"If you were to be in my office in the State Department, I didn't have a computer," former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the Select Committee on Benghazi today.
For modern-day office workers everywhere, forever chained to our desks and screens, this was perhaps the most shocking revelation in Clinton's drawn-out and repetitive hearing before the committee today (which is still ongoing. If you've got a few extra hours in your schedule, you can tune in here).
Clinton offered up this answer in response to questioning by US Rep. Susan Brooks about Clinton's emails before and after the attacks on American diplomats in Benghazi in 2012. Brooks came armed with props, presenting the committee with a stack of nearly 800 emails about Libya that Clinton sent in 2011, compared to the much smaller stack of emails she sent in 2012, the year of the attacks.
"What kind of culture was created in the State Department that your folks couldn't tell you in an email about a bomb in April of 2012?" Rep. Brooks asked.
"Congresswoman, I did not conduct most of the business I did on behalf of our country on email," Clinton responded, and not only because she didn't have a computer in the office. Due to the "great deal of classified information" that was being brought to her, Clinton says she received the bulk of her information in meetings, memos, and even top secret documents that "were brought into my office in a locked briefcase." How very James Bond.
Of course, it's not entirely unusual for people serving in the highest levels of public office to forgo a computer. In her opening statement, which was just as much a campaign speech on foreign relations as it was testimony, Clinton said she travelled to 112 countries as secretary of state, which wouldn't have left her much time to surf the web from the comfort of her office desktop. At least she had that BlackBerry.
