POLITICS

Caught Off Guard by Disclosure of Emails, Democrats Rally to Clinton’s Defense

By  and MAGGIE HABERMAN
Hillary Rodham Clinton at an event for Emily's List in Washington on Tuesday.Jabin Botsford/The New York Times 
WASHINGTON — The revelation that Hillary Rodham Clinton conducted government business entirely on a private email account as secretary of state has blindsided the Democratic establishment.
It was a bracing reminder of the risks entailed in the party’s all-but-all-in bet on Mrs. Clinton so early in the presidential nominating process. And it left Democrats contemplating the prospect of yet another long cycle of dramatic Clinton flare-ups — the type that President Obama obliquely campaigned against in 2008.
The report on Mrs. Clinton’s emails, published by The New York Times late Monday night, left many Democrats privately expressing wonder as late as Wednesday morning that Mrs. Clinton and her aides had not anticipated the political problems this could create.
In a testament to Mrs. Clinton’s political strength — and underscoring the scarcity of other potential White House hopefuls — senior Democrats spoke in her defense without fully explaining why she had avoided using a government account during her four-year tenure in the Obama administration.
“I don’t think there’s any ill intent in this,” Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, said Tuesday. “I just don’t know how the State Department functions with regard to this.”
An array of leading Democrats echoed Ms. Feinstein’s view, defending Mrs. Clinton broadly while sidestepping questions about transparency and ethics. Some even went to great lengths to dismiss the report.
“People have different ways of communicating,” said Senator Benjamin L. Cardin, Democrat of Maryland. “I have a granddaughter who does nothing but text. You’ll never find a letter written with her. So everybody’s different.”
The chorus of confident, if less than fully briefed, supporters was perhaps the most vivid illustration yet that, unlike when Mrs. Clinton ran in 2008, Democratic officials are overwhelmingly supportive of her, invested in her success and unwilling to offer even mild public criticism.
Indeed, even from the safety of anonymity, Democrats quickly shifted from the basic facts about Mrs. Clinton’s email practices to grousing over the initial lack of an aggressive response by her advisers and her allies.
That seemingly flat-footed reaction, several Democratic strategists said, illustrated how Mrs. Clinton’s decision to delay a formal start to her campaign had left her vulnerable. She has waited until recent weeks to begin hiring staff and creating the sort of sprawling infrastructure a presidential bid demands. She also only recently hired researchers to start reviewing her paper trail from the State Department, the Clinton Foundation and the past two years as a private citizen, to identify potential trouble spots that might need to be addressed later in the campaign.
The allied groups that are devoted to defending her, meanwhile, are mostly constrained to following her lead. Mrs. Clinton’s aides did not alert officials with the Democratic National Committee or outside liberal groups such as American Bridge that the Times article was coming, according to Democrats briefed on the matter, leaving her would-be defenders scrambling and hastily searching for similar transgressions by Republicans that could at least muddy the issue.
Mrs. Clinton’s aides provided no new information on Wednesday to explain her use of only a personal email account, even as it was revealed that the email server she used had been registered at her home address in Chappaqua, N.Y., and established by a longtime political aide.
The episode also crystallized the difficulty Democrats are experiencing at a time when Mr. Obama is still the head of the party, but Mrs. Clinton, an undeclared candidate with no campaign apparatus, is the one being scrutinized by the news media and attacked by Republicans.
“Our nominee is not going to be named Barack Obama, and we better get prepared for that and do it fast,” said Bill Carrick, a veteran Democratic strategist. Part of the problem, Mr. Carrick noted, is that Mr. Obama created a parallel political infrastructure outside the Democratic National Committee.
“That’s fine when you have a president in the White House to respond to things on daily basis,” he said. “But that’s not going to work in terms of the campaign coming up. And it has started — there’s no way of getting around that. The Republicans are out there trash-talking her.”
Edward G. Rendell, a former Pennsylvania governor and the chairman of the Democratic National Committee during the 2000 election, said Mrs. Clinton needed a more robust political organization to defend her.
“I assume when there’s a campaign, there will be a better effort,” he said. “I assume this will get rectified.”
The White House has not condemned Mrs. Clinton, nor has it come to her defense. The White House press secretary, Josh Earnest, told reporters on Tuesday that the administration had given clear guidance to agency officials about using government email accounts and preserving email correspondence if they did not.
Some Democrats expressed confidence that the email issue would eventually melt away like the season’s snow. It is “a chattering-class issue that means nothing for her long-term prospects to win the election,” said Steve Elmendorf, a longtime Washington strategist and lobbyist.
Still, several Democratic operatives, including some former aides to Mr. Obama, privately expressed amazement about what they called an unforced error — one that played into Republican depictions of the Clintons as secretive.
They also noted that the report on Mrs. Clinton’s emails surfaced because of a congressional investigation of an issue that has long dogged Mrs. Clinton: the deaths of four Americans, including the United States ambassador to Libya, in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012. New interest in Mrs. Clinton’s email practices, Democrats warned, could prompt congressional Republicans to expand their inquiries into Mrs. Clinton’s entire tenure as the nation’s chief diplomat.
Representative Trey Gowdy, Republican of South Carolina and chairman of a special panel investigating the response to the Benghazi attack, indicated at a news conference on Tuesday that he might call Mrs. Clinton to testify. And on Wednesday, the committee issued subpoenas to the State Department for Mrs. Clinton’s emails, looking for material related to their investigation.