compromise plan to send an additional 30,000 troops and tie the surge to a timetable for eventual withdrawal. In March 2009, Clinton presented Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov with a "reset button" symbolizing U.S. attempts to rebuild diplomatic ties with that country. Relations would worsen considerably between the two countries after Vladimir Putin returned as Russian President in 2012.
In 2009, Clinton traveled to Switzerland, Clinton for the signing of an historic Turkish–Armenian accord that established diplomatic relations and opened the border between the two long-hostile nations. In Pakistan, she attempted to repair relations with that country and in 2010, she helped organize international sanctions against Iran, in an effort to curtail that country's nuclear program. This would eventually lead to the multinational Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action being agreed to in 2015.
Clinton was considered to be a team player within the Obama administration. She formed an alliance with Secretary of Defense Gates with whom she shared similar strategic outlooks. She met with the President.In July 2010, she visited Korea, Vietnam, Pakistan and Afghanistan, while preparing for the July 31 wedding of daughter Chelsea.
In response to the 2011 Egyptian protests, Clinton's position changed from first concluding that the government of Hosni Mubarak was "stable", to one of deciding that there needed to be an "orderly transition" to a democratic government. As Arab Spring protests spread throughout the region, Clinton backed some regimes while supporting protesters against others. As the Libyan Civil War took place, Clinton favored military intervention. She testified to Congress that the administration did not need congressional authorization for its military intervention in Libya, despite objections from some members of both parties that the administration was violating the War Powers Resolution. The aftermath of the Libyan Civil War saw the country becoming a failed state.
During April 2011, the president's inner circle of advisors debated over whether to order U.S. special forces to conduct a raid into Pakistan against Osama bin Laden. Clinton was among those who argued in favor, saying the importance of getting bin Laden outweighed the risks to the U.S. relationship with Pakistan. After completion of the mission on May 2, which resulted in bin Laden's death, Clinton played a key role in the administration's decision not to release photographs of the dead al-Qaeda leader.
During internal discussions about Iraq in 2011, Clinton argued unsuccessfully for keeping a residual force of up to 10,000–20,000 U.S. troops there. All troops ended up being withdrawn after negotiations for a revised U.S.–Iraq Status of Forces Agreement failed.
In a speech before the United Nations Human Rights Council in December 2011, Clinton said that "Gay rights are human rights" and that the U.S. would advocate for gay rights and legal protections of gays abroad. She made the first visit to Burma by a U.S. secretary of state since 1955, as she met with Burmese leaders as well as opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and sought to support the 2011 Burmese democratic reforms.
During the Syrian Civil War, Clinton and the Obama administration initially sought to persuade Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to institute reforms, as government violence rose in August 2011. She called for him to resign from the presidency. The administration joined several countries in delivering non-lethal assistance to rebels opposed to the Assad government and humanitarian groups working in Syria. In mid-2012, Clinton formed a plan with CIA Director David Petraeus to strengthen the opposition by arming and training vetted groups of Syrian rebels, but the proposal was rejected by the White House.
In December 2012 Clinton was hospitalized treatment of a blood clot in her right transverse venous sinus. Her doctors had discovered the clot during a follow-up examination for a concussion she had sustained when she fainted and fell nearly three weeks earlier, the result of severe dehydration from a viral intestinal ailment. The clot was treated with anticoagulant medication.
Clinton expanded the State Department's use of social media, including Facebook and Twitter. One of the central themes of her tenure was the empowerment and welfare of women and girls worldwide. She said that she viewed women's rights as critical for U.S. security interests, due to a link between the level of violence against women and gender inequality within a state and the instability and challenge to international security of that state. This became known as the "Hillary Doctrine".
Clinton visited 112 countries during her time as Secretary of State, making her the most widely traveled secretary of state. She was the first secretary of state to visit countries such as Togo and East Timor, and said that she believed that in-person visits were more important than ever in the virtual age. As early as March 2011, she indicated she was not interested in serving a second term as Secretary of State should President Obama be re-elected in 2012 in December 2012, following that re-election, Obama nominated Senator John Kerry to be Clinton's successor. Her last day as Secretary of State was February 1, 2013.
On September 11, 2012, while President Obama was campaigning for re-election, the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, was attacked, resulting in the deaths of the U.S. Ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. The attack called into question the security of the U.S. consulate. Inconsistent explanations were given afterward by administration officials for what had happened. On October 15, Clinton took responsibility for the question of security lapses and said the differing explanations were due to the "fog of war" that follows such events. On December 19, a panel led by Thomas R. Pickering and Michael Mullen issued its report on the matter. The report was critical of State Department officials in Washington for ignoring requests for more guards and safety upgrades and for failing to adapt security procedures to a deteriorating security environment. Four State Department officials at the assistant secretary level and below were removed from their posts as a consequence. Clinton said she accepted the conclusions of the report.
