5 Highlights From Latest Clinton Emails

'What does fubar mean?' she asked aide
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Oct 1, 2015 5:47 AM CDT
5 Highlights From Latest Clinton Emails
An email Clinton received early in the morning on Aug. 3, 2011.    (AP Photo/Jon Elswick)

The State Department posted 6,300 pages of Hillary Clinton's emails online Wednesday in the latest batch of court-ordered releases, and they don't appear to contain any earth-shattering revelations, though the contents range from alarming to amusing. Some highlights from the thousands of emails, which date from 2010 and 2011:

  • Russian hackers tried to infect her system. She received five infected emails disguised as speeding tickets on Aug. 3, 2011, and the hackers would have been able to take over her computer if she had opened the attachments, the AP reports. "All these emails show is that, like millions of other Americans, she received spam," a Clinton spokesman says, though the emails raise yet more questions about her use of a private email system.

  • She was fed up with White House phone operators. "I'm fighting w the WH operator who doesn't believe I am who I say," she tells aide Huma Abedin in a Feb. 10, 2010, email. "I told him I had no idea what my direct office # was since I didn't call myself and I just hung up and am calling thru Ops like a proper and properly dependent Secretary of State."
  • She wasn't happy about a symbolic gay-rights move on passport application forms. "Who made the decision that State will not use the terms 'mother and father' and instead substitute 'parent one and two'?" she wrote in a Jan. 8, 2011, email to aides. "I am not defending that decision which I disagree w and knew nothing about in front of this Congress," she wrote, warning that "we will be facing a huge Fox generated media storm led by Palin et al." The passport form was changed, reports the Los Angeles Times, which calls the email "particularly revealing."
  • She wanted to let people know about use of private email at the State Department. In a June 2011, exchange, policy chief Anne-Marie Slaughter said the public should know that department technology is "so antiquated that NO ONE uses a State-issued laptop and even high officials routinely end up using their home email accounts to be able to get their work done quickly and effectively." Clinton said an op-ed on the subject would be a "good idea," but Cheryl Mills, her chief of staff, warned that it could encourage hackers.
  • She was confused by a slang term dating from World War II. "What does fubar mean?" she asked Mills in a Dec. 4, 2010, email. The term is "unprintable on civil email." The term came up in a heavily redacted exchange about WikiLeaks, the LA Times notes.
Politico reports that the latest release is certain to keep the Clinton email controversy going, since it doubles the number of emails now considered classified to more than 400. Three from the latest released were deemed secret, the second-highest level, including two that contained summaries of Iran nuclear talks, report the New York Times. (Gefilte fish featured in the last release of Clinton emails.)

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