Hillary Clinton campaign chairman: "We are going to have to dump all those emails"
The day the original story about Hillary Clinton’s private email server broke, Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta wrote to another top Clinton aide, Cheryl Mills, that the emails would have to be dealt with, and “better to do so sooner than later.”
In the exchange, just before 11 p.m. on March 2, 2015, Podesta wrote to Mills, who served as Clinton’s chief of staff at the State Department. The New York Times published its story about the existence of Clinton’s private email account just hours beforehand.
“We are going to have to dump all those emails so better to do so sooner than later,” Podesta wrote.
A Clinton campaign aide clarified that by “dump,” Podesta meant to release to the public—like in a document dump—and not deleting or getting rid of them.
This email exchange was part of the latest batch of emails released by WikiLeaks—the 25th such exchange since Oct. 7. The total number of emails now available from Podesta’s account totals 41,969.
Clinton turned over roughly 55,000 pages of emails to the State Department in December 2014—before the story broke about her private server. Many of those pages have subsequently been reviewed and released to the public by the State Department. However, Clinton deleted an additional 33,000 emails because they were not work-related, she and her team have said.
The issue is especially salient after the news last week that the FBI is investigating new material related to Clinton’s email practices.
The WikiLeaks dumps have shed light on the Clinton team’s response to the ongoing situation with her private email practices, an issue that has plagued her campaign since its inception. For example, later in March 2015, Mills wrote to Podesta and other aides that they needed to “clean this up” when President Obama said he was unaware of Clinton’s private email server until the news broke publicly.
“We need to clean this up,” she wrote. “He has emails from her - they do not say state.gov.”
This article has been updated to clarify the characterization of the Podesta email.