Clinton gave testimony to two congressional foreign affairs committees on January 23, 2013, regarding the Benghazi attack. She defended her actions in response to the incident but accepted formal responsibility. She said that she had had no direct role in specific discussions beforehand regarding consulate security. In November 2014, the House Intelligence Committee issued a report that concluded there had been no wrongdoing in the administration's response to the attack.
The House Select Committee on Benghazi was created in May 2014 and conducted a two-year investigation related to the 2012 attack. On October 22, 2015, while in the midst of a second campaign for President, Clinton testified at an all-day and nighttime session before the committee. The hearing included many heated exchanges between committee members and Clinton. Clinton was generally perceived as emerging unscathed from the hearing. The committee issued competing final reports in June 2016 that broke along partisan lines.
A controversy arose in March 2015, when it was revealed by the State Department's inspector general that Clinton had exclusively used personal email accounts on a non-government, privately maintained server, instead of using email accounts maintained on federal government servers. The controversy occurred as Clinton's 2016 presidential election campaign and the hearings held by the House Select Committee on Benghazi were taking place. In a joint statement released on July 15, 2015, the inspector general of the State Department and the inspector general of the intelligence community said that their review of the emails found information that was classified when sent, remained so at the time of their inspection and "never should have been transmitted via an unclassified personal system." They also stated unequivocally that this classified information should never have been stored outside of secure government computer systems. Clinton maintained that she kept no classified information on the private server that she set up in her house. The nondisclosure agreement signed by Clinton as part of gaining her security clearance, stated that sensitive information could be considered as classified even if not marked as such.
An FBI probe was initiated regarding how classified information was handled on the Clinton server. The New York Times reported in February 2016 that nearly 2,100 emails stored on Clinton's server were retroactively marked classified by the State Department. In May 2016, the inspector general of the State Department criticized Clinton's use of a private email server while secretary of state, stating that she had not requested permission for this and would not have received it if she had asked. Clinton maintained that she did not send or receive any emails from her personal server that were confidential at the time they were sent. In a Democratic debate with Bernie Sanders on February 4, 2016, Clinton said, "I never sent or received any classified material – they are retroactively classifying it." On July 2, 2016, Clinton stated: "Let me repeat what I have repeated for many months now, I never received nor sent any material that was marked classified."
On July 5, 2016, the FBI concluded its investigation. The probe found that Clinton used her personal email extensively while outside the United States, both sending and receiving work-related emails in the territory of adversaries. The FBI assessed that it "is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton's personal email account." Comey stated that although Clinton or her colleagues were "extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information", the FBI would recommend to the Justice Department that "no charges are appropriate in this case." On July 6, 2016, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch confirmed that the probe into Clinton's use of private email servers while secretary of state will be closed without criminal charges.
While the 2016 Presidential election campaign was in the homestretch, on October 28, 2016, Comey notified Congress that the FBI started looking into newly discovered emails discovered while law enforcement officials stated while investigating allegedly illicit text messages from Anthony Weiner husband of Clinton aide Huma Abedin, to a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina. In the course of that investigation, they discovered e-mails related to Clinton's private server on a laptop computer belonging to Anthony Weiner. On November 6, Comey notified Congress that the FBI had not changed its conclusion reached in July. The notification was later cited by Clinton as a factor in her loss in the 2016 presidential election.
When Clinton left the State Department, she became a private citizen for the first time in thirty years. She and her daughter joined her husband as members of the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation in 2013. Clinton also led the No Ceilings: The Full Participation Project, a partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to gather and study data on the progress of women and girls around the world since the Beijing conference in 1995. She began work on another volume of memoirs and made appearances on the paid speaking circuit, receiving between $200,000 and $225,000 per engagement. For the fifteen months ending in March 2015, Clinton earned over $11 million from her speeches. For the overall period 2007–14, the Clintons earned almost $141 million, paid some $56 million in federal and state taxes and donated about $15 million to charity.
Clinton resigned from the foundation's board in April 2015, when she began her presidential campaign and the foundation said it would accept new foreign governmental donations from six Western nations only. Clinton authored her third memoir, entitled "What Happened", about the 2016 election, which was released on September 12, 2017, by Simon & Schuster.
In mid-November 2008, Obama discussed with Clinton the possibility of her serving as U.S. Secretary of State in his administration. On November 20, she told Obama she would accept the job and on December 1, the President-elect formally announced that Clinton would be his nominee for Secretary of State. In order for her to serve in the post, her husband former President Bill Clinton agreed to accept several conditions and restrictions regarding his ongoing activities and fundraising efforts for the William J. Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative.
