7) Disclosing Emails
Hillary Clinton’s recent email controversy may have sounded weirdly familiar to Veep fans. All the way back in the season 1 episode “Full Disclosure,” Selina is battling scandal after reassigning a secret service agent for smiling on the job. The White House requests her office release their secret service personnel records, and Meyers’ staff decides that to combat the ensuing madness, they will release all of their records, including emails.
“They won’t have time to read everything,” Mike says. “You can’t read everything. I don’t read half the stuff I’m supposed to.” Of course, moments after declaring their goal of full disclosure, Selina commands her team to hold certain documents back. “Obviously, it is not going to be full disclosure,” she tells them. “It’s going to be partial disclosure light.”
Armando Iannucci explained to The Daily Beast that he usually doesn’t write Veep scenes based on actual events. Rather, he writes ridiculous situations and then, by coincidence, they happen in real life, and he pointed to this as an example. Watching the episode during a binge, you might assume this was written as a parody of Hillary Clinton, but in fact it aired years prior to the secretary of state’s email disclosure.
“…in the very first season [Selina] was under fire for her emails so she had all her emails released and the federal government had to read them all,” Iannucci said. “And Hillary Clinton’s going through that right now. It happened to Selina four years ago. It’s surreal. Nothing you can come up with is as crazy as something that has actually happened in real life. That’s what you discover.”
In fact, many of Clinton’s now-public email exchanges have drawn comparisons to Selina Meyer. In several, Clinton complains about meetings having been cancelled without anyone bothering to tell her. There’s one particularly memorable email where she writes that she heard about a cabinet meeting on the radio, with nobody having informed her of it. “Can I go,” she asks Huma Abedin. Presumably, her next question was, “Did the president call?”