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Republicans Go After Hillary Clinton on Private E-Mails; Concern Hillary Clinton's Private E-Mail Could Have Been Hacked; Some Democrats Salivate at Demise of Hillary Clinton Presidential Run; What Would Satisfy Hillary Clinton's Republican Critics; Hillary Clinton Begins Media Briefing on Private E-Mails

Aired March 10, 2015 - 14:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


GLORIA BORGER, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: She called them secret military tribunals. Of course, the secret White House e-mail accounts. As she now stands before this media scrum of at least 25 cameras, she's talking about her own secret e-mail accounts. Now, granted, she was secretary of state. She was not president of the United States. But there's a little bit of irony here that she's got to defend her own secret e-mail when she attacked the Bush administration's secret e- mails.

WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: Everyone, stand by. I want to reset what's going on.

We're at the bottom of the hour. We're standing by to hear from the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She's at the United Nations. She was delivering a speech on women's issues, girls' issues. Now she's about to walk out to this stakeout location, this microphone that's been set up. There are a lot of TV cameras there, a lot of reporters. They're getting ready to hear what she has to say about this e-mail uproar that's developed, why she had a private e- mail account rather than using a government account during her four years as secretary of state. This is the first time she's going to be answering reporters' questions on this sensitive issue as well.

A lot of Republican candidates have been going after Hillary Clinton as a result of this uproar.

Let's go to Dana Bash, our chief congressional correspondent.

Dana, a lot of Democrats make the point that what Hillary Clinton did is no different than what Jeb Bush, one of the front runners for the Republican presidential nomination, did. He had a private account while he served as governor of Florida.

DANA BASH, CNN CHIEF CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: A private account and his own server. The difference is -- and you hear this from not only Jeb Bush's people, people close to him, but also so many other politicians that you and I know who also have private e-mail accounts. We know because we communicate with them that way. The difference is that they have private e-mail accounts, but they also have their public official e-mail accounts. Hillary Clinton apparently did not have that official e-mail account. More importantly, what the Bush people argue, for example, is that because they had that server, they have held on to all of these e-mails. So they are able to go back and get them for records, for transparency, and so forth.

One thing that Hilary Rosen brought up earlier, which she's right about, is despite the fact that the Bush campaign in waiting has released 275,000 e-mails all on the website, it was done through an attorney that they hired and a couple other people to sift through because he did use, for the most part, his personal account.

You know, they had everything from communication with constituents, with staffers, to his wife. They wanted to separate the personal from the private, much like I think what we're going to see Hillary Clinton do. The difference is, they kind of did it on their own, without a third party, which is what you're seeing a lot of Republicans, Lindsay Graham, for example, just today in the halls of the capitol told our Athena Jones, he wants there to be an independent review of all of Hillary Clinton's e-mails. So there is a very fine line between all of what Republicans have done and what Hillary Clinton has done, but there are some very important differences.

BLITZER: All right.

We're told the secretary of state will be coming to that microphone, the former secretary of state, very soon. We'll, of course, be standing by. We'll have live coverage and hear what she has to say about this e-mail uproar that has developed.

A lot of controversy over the security of that private server that she had. Could it have been hacked? We're going to speak to a cyber expert when we come back as we await the former secretary of state.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BLITZER: Welcome back to our viewers in the United States and around the world. I'm Wolf Blitzer, reporting from Washington.

You're looking at live pictures from the United Nations. Momentarily, we're told, the former secretary of state Hillary Clinton will go to that microphone and for the first time answer questions about her private e-mail account she used during her four years as secretary of state. This has become a huge political issue here in the United States, especially as she gets ready to announce, as we all expect she will, that she wants to be the next president of the United States.

Brianna Keilar is at the United Nations. She's been watching what's going on.

Set the scene for our viewers, Brianna, right now. She's going to come out, make a statement, then answer questions, right?

