Is Hillary sorry? She can't decide! Candidate apologizes for email scandal after focus group session but then tells 'Ellen' she's just 'sorry for all the confusion' – and muddies waters with late-night email blast

  • Hillary Clinton finally apologized for her private email scandal during an interview Tuesday with ABC News
  • 'That was a mistake. I'm sorry about that. I take responsibility,' she said
  • But hours later the Democratic front-runner taped an appearance on Ellen DeGeneres' talk show in which she only said 'I am sorry for all the confusion that has ensued'
  • Campaign sends late-night email blast calling the flap a 'complex story' – and then boiling it down to just four sentences
  • Morning reactions were harsh, with host on Democrat-friendly MSNBC calling ABC interview a 'hostage video' and talking about his 'B.S. detector'
  • Entire sequence of events followed New Hampshire focus group in which voters told campaign aides the scandal was drowning out her messages

By David Martosko, Us Political Editor For Dailymail.com

Published: 09:20 EST, 9 September 2015 | Updated: 17:27 EST, 9 September 2015

Is she sorry? Only Hillary Clinton and her focus group know for sure.

Hours after issuing her first plainspoken apology Tuesday on ABC for her persistent email scandal, the former secretary of state strode onto the 'Ellen' set and walked her position back to a weaker, more lawyerly explanation of the sort that brought eye-rolls Friday following her interview on MSNBC.

By 11:00 p.m., however, Hillary was once again sorry for her behavior, not for the 'resulting confusion' and public questions about her suitability for the White House, and blasted out that message to millions in – what else? – an email.

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SORRY AND NOT SORRY: Hillary Clinton vacillated on Tuesday between apologizing for her behavoir and merely offering a sheepish mea culpa for the public c0ontroversy she caused with her private email server

SORRY AND NOT SORRY: Hillary Clinton vacillated on Tuesday between apologizing for her behavoir and merely offering a sheepish mea culpa for the public c0ontroversy she caused with her private email server

FLUFF: Ellen DeGeneres (right) proclaimed Clinton 'the smartest and most qualified person' for the White House and then admired Hillary while she danced with Amy Schumer (left) and 'P!nk' (second right)

FLUFF: Ellen DeGeneres (right) proclaimed Clinton 'the smartest and most qualified person' for the White House and then admired Hillary while she danced with Amy Schumer (left) and 'P!nk' (second right)

Hillary hedged to Andrea Mitchell on Friday that 'I now disagree with the choice that I made' in setting up a private server to manage some of the State Department's most bluntly sensitive email traffic.

By Monday she was telling the Associated Press that she had no intention of apologizing because her actions were 'allowed by the State Department,' which she ran for four years.

That declaration came despite a policy that State put into place nine months into her tenure in 2009, which required the electronic capture of every email sent or received by agency officials – something Clinton's use of a home-brew server prohibited from happening uniformly.

Then came Tuesday's ABC News sit-down and what appeared to be a sea-change admission of guilt.

'That was a mistake. I'm sorry about that. I take responsibility,' she told the network's Nightly News anchor David Muir. 

Saying she was sorry for her scandalous choices brought sighs of relief among Democratic partisans pleased with Clinton for easing, at long last, into a posture that could have helped her months ago.

But then she appeared for a taping on comedian Ellen DeGeneres' talk show and turned the calendar back five days with a confusing word-salad of answers.

'I made a mistake. I am sorry for all the confusion that has ensued. I take responsibility,' Clinton said, once again parsing her language choices as though she were in the middle of a U.S. Senate hearing and not an otherwise lighthearted TV appearance.

The more defensive posture mattered little: DeGeneres pronounced her 'the smartest and most qualified person for the job,' a message her daily audience's 2.5 million women heard clearly as Clinton danced in a blue pantsuit.

AN EMAIL FROM HILLARY: Clinton's campaign ended the apology tour with an email to her supporter list returning to the more somber 'sorry' language

AN EMAIL FROM HILLARY: Clinton's campaign ended the apology tour with an email to her supporter list returning to the more somber 'sorry' language

IS IT TRUE? The Clinton camp is boiling down the scandal to four claims, but #2 appears false since a State Department directive required the capture of every email send or received by officials – something Clinton's private server couldn't deliver

IS IT TRUE? The Clinton camp is boiling down the scandal to four claims, but #2 appears false since a State Department directive required the capture of every email send or received by officials – something Clinton's private server couldn't deliver

By 10:30 p.m. Twitter began to buzz about a followup email circulating on Clinton's largest campaign email list.

'Yes, I should have used two email addresses, one for personal matters and one for my work at the State Department,' Clinton wrote in that message. 'Not doing so was a mistake. I'm sorry about it, and I take full responsibility.'

But that more definitive apology came with asterisks.

'My use of a personal email account was aboveboard and allowed under the State Department's rules,' Clinton insisted in the following paragraph. 'Everyone I communicated with in government was aware of it. And nothing I ever sent or received was marked classified at the time.' 

After calling her email saga 'a complex story,' Clinton's message links to a campaign Web page that proclaims it simple enough to boil down to 'Hillary’s emails in 4 sentences.'

The Hillary campaign's nearly week-long dalliance with public confession came after a focus group of New Hampshire voters dissected the August 26 Iowa press conference in which she floated the idea of taking 'responsibility' for risking the exposure of state secrets – while not actually apologizing.

The focus group, according to The New York Times, told campaign aides that the email scandal was drowning out everything positive that they were trying to communicate about her.

The varied and contradictory messaging coming out of the Clinton apology tour left a panel on MSNBC's 'Morning Joe' program laughing out loud on Wednesday. 

'We know when our children are forced to apologize. We know when they mean it, and we know when they don't mean it,' host Joe Scarborough said. 'Like, tone does matter.'

'Why does it matter? Because you get an understanding of whether the person gets what they did was wrong. Or to our significant others, saying that we're sorry. You know, there's a "B.S. detector" that tells our significant others: We’re saying we’re sorry, but we don’t really mean it.'

'Just listen to how flat the voice was at the end,' he added, reacting to video of Clinton's apology to David Muir's ABC News audience.

'Seriously! This was a hostage video, right?' he asked.

Liberal commentator Mike Barnicle watched the Clinton-Muir exchange and snarked: 'Did they cut out the part where she said to David, "OK, are you happy now?"' 

New York magazine journalist John Heilemann declared Clinton an unwilling participant, saying she was dragged into the apology 'kicking and screaming.' 

 

 

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