Hillary Clinton’s political team was convinced President Obama would pick her to be his vice president for his second term, according to the latest batch of secret emails from Mrs. Clinton’s time at the State Department.
Mark Penn, the Clintons’ longtime pollster and adviser, in an evaluation of Mr. Obama’s State of the Union speech in 2010, said it was “overall pretty good” but said the president “seemed angry.”
He also said people were coming to realize “the Obama flaws like inexperience I was trying to point out were on the mark and were appropriate.”
And Mr. Penn predicted Mrs. Clinton would end up as running mate if Mr. Obama went for a second term.
“Only way for him to win second term is to ask you to be VP- he will realize that after midterms,” the adviser said in a Jan. 28 message to the then-secretary of state.
He went on to call a Clinton speech a few days earlier on internet freedom “truly, historic, path breaking.”
No response from Mrs. Clinton is recorded. She did, however, ask one of her assistants to print out a copy of Mr. Penn’s for her.
The 75 new messages released Friday are some of the thousands recovered by the FBI that Mrs. Clinton should have, but didn’t, return to the department after she left office.
One is an email containing dictation from former President Clinton to another aide to Mrs. Clinton. In it, Mr. Clinton offered advice for how to get poor countries to sign up for President Obama’s global warming plans.
“To keep poor counties from siding with China, India etal on issues like transparency, you might offer them this deal: whatever commitments they make are contingent on the availability of an option that is good for their economics,” the email read.
Most of the other messages are brief communications with top aide Huma Abedin about scheduling.
But it’s the Penn email that’s likely to get the most scrutiny.
Mrs. Clinton said she belatedly turned over all work-related messages, but the FBI found thousands that it said were work-related that she didn’t turn over.
The Penn message could signal that Mrs. Clinton’s team discounted potentially embarrassing political talk as official government business, but the FBI and State Department have concluded otherwise in releasing that email.
Hundreds more emails are due to be released before the Nov. 8 election under orders from several federal judges.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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