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL REPORTER (voice-over): That is our expectation, Wolf. I'm right now in the press pen in front of the podium where Secretary Clinton will speak. There's about at least 25 cameras here. There are definitely more than 100 journalists who are here awaiting Secretary Clinton. She just gave a speech at a U.N. women's conference on women's empowerment. She's been waiting for some time after giving those remarks for other activities in the event to wrap up. But we're expecting her here any moment. The question is really how many questions is she going to take? Is

she just going to take a few? The ones that she gets, the way she answers them, does it really do enough to stem some of these questions about why she relies fully on personal e-mail to conduct government business while she was secretary of state and why it took so long for her and for her team to turn over those e-mails to the State Department recordkeeping system.

BLITZER: All right. Brianna, stand by.

As soon as she starts walking to that microphone, we'll have live coverage.

There's been a lot of concern that during those four years while she was using that private server, that private e-mail account, potentially it could have been hacked by nefarious sources out there.

I want to bring in an expert on cyber warfare, Mark Rasch, a former prosecutor for cyber crimes for the Justice Department in Washington.

What would have been more dangerous as far as the security of her e- mails? We know she did use those private e-mail servers for her official government business as well. Was that more vulnerable than the State Department official e-mail accounts?

MARK RASCH, CYBER WARFARE EXPERT & FORMER PROSECUTOR, U.S. JUSTICE DEPARTMENT: Well, the problem with using a private e-mail account but what is called a home brew network is it's got to be constantly monitored. It's going to be under attack from other governments, from hacker groups and all kinds of different groups. You have to be constantly monitoring it, constantly updating it. You can make it secure, but you have to work really hard at doing that.

BLITZER: And do we have any information that they were working full time, around the clock? We know her husband, the former president, he was also apparently using that e-mail server.

RASCH: The answers right now, we just don't know. Until we have more information, you have to start with the assumption that the e-mail was not secure unless they can prove it was secured.

JAKE TAPPER, CNN CHIEF WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT: In 2012, when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, the inspector general of the State Department issued a blistering report about a U.S. Ambassador in Kenya, a retied Air Force general, and one of the many things he was hammered for was for using a private e-mail address instead of using the state.gov, the official government e-mail address. Is there a reason why that would have been more vulnerable in Kenya than Secretary Clinton using her private e-mail in New York or wherever the server was based?

RASCH: Well, geography is part of it. Obviously when you're traveling over an unsecure network, whether in Kenya or the United States, it's vulnerable to attack. When you're outside the United States, of course, you may be traveling through a network that is owned by a foreign government. In that case, you've got to assume that everything is being intercepted.

TAPPER: So even if you're using g-mail in Kenya, the Kenyan government theoretically would have access to it in a way that would not be the case in the United States?

RASCH: That's right. So what you want to do is have the communications encrypted all the way through so even if they can intercept it, they can't necessarily read it.

BLITZER: There's been some debate, Mark, as to whether or not the 55,000 pages she handed over to the State Department, was that everything, mostly everything, what she wanted to hand over, and there's been another debate over whether or not she deleted certain e- mails that could have been embarrassing, put them in the trash and emptied that trash from that server. Could she -- if somebody's going through and has the hard drives, has the server, can they retrieve the stuff put in the delete file?

RASCH: There's an old rule that says delete doesn't and restore won't. When you delete a file, the odds are it's probably still there unless you do it properly. You can wipe files and actually make sure they're not retrieved over a long period of time. That's one of the problems, is this idea of confidence. When she says these are all the e-mails, having confidence that they actually are.

(CROSSTALK)

BLITZER: Hold on a second.

I just want to tell our viewers Hillary Clinton is now leaving that event. You see Ban Ki-moon, the U.N. secretary-general, escorting her. She's going to be supposedly walking over to that microphone momentarily to make a statement and answer reporters' questions on this e-mail controversy. She's been under enormous pressure to do so.

Jake, I know you have a question.

TAPPER: Mark, just a quick question. When we hear the secretary of state Hillary Clinton has handed over 55,000 pages of e-mails to the U.S. State Department, that's a little bit misleading, right, because it's not 55,000 pages. A lot of them are just the same e-mail over and over again, very long e-mail chains. It's as if you go back and forth with somebody for 20 e-mails, that's going to repeat itself 20 times.

