When President-elect Barack Obama invited Hillary Rodham Clinton to be his secretary of state, he didn't just get Clinton. He also got the extended circle of political aides she and her husband had collected over her years in the White House, the Senate, and the 2008 presidential campaign.
In her four years at the State Department, Clinton was widely admired within the Obama administration as hard-charging and low-profile, and her coterie of political advisers meshed with the White House team better than anyone had expected.
Now, the uproar over her use of only a private email account to conduct government business - and her aides' control over what emails to release and when - threaten to give Clinton's detractors a means to cast her tenure as secretary of state, in a new and unflattering light.
"It's a ball of wool that won't go away until the questions are answered," said David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Obama.
Like a small group of other early advisers to Obama, Axelrod was present for some of the early bumps incorporating Clinton and her team into the State Department after the brutal 2008 primary fight.
By the time Clinton was sworn in as secretary, her closest aides, who came with her to Foggy Bottom, knew that she communicated only through a private email address. The practice was not a secret, according to a person with direct knowledge of the inner workings of State Department under Clinton, and no one thought it necessary that she switch to an official government address, which would have caused her email to be preserved under the Federal Records Act. Neither career foreign service officers nor State Department lawyers suggested that Clinton use a department email address, the person said.
But Clinton's use of a clintonemail.com address, which shielded those emails from public records requests, is giving ammunition to critics eager to diminish Clinton's time as a globe-trotting diplomat, which allies portray as her strongest credential in seeking the Democratic nomination for president.
Moreover, Clinton's relationship with the Obama White House, which she and her aides worked hard to improve and nurture, once again seems strained. Some of her allies have grumbled that the president's aides could have done more to support her - perhaps, one said, by pointing out that the president himself and Clinton's successor, Secretary of State John Kerry, both use private accounts in addition to their government email addresses.
The White House has walked a careful line, not directly criticizing Clinton but also directing most questions to her own team.
The issue came to light after House Republican officials probing the events surrounding the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012 tried to get copies of Clinton's email.
Aides to both Clinton and Obama said they have kept one another informed throughout the process; Clinton's team, for example, gave a heads-up to the White House about the original report in The New York Times.
"We have always had an open line of communication with the White House, from our time at the State Department and beyond," Clinton's spokesman, Nick Merrill, said. "That continues here, and we're grateful for it."
Clinton's arrival at the State Department initially left Obama's aides fearing that she would try to create a shadow political operation at the State Department: She saw to it that Obama allowed her to bring in an unusually large number of her loyalists. (As one person familiar with the confirmation process said last year, "Obama didn't realize that extended to the cafeteria workers.")
Merrill said Clinton had fewer appointees than former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
But the Obama team's early fears that Clinton, who won 17.5 million votes in the Democratic primary, would steal the spotlight proved unfounded. Instead, administration officials said, Clinton was known to bury herself in policy briefing books, talking to Obama at scheduled 45-minute meetings each week.
"I didn't see political tension," Thomas R. Nides, deputy secretary for management and resources under Clinton, said recently. "I saw a phenomenally cooperative State Department and White House."
There had been relative harmony between the White House and Clinton's operation until this week. So far, Clinton has tapped the White House communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, and John D. Podesta, a senior adviser to Obama, for senior roles on her presumptive 2016 presidential campaign.
But now, the former first lady suddenly looms large on the minds of White House aides again.
© 2015, The New York Times News Service