On January 21, 2009, Clinton was confirmed in the full Senate by a vote of 94–2. She took the oath of office of Secretary of State, resigning from the Senate later that day. She became the first former first lady to serve in the United States Cabinet. She spent her first days as Secretary of State calling world leaders and indicating that U.S. foreign policy would change direction from that of the Bush administration.
She participated in the Obama administration's debate regarding the war in Afghanistan and sided with the military's recommendations for a surge. She recommended that 40,000 troops be added, and opposed declaring a public deadline for withdrawal. She eventually supported Obama's compromise plan to send an additional 30,000 troops and tie the surge to a timetable for eventual withdrawal. In March 2009, Clinton presented Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov with a "reset button" symbolizing U.S. attempts to rebuild diplomatic ties with that country. Relations would worsen considerably between the two countries after Vladimir Putin returned as Russian President in 2012.
In 2009, Clinton traveled to Switzerland, Clinton for the signing of an historic Turkish–Armenian accord that established diplomatic relations and opened the border between the two long-hostile nations. In Pakistan, she attempted to repair relations with that country and in 2010, she helped organize international sanctions against Iran, in an effort to curtail that country's nuclear program. This would eventually lead to the multinational Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action being agreed to in 2015.
Clinton was considered to be a team player within the Obama administration. She formed an alliance with Secretary of Defense Gates with whom she shared similar strategic outlooks. She met with the President.In July 2010, she visited Korea, Vietnam, Pakistan and Afghanistan, while preparing for the July 31 wedding of daughter Chelsea.
In response to the 2011 Egyptian protests, Clinton's position changed from first concluding that the government of Hosni Mubarak was "stable", to one of deciding that there needed to be an "orderly transition" to a democratic government. As Arab Spring protests spread throughout the region, Clinton backed some regimes while supporting protesters against others. As the Libyan Civil War took place, Clinton favored military intervention. She testified to Congress that the administration did not need congressional authorization for its military intervention in Libya, despite objections from some members of both parties that the administration was violating the War Powers Resolution. The aftermath of the Libyan Civil War saw the country becoming a failed state.
During April 2011, the president's inner circle of advisors debated over whether to order U.S. special forces to conduct a raid into Pakistan against Osama bin Laden. Clinton was among those who argued in favor, saying the importance of getting bin Laden outweighed the risks to the U.S. relationship with Pakistan. After completion of the mission on May 2, which resulted in bin Laden's death, Clinton played a key role in the administration's decision not to release photographs of the dead al-Qaeda leader.
During internal discussions about Iraq in 2011, Clinton argued unsuccessfully for keeping a residual force of up to 10,000–20,000 U.S. troops there. All troops ended up being withdrawn after negotiations for a revised U.S.–Iraq Status of Forces Agreement failed.
In a speech before the United Nations Human Rights Council in December 2011, Clinton said that "Gay rights are human rights" and that the U.S. would advocate for gay rights and legal protections of gays abroad. She made the first visit to Burma by a U.S. secretary of state since 1955, as she met with Burmese leaders as well as opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and sought to support the 2011 Burmese democratic reforms.
During the Syrian Civil War, Clinton and the Obama administration initially sought to persuade Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to institute reforms, as government violence rose in August 2011. She called for him to resign from the presidency. The administration joined several countries in delivering non-lethal assistance to rebels opposed to the Assad government and humanitarian groups working in Syria. In mid-2012, Clinton formed a plan with CIA Director David Petraeus to strengthen the opposition by arming and training vetted groups of Syrian rebels, but the proposal was rejected by the White House.
In December 2012 Clinton was hospitalized treatment of a blood clot in her right transverse venous sinus. Her doctors had discovered the clot during a follow-up examination for a concussion she had sustained when she fainted and fell nearly three weeks earlier, the result of severe dehydration from a viral intestinal ailment. The clot was treated with anticoagulant medication.
Clinton expanded the State Department's use of social media, including Facebook and Twitter. One of the central themes of her tenure was the empowerment and welfare of women and girls worldwide. She said that she viewed women's rights as critical for U.S. security interests, due to a link between the level of violence against women and gender inequality within a state and the instability and challenge to international security of that state. This became known as the "Hillary Doctrine".
Clinton visited 112 countries during her time as Secretary of State, making her the most widely traveled secretary of state. She was the first secretary of state to visit countries such as Togo and East Timor, and said that she believed that in-person visits were more important than ever in the virtual age. As early as March 2011, she indicated she was not interested in serving a second term as Secretary of State should President Obama be re-elected in 2012 in December 2012, following that re-election, Obama nominated Senator John Kerry to be Clinton's successor. Her last day as Secretary of State was February 1, 2013.