RASCH: Yeah, one of the things that strikes me as funny is you don't typically refer to e-mails as the number of pages they are when printed out. You talk about terabytes or gigabytes. You don't talk about how many pages of e-mails they are. Also, we don't know if that includes pages of attachments. I could have one e-mail with a 50,000- page attachment. That would be one e-mail.

BLITZER: We know there are 55,000 pages because they actually printed out all those pages and put them in boxes and shipped them over to the State Department, presumably, instead of just giving them the server or the hard drive or whatever so they actually have a count of those 55,000 pages. What do you think of the way they did that?

RASCH: Normally, when you're doing -- even in litigation, when you're doing e-discovery, you're going to turn it over in native format. You turn over the drive. You turn over the documents in that kind of format so they can be indexed, searched, retrieved. When you don't want somebody to know what it is, then you turn it over either as a PDF document that can't be searched or in paper. It makes it more difficult.

BLITZER: Mark, hold on for a moment.

Mark Rasch is a former prosecutor at the U.S. Justice Department.

Once again, we're standing by to hear from Hillary Clinton momentarily. She just wrapped up a meeting at the United Nations. A lot of reporters are standing by to ask her questions.

Jake?

TAPPER: I want to go to our senior Washington correspondent, Jeff Zeleny, who just joined us this week. We're all very excited about that.

Jeff, you've been talking to Clinton advisers. What do you expect she's going to say, and is she going to take innumerable questions from the reporters that have gathered there, or do you think just one or two?

JEFF ZELENY, CNN SENIOR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Jake, I think she'd be hard pressed to take as many questions from reporters as she can. I'm told it's going to be fairly brief. She's going to lay out a couple things and try and move beyond this. She's certainly not going to take every last question. At least that's not the expectation. Her advisers say she simply wants to address a few of them. We'll see what she does. Some Democrats are looking at this to see is she going to be more transparent, is she going to run a different kind of campaign. I'd be very surprised if she stood here very long. Certainly, a hungry crowd.

TAPPER: And what are the different conflicting advice she's getting from different advisers? I imagine that it runs the gamut from open up all the e-mail, let everybody see everything, to shut it down, you don't have to talk to any of these jerks, just talk to the American people, forget the reporters.

ZELENY: I'm struck by how generational this is, Jake. Some of the advice she's getting from older advisers who were with her through all of that time in the White House and beyond, they say she should hunker down and ignore it. Some of her younger advisers, who may be more up to speed with social media and how things move now, are saying she should address it. My guess is she'll sort of strike a balance somewhere in the middle here. They definitely want to move beyond this before her expected campaign, which is likely just weeks away.

BLITZER: When you say weeks away, Jeff, a lot of expectation she could make some sort of formal announcement as early as next month. ZELENY: I mean, that's what everyone is anticipating. People are

beginning to sort of leave current jobs with the anticipation of going to a new job. Sometime in the beginning of April is the expectation. That always could change. She controls the decision, and it's hers alone to make. But that's what a lot of her advisers in waiting believe she will do. There's no sense that this has changed the timeline at all, but it certainly raises the point that she needs the campaign apparatus to start responding to all of these things that are going to come her way.

BLITZER: And she needs to make an excellent statement right now explaining what happened and answer some questions from the reporters. A lot of them are standing by to ask questions. It'll be interesting to see how that unfolds. Momentarily, we expect her to show up at that microphone at the United Nations.

Gloria Borger, I know there are a whole bunch of other Democrats out there, some of whom never loved her to begin with, who are sort of salivating right now, thinking there could be an opening as far as the Democratic competition for the nomination is concerned.

BORGER: Let me just say that the most recent NBC/"Wall Street Journal" poll shows that within the Democratic party, she kind of has around an 85 percent, 86 percent approval rating. While there are other Democratic candidates waiting in the wings, you know, the Democrats that I talk to say, look, Hillary Clinton is very likely to be our nominee, and we need to figure out a way to defend her on this. I think that was really the issue.

