WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton’s staff carefully plotted how to pad her numbers to make certain their boss broke the record for most countries visited by a secretary of state while in office.
“With 7ish months left, plenty of time to run up the score on total countries,” press aide Philippe Reines advised Clinton and longtime aide Huma Abedin in a June 2012 e-mail that was among the latest State Department batch of Clinton e-mails released Monday.
Under the subject line “100 and counting . . .” Reines continued, “110 is a reasonable goal. Here are the 94 countries left to choose from,” he wrote, followed by a list that ran from Andorra to Zimbabwe.
Clinton’s response: “Pls print.”
Clinton ended up hitting 112 countries, breaking the old record of 98 by Madeleine Albright during the Bill Clinton administration. Hillary’s record total wound up generating favorable press coverage.
Meanwhile, in an October 2012 e-mail under the heading “Stupid question,” Clinton sought advice from Reines on how to find a DC cable TV listing — “specifically, what channel number is Showtime?”
Clinton wrote that the reason is, “Because I want to watch ‘Homeland’ ” the channel’s spy hit.