On September 11, 2012, while President Obama was campaigning for re-election, the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, was attacked, resulting in the deaths of the U.S. Ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. The attack called into question the security of the U.S. consulate. Inconsistent explanations were given afterward by administration officials for what had happened. On October 15, Clinton took responsibility for the question of security lapses and said the differing explanations were due to the "fog of war" that follows such events. On December 19, a panel led by Thomas R. Pickering and Michael Mullen issued its report on the matter. The report was critical of State Department officials in Washington for ignoring requests for more guards and safety upgrades and for failing to adapt security procedures to a deteriorating security environment. Four State Department officials at the assistant secretary level and below were removed from their posts as a consequence. Clinton said she accepted the conclusions of the report.
Clinton gave testimony to two congressional foreign affairs committees on January 23, 2013, regarding the Benghazi attack. She defended her actions in response to the incident but accepted formal responsibility. She said that she had had no direct role in specific discussions beforehand regarding consulate security. In November 2014, the House Intelligence Committee issued a report that concluded there had been no wrongdoing in the administration's response to the attack.
The House Select Committee on Benghazi was created in May 2014 and conducted a two-year investigation related to the 2012 attack. On October 22, 2015, while in the midst of a second campaign for President, Clinton testified at an all-day and nighttime session before the committee. The hearing included many heated exchanges between committee members and Clinton. Clinton was generally perceived as emerging unscathed from the hearing. The committee issued competing final reports in June 2016 that broke along partisan lines.
A controversy arose in March 2015, when it was revealed by the State Department's inspector general that Clinton had exclusively used personal email accounts on a non-government, privately maintained server, instead of using email accounts maintained on federal government servers. The controversy occurred as Clinton's 2016 presidential election campaign and the hearings held by the House Select Committee on Benghazi were taking place. In a joint statement released on July 15, 2015, the inspector general of the State Department and the inspector general of the intelligence community said that their review of the emails found information that was classified when sent, remained so at the time of their inspection and "never should have been transmitted via an unclassified personal system." They also stated unequivocally that this classified information should never have been stored outside of secure government computer systems. Clinton maintained that she kept no classified information on the private server that she set up in her house. The nondisclosure agreement signed by Clinton as part of gaining her security clearance, stated that sensitive information could be considered as classified even if not marked as such.
An FBI probe was initiated regarding how classified information was handled on the Clinton server. The New York Times reported in February 2016 that nearly 2,100 emails stored on Clinton's server were retroactively marked classified by the State Department. In May 2016, the inspector general of the State Department criticized Clinton's use of a private email server while secretary of state, stating that she had not requested permission for this and would not have received it if she had asked. Clinton maintained that she did not send or receive any emails from her personal server that were confidential at the time they were sent. In a Democratic debate with Bernie Sanders on February 4, 2016, Clinton said, "I never sent or received any classified material – they are retroactively classifying it." On July 2, 2016, Clinton stated: "Let me repeat what I have repeated for many months now, I never received nor sent any material that was marked classified."
On July 5, 2016, the FBI concluded its investigation. The probe found that Clinton used her personal email extensively while outside the United States, both sending and receiving work-related emails in the territory of adversaries. The FBI assessed that it "is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton's personal email account." Comey stated that although Clinton or her colleagues were "extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information", the FBI would recommend to the Justice Department that "no charges are appropriate in this case." On July 6, 2016, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch confirmed that the probe into Clinton's use of private email servers while secretary of state will be closed without criminal charges.
While the 2016 Presidential election campaign was in the homestretch, on October 28, 2016, Comey notified Congress that the FBI started looking into newly discovered emails discovered while law enforcement officials stated while investigating allegedly illicit text messages from Anthony Weiner husband of Clinton aide Huma Abedin, to a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina. In the course of that investigation, they discovered e-mails related to Clinton's private server on a laptop computer belonging to Anthony Weiner. On November 6, Comey notified Congress that the FBI had not changed its conclusion reached in July. The notification was later cited by Clinton as a factor in her loss in the 2016 presidential election.
When Clinton left the State Department, she became a private citizen for the first time in thirty years. She and her daughter joined her husband as members of the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation in 2013. Clinton also led the No Ceilings: The Full Participation Project, a partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to gather and study data on the progress of women and girls around the world since the Beijing conference in 1995. She began work on another volume of memoirs and made appearances on the paid speaking circuit, receiving between $200,000 and $225,000 per engagement. For the fifteen months ending in March 2015, Clinton earned over $11 million from her speeches. For the overall period 2007–14, the Clintons earned almost $141 million, paid some $56 million in federal and state taxes and donated about $15 million to charity.
Clinton resigned from the foundation's board in April 2015, when she began her presidential campaign and the foundation said it would accept new foreign governmental donations from six Western nations only. Clinton authored her third memoir, entitled "What Happened", about the 2016 election, which was released on September 12, 2017, by Simon & Schuster.