Hillary Clinton did not attend Saturday's 50th anniversary of the "Bloody Sunday" civil right clash in Selma, instead attending a Clinton Global Initiative University conference in Miami.
The secretary of state brought hundreds of students together to brainstorm ways of improving their communities. She expressed support for Selma and referenced the Affordable Care Act, but stayed mum on the email scandal that may derail her 2016 presidential run.
Last Monday's revelation that Clinton uses only a personal account for government affairs rather than the "stage.gov" address officials are encouraged to use drew ire from lawmakers. Department officials are now reviewing tens of thousands of emails, not because of any wrongdoing on Clinton's part but to ensure sensitive info wasn't released.
I want the public to see my email. I asked State to release them. They said they will review them for release as soon as possible.
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) March 5, 2015
Republican National Committee Chief Counsel John Phillippe wrote in a letter that the investigation should focus on whether Clinton violated department policies. RNC spokesman Michael Short said Clinton has "spent a week hiding from the press and voters who have serious questions about her commitment to transparency."
More to the point, Sen. Lindsay Graham (R- SC) bluntly assumed Clinton was hiding something. "Did she communicate on behalf Clinton Foundation as secretary of state? Did she call the terrorist attack in Benghazi a terrorist attack in real time?"
Graham added, "I want to know. And the one thing I'll never agree to is let the State Department tell us what emails we should receive or let her and her team tell us some independent group should do that." In the same interview, Graham admitted that he's never sent one email, but did appear to know what email is.
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell came to Clinton's aid Sunday morning, admitting he used a private email account for public business.
"What I did when I entered the State Department, I found an antiquated system that had to be modernized and modernized quickly," Powell said on ABC's This Week. "But in order to change the culture, to change the brain ware, as I call it, I started using it in order to get everybody to use it, so we could be a 21st century institution and not a 19th century."
"But I retained none of those e-mails and we are working with the State Department to see if there's anything else they want to discuss with me about those e-mails," Powell said.
In November 2011, the Obama administration ordered that all electronic records be managed digitally by 2019, including paperwork dating back to the Cold War. This creates a problem for archivists who are already backlogged as investigators looking through Clinton's thousands of emails will soon find out themselves.
The 55,000 emails Clinton aide turned over are a fraction of the two billion emails the State Department's Office of the Historian estimates the department produces every year.
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