Texts from Hillary was an internet meme that went viral in 2012, based on photographs of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. [1] The photos show Clinton holding a BlackBerry phone, wearing sunglasses. A Tumblr blog added various captions under the photo, imagining what Clinton might have been texting, and paired them with a matching photo to represent her imagined conversation partner.
The meme was based on two photographs of the same moment, from slightly different angles. One version of the photo was taken by Diane Walker from Time magazine, [2] the other by Kevin Lamarque from the Associated Press. [3] The photo was taken while Clinton was aboard a diplomatic trip to Libya.
In June 2016, a Freedom of Information Act deposition in a lawsuit by Judicial Watch, which was part of the Hillary Clinton email controversy, revealed that the photo caught the interest of State Department employees, who were inspired to investigate if Clinton was using a personal email account instead of an official state account. [4] [5] [6] [7]
Clinton used the photo as her Twitter avatar until a week after the controversy first broke. [8] [9] [10]
Judicial Watch (JW) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit American conservative activist group that files Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits to investigate claimed misconduct by government officials. Founded in 1994, Judicial Watch has primarily targeted Democrats, in particular the administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, as well as Hillary Clinton's role in them. It was founded by attorney Larry Klayman, and has been led by Tom Fitton since 2003.
Huma Mahmood Abedin is an American political staffer who was vice chair of Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign for President of the United States. Before that, Abedin was deputy chief of staff to Clinton when she was U.S. Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013. She was also the traveling chief of staff and former assistant to Clinton during her 2008 presidential campaign for the Democratic nomination in the 2008 presidential election.
Hillary Clinton served as the 67th United States Secretary of State, under President Barack Obama, from 2009 to 2013, overseeing the department that conducted the foreign policy of Barack Obama. She was preceded in office by Condoleezza Rice, and succeeded by John Kerry. She is also the only former First Lady of the United States to become a member of the United States Cabinet. As secretary of state she traveled widely and initiated many diplomatic efforts on behalf of the Obama administration.
Justin Cooper is a former adviser to Bill Clinton, former President of the United States. Cooper first worked within the Office of Science and Technology in the Clinton administration before later becoming an aide for Clinton in his post-presidential years.
Michael S. Schmidt is an American journalist, author, and correspondent for The New York Times in Washington, D.C. He is also a producer of a Netflix show. He covers national security and federal law enforcement, and has broken several high-profile stories about politics, media and sports. He is also a national security contributor for MSNBC and NBC News.
Marcel Lehel Lazăr, known as Guccifer, is a Romanian hacker responsible for high-level computer security breaches in the U.S. and Romania. Lazăr targeted celebrities, Romanian and U.S. government officials, and other prominent persons.
Matt Apuzzo is an American journalist working for The New York Times.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton ran unsuccessfully for president of the United States. An experienced Democratic politician, Clinton served as the 67th United States secretary of state in the administration of Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013, a U.S. senator representing New York from 2001 to 2009, and the first lady of the United States as the wife of Bill Clinton from 1993 to 2001. She was defeated in the general election by the Republican candidate, businessman Donald Trump.
During her tenure as United States Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton drew controversy by using a private email server for official public communications rather than using official State Department email accounts maintained on federal servers. After a years-long FBI investigation, it was determined that Clinton's server did not contain any information or emails that were clearly marked classified. Federal agencies did, however, retrospectively determine that 100 emails contained information that should have been deemed classified at the time they were sent, including 65 emails deemed "Secret" and 22 deemed "Top Secret". An additional 2,093 emails were retroactively designated confidential by the State Department.
The cultural and political image of Hillary Clinton has been explored since the early 1990s, when her husband Bill Clinton launched his presidential campaign, and has continued to draw broad public attention during her time as First Lady of the United States, U.S. Senator from New York, 67th United States Secretary of State, and the Democratic Party's nominee for President of the United States in the 2016 election.
Social media played an important role in shaping the course of events surrounding the 2016 United States presidential election. It facilitated greater voter interaction with the political climate; unlike traditional media, social media gave people the ability to create, comment on, and share content related to the election.
During Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State, a number of individuals, organizations, and countries allegedly contributed to the Clinton Foundation either before, or while, pursuing interests through ordinary channels with the U.S. State Department.
In March 2016, the personal Gmail account of John Podesta, a former White House chief of staff and chair of Hillary Clinton's 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, was compromised in a data breach accomplished via a spear-phishing attack, and some of his emails, many of which were work-related, were hacked. Cybersecurity researchers as well as the United States government attributed responsibility for the breach to the Russian cyber spying group Fancy Bear, allegedly two units of a Russian military intelligence agency.
"Pizzagate" is a conspiracy theory that went viral during the 2016 United States presidential election cycle, falsely claiming that the New York City Police Department (NYPD) had discovered a pedophilia ring linked to members of the Democratic Party while searching through Anthony Weiner's emails. It has been extensively discredited by a wide range of organizations, including the Washington, D.C. police.
Peter Paul Strzok II is a former United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent. He was the Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI's Counterintelligence Division and led the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. Previously, he had been the chief of the division's Counterespionage Section and led the investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a personal email server.
Kristian Mark Saucier is a former U.S. Navy sailor who was convicted of unauthorized retention of national defense information and sentenced to one year in prison in October 2016 for taking photographs of classified engineering areas of USS Alexandria (SSN-757), a nuclear-powered attack submarine, in 2009. President Donald Trump pardoned Saucier on March 9, 2018.
A Review of Various Actions by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Justice in Advance of the 2016 Election is the official 568-page report of the actions taken by the FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) during the 2016 U.S. presidential election connected with Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server, prepared by the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General (OIG) "in response to requests from numerous Chairmen and Ranking Members of Congressional oversight committees, various organizations, and members of the public."
This is a timeline of events related to Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.
Douglass Mackey is an American social media influencer who posted under the alias Ricky Vaughn. In March 2023, he was convicted of allegedly conspiring to deprive citizens of their right to vote in the 2016 presidential election.