Just last week, Common Sense thought that he had covered the ultimate stupidity in the handling of the Clinton email scandal. It is just not reasonable to suppose that there is an email out there which expressly says “pay Bill $10 million and I will alter the policy of the US in the way that you request”. Even if we suppose that they Clintons are that corrupt, they are not that stupid, and would never put something that explicit into writing. Surely it couldn’t get any worse than Hillary Clinton turning up to a press conference to announce that she had not broken the law dressed like an extra from Orange is the New Black?
It just got worse.
In an interview designed to move the story on and quiet things down for the weekend, Hillary Clinton managed to say some bizarre and ridiculous things, while avoiding saying the one thing that might actually go some way to addressing people’s concerns. People are worried that the Clintons think the rules don’t apply to them. She should say that she is sorry.
But, no, she is thinking like a lawyer. But she is not, in this context, a lawyer, and this case is very unlikely to go to court, and certainly not while Barack Obama is president. His Justice Department is not going to bring a case against his former Secretary of State for actions she took in office. Most especially as the White House itself was engaged in email correspondence with the Secretary, and must therefore have known what her email address was.
But in every business crisis in which I have advised clients in many of those which I have studied – there are 140 case studies in my book – the lawyers are the enemies of the people who advise on communications. A lawyer’s instinct is to obfuscate and confuse rather than clarify. And the lawyer will always advise against an apology in case it is seen as admission of guilt. The result is known as the “non-apology apology”.
She used the phrase “I’m sorry,” but only in the context of being sorry that the story is so confusing. Or to put it another way, she is sorry you are too stupid to understand how innocent she is.
Does she regret her decision to use a private email server? Yes, she does. She has said that before. But this time she managed a truly astonishing formulation to cover that: “I disagree with the choice that I made”. That may actually be worse than the John Kerry line “I voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it”.
And how about: “I was not thinking a lot when I got in [to the State Department]”? Her point, in context, is clear. She wasn’t thinking about [as she would put it] relatively minor administrative issues because there were more important policy questions to consider. In fact her choices on email use touch upon the critical questions of accountability and security, so they are far from trivial, but even if we accept her premise here, then she should have thought that he quote could easily be taken out of context. She was “not thinking a lot” when she was Secretary of State? That’s what she wants us to take away?
Quentin Langley is a Senior Lecturer in Marketing at the University of Bedfordshire Business School as well as a freelance columnist published in the UK and all parts of the US. He blogs on social media and crisis communications at brandjacknews.com
Filed under: U.S. Politics