When you heard Senator Feinstein come out over the weekend, Senator Durbin, both allies of Hillary Clinton. I think they were saying, look, we need to get guidance from you, and only you can do this. You are the only person who can put this to rest personally. You can't have surrogates out there explaining why you used personal e-mail for State Department business or whether you used it for classified business and every single question we've asked all week long. Only you can put that to rest. If she's to be a Democratic presidential candidate, she has to kind of answer these questions directly, sort of detox this whole issue, if you will, Wolf, and try to move on as Jeff was saying.

BLITZER: And, Hilary Rosen, I know you're a Democratic strategist. You're our CNN political commentator. She's got a huge challenge ahead of her over the next several minutes.

HILARY ROSEN, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Well, I think that Jeff actually raised the key point, which is this was supposed to be a fantastic couple of weeks for Hillary Clinton leading up to her announcement. After all, she started it off with a speech at a tech conference with a new young crowd. Then she was going to Emily's List, where her base of women supporters were. She was launching no ceilings, which is a long-time passion of her and her life's work for women and children around the world. These were the weeks that were supposed to create the platform of her story before she announced for president. You know, it has just gotten lost in this e-mail story. I think her challenge today is to find a way to encourage people to put it aside long enough to have a clean enough slate to really launch with the purpose and values and leadership that a lot of Democrats see in her and are excited about, you know, with a campaign.

TAPPER: Hilary, one of the things I've been struck by these last eight days as this controversy has bubbled up from the front page of "The New York Times" to all of us talking about it right now, waiting for this press conference with breathless anticipation, is the fact that she doesn't have a campaign apparatus up. There is no war room.

There is no fleet of surrogates to be shuttled out to cable news and Sunday shows to defend her and talk about her. She has been relatively undefended. There aren't people making the arguments about when governor Mitt Romney left the governor's office, his staff wiped the servers clean on their way out the door. There aren't people making those arguments. When is she going to get that apparatus up and running?

ROSEN: Well, I think there are people making those arguments, such as the Jeb Bush pushback and other things. The problem is that we don't have the facts of Secretary Clinton's situation. So I think you have seen a high politicization of the story because Democratic surrogates and friends of Hillary Clinton have kind of been out there sort of anticipating the best-case intentions but not really knowing the facts. I'll put myself in there as well.

I've talked to a lot of friends over the last few days who have worked in the State Department when Hillary Clinton was there. They didn't see this as a big issue. All secretaries of state have done this. But those facts of what was going on for her still have yet to be answered. So I think this has heightened the intensity around this issue because we are only left with political responses as opposed to facts.

TAPPER: Hilary, why have they handled this so poorly? Why did they not realize this was a political crisis and get facts to people like you who want to support her and get facts to people on editorial boards and other places? Obviously there's a reservoir of progressives in the media who would like to defend her. Why have they handled this so astoundingly poorly?

ROSEN: It's a great question, Jake.

(LAUGHTER)

(CROSSTALK)

TAPPER: That's all you need to say. Drop the mic. "That's a great question, Jake." Move on from there.

Appreciate it.

BLITZER: Let me bring Margaret Hoover back in, our CNN political commentator.

Margaret, what would satisfy the leadership, the Republican leadership, the Republican presidential candidates, the chairman of the Benghazi Select Committee? What would she have to do to satisfy them that she's being transparent?

MARGARET HOOVER, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Look, I think the number one thing she has to do is really take every single question. It's unfortunate Jeff thinks she probably won't do that. To really be open and transparent. Open societies thrive on transparency. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

I think the final ultimate thing is just to hand over the hard drive. I think there will always be looming and lingering questions. So she has 55,000 e-mails, great, but from what time period? If you own and control the hard drive, you can delete e-mails from that. If you can see the hard drive, you can tell whether e-mails have been deleted. There probably are always going to be Clinton conspiracy theorists and paranoid fringe thinkers.

For the moderate majority of Americans, if she can turn over the hard drive and say, I'm being as transparent as I possibly can, here, look, these are all the e-mails. She knows she lives her life out in the open. That's the downside and tragedy of public service in this country. And that's probably why she was partly inspired to try to control them on the front end. This has been part of her Achilles heel all along. She's been predisposed to secrecy and defensiveness with the press. That's what ends up getting her in this difficult conundrum she finds herself in. To turn over the hard drive, I think, is the final key point.

