What To Know About Hillary Clinton’s Infamous Email Scandal

The new Hillary Clinton documentary series, is officially out today — and anticipation around it is quite overwhelming. The docuseries entitled Hillary is being released exclusively on Hulu, and it’s already making history as a deeply personal inside look at one of the most powerful women in politics. Among other topics, the series reveals details about Hillary’s life, as well as her thoughts on the 2016 election and the 2020 election. In the series, she talks about her relationship with her parents, the Bill and Monica Lewinsky scandal, and how she ultimately lost (but still won) the 2016 election. 

Throwing it back to 2016 for a moment, the series explores how Clinton won the popular vote but lost to Trump after scandals of all kinds plagued her campaign. One of the most infamous was the scandal over her e-mails. In case you need a refresher on what the Hillary e-mail scandal was, we’ve got you covered.

It was August of 2016, right in the middle of the general election when Clinton was being hit with new scandals left and right. But, what felt like early 2000s TMZ gossip turned into very serious allegations of a cover-up during Clinton's time as secretary of state. The now-dubbed "email scandal" involved accusations from Trump and former FBI director James Comey. When a batch of emails from the then-presidential candidate’s duration as secretary of state (including conversations between a top aide handling requests from donors to the Clinton Foundation) surfaced, the world practically went up in flames. The emails that were found were from a private server, meaning that Clinton conducted official business using personal, non-government accounts, raising ethical questions around why she did this.

The original exchanges, which were from Huma Abedin’s inbox, ran 725 pages and hadn’t been released prior to then. So, how did the emails get leaked? They were submitted as part of a lawsuit then being filed by Judicial Watch, a conservative group. After reviewing the emails, the State Department concluded that there was “no clear sign” that donors were given special access to Clinton, and a spokesperson from the campaign accused the conservative group of “distorting facts to make utterly false attacks.” 

Still, while there was little evidence that Clinton did do something wrong, the emails put a serious focus on a budding controversy for the remainder of the campaign, and drew much scrutiny for Clinton. “But her emails!” even became a frequent callout from Donald Trump and his base, who ran with the scandal to make a point that Clinton should be locked up. 

After an FBI investigation into the presidential candidate’s use of a private server scrounged up an additional 15,000 previously undisclosed emails, these were released in October — just weeks before the election. The emails became available on the popular Wikileaks site, and stayed the course as the most talked about scandal by media and Trump’s campaign for the duration of the election.

While at the time Clinton and her public relations team tried to stay relatively quiet, lay low, and continue on the campaign trail to victory, after the outcome of the 2016 election it’s safe to say that the scandal was detrimental to her historic bid. Now, in this new documentary series, Clinton gets the chance to speak on it, and this time she has a good deal to say. And according to recent news, she’s been requested to appear for a sworn deposition in the ongoing trial about the emails, so perhaps we still haven’t heard the end of it.