BLITZER: Here's the question. Who does she turn it over to? The State Department? The Archives? Who gets that hard drive?

HOOVER: I think it's fair to say -- look, the authority for the guidelines and the preservation comes from the National Archives and records administration. They're the ones who say the materials have to be preserved in the appropriate agency. The White House is the one that says, you know, the guidance should be that it should be on a government account. So regardless of the fact there's conflicting guidelines from different federal agencies, the idea is that it's in the executive branch. Somehow the National Archives and record administration is charged with preserving the documents of the executive branch. So I think it makes sense that somewhere in there, not an independent third party -- I think our executive branch is perfectly capable. That's what they do.

BLITZER: You think, David Gergen, that would satisfy her Republican critics out there, members of the Benghazi Select Committee, for example?

DAVID GERGEN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: I think, Wolf, that Hillary Clinton has been badly damaged by these eight days or so of silence. While the polls don't yet show it, she's been taking a nose dive in the press among a lot of people who actually respect her for all sorts of other reasons. But this reminds them of some of the worst aspects of the '90s. I think today she has to reverse that by taking concrete steps that will ensure that the server is -- does go into the protection of the U.S. government, that there is some process of reviewing not only the 55,000 that she's turned over but whatever number are still out there. We don't know. Nobody has been willing to talk to us about it. I think concrete steps are going to go a lot farther than rhetoric or dancing.

I must say, Wolf, I think she misses having an advance team for this event. There's a lot of chatter among the press. Why are you putting this at the U.N.? They could have put this in a New York hotel. They have a backdrop here that looks odd for television. We've been here now. She was supposed to come out at 2:20. It's 2:56 or so. She doesn't have the apparatus to deal with something like this around her. She needs it in order to put a stop to this and get herself back on track on the more serious issues facing the country.

BLITZER: Let me ask Peter Hamby quickly to react to all of that.

You think it's likely based on everything you're hearing she would take those kinds of steps, hand over the server, hand over the hard driving, and give it to a third party?

PETER HAMBY, CNN NATIONAL POLITICAL REPORTER: I don't think that will happen. Margaret was talking about this a little bit. Coursing through the minds of voters that I've talked to in my travels is a real hunger for authenticity, for transparency from their candidates. I think Secretary Clinton would be served by being as transparent as possible. I don't know if that goes to turning over an entire hard drive. But look, as much as there is a demand for that on the part of the voters and frankly the press, Secretary Clinton came of age, you know, and developed a bunker mentality toward the media.

We can't demand her to be transparent and nimble and authentic, you know, when she's surrounded by banks of 25 television cameras and 100 reporters. It's a real conundrum for her. Honestly a lot of the reporters covering the campaign now are -- were in high school when Hillary Clinton ran for president the last time and were in diapers when Bill Clinton was elected president. They're used to going up to Senators and Martin O'Malley and Chris Christie and sticking a microphone in their face and getting a question. And that's just something that Hillary Clinton might not be able to do.

BLITZER: Looks like she's getting closer. Here she comes, former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. She's coming to the microphone.

HILLARY CLINTON, FORMER SECRETARY OF STATE: All set?

Good afternoon. I want to thank the United Nations for hosting today's events and putting the challenge of gender equality front and center on the international agenda. I'm especially pleased to have so many leaders here from the private sector standing shoulder to shoulder with advocates who have worked tirelessly for equality for decades. 20 years ago, this was a lonelier struggle. Today, we mark the progress that has been made in the two decades since the international community gathered in Beijing and declared with one voice that human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human rights. And because of advances in health, education, and legal protections, we can say that there has never been a better time in history to be born female.

Yet, as the comprehensive new report published by the Clinton Foundation and the Gates Foundation this week makes clear, despite all this progress, when it comes to the full participation of women and girls, we're just not there yet. As I said today, this remains the great unfinished business of the 21st century. And my passion for this fight burns as brightly today as it did 20 years ago.

I want to comment on a matter in the news today regarding Iran. The president and his team are in the midst of intense negotiations. Their goal is a diplomatic solution that would close off Iran's pathways to a nuclear bomb.