DES MOINES, Iowa — Hillary Clinton learned her lesson: No rope lines in Iowa. 
 
 In stark contrast to her 2008 campaign — which unraveled fast after Iowans rejected her for more a more approachable Barack Obama — Clinton put herself out at the Iowa State Fair Saturday, embracing the masses that engulfed her. 
 
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 The 2016 Democratic contender shook hands and took selfies with total strangers, listened to Iowans’ personal stories of struggle and even met a young boy’s show cow. She gave people hugs, patted babies on the head, munched on a grease-dripping pork chop and waved to cheering crowds on balconies as they called out her name. 
 
 It’s a world of difference from Clinton’s last White House bid, when she was criticized here for seeming too-cool-for-school to mingle with what she now calls ‘everyday Americans.’ Given Iowa’s traditional early-state role in presidential elections, its residents are accustomed to, and expect, face-to-face interaction with political candidates — never Clinton’s forte. 
 
 But during a two-day sweep through the Hawkeye State this weekend, Clinton is showing she’s learned her lesson — and that she’s really trying to put that problem behind her. 
 
 For starters, there were no rope lines keeping people out. During a July 4 parade in New Hampshire just a few weeks ago, Clinton separated herself off from reporters and others with a moving corral — which played terribly in the headlines and reinforced the image of a standoff contender who didn’t want to interact. 
 
 But at the fair, crowds totally swarmed her and her escort, former Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who just endorsed Clinton this week. The scrum following Clinton was so densely packed that followers at times had to take one-inch baby steps to move, bumping shoulders with people next to them — if they could move at all. 
 
 Few in the press could even get to her as she walked through a barn, and was promptly surrounded, to marveled at Iowa’s world-famous Butter Cow, a massive bovine statue made of pure cholesterol. 
 
 When people realized who was in the building, they pushed toward the cameras and flying boom microphones — so much that Clinton’s omnipresent security detail, which wore plaid shirts to blend in with the crowd, had to hold some back because they couldn’t keep eyes on everyone. With temperatures outside in the high 80s, the place was like a sauna. 
 
 People encircled balconies in the barn to get a glimpse of her, yelling “look here, Hillary!” or “Hillary, I love you!” And those on the ground who couldn’t see her because of all the bodies held up their phones, angling them such that they could snap a memento. 
 
 “I got a video,” one kid bragged to someone standing next to him. A Secret Service officer joked to POLITICO that he hadn’t even seen Clinton once since her arrival at the fair because of the thick crowd surrounding her. 
 
 Clinton supporter Dan Fredericks of Boone, who went up to praise Clinton in peron at the fair for her education policy, said he’s seen a real difference in her this year. 
 
 “She’s doing it. Right here,” he said, pointing down at the ground. “Last time she was kinda up, and Barack Obama was down with the crowds. Now, it’s giving me goosebumps … She’s having a good weekend.” 
 
 There was one notable stop Clinton didn’t make at the fair: the soapbox. Politicians, including GOP candidate Jeb Bush just a day earlier, will often jump up on the stage to take questions from Iowans. And on Saturday, just hours after Clinton left, her most threatening Democratic challenger Bernie Sanders got up there to rail against corporate American greed. 
 
 The crowd that surrounded Sanders during his soapbox speech was even larger than the one that followed Hillary, and the fact that Clinton wasn’t up there, too, prompted some criticism. 
 
 “Why didn’t she get on the soapbox to talk?” asked an irked Leslie Johnson of Waukee, who had just heard Sanders’s soapbox speech. She didn’t even know Clinton was at the fair. “Why didn’t she do that? … And I remember all this [when I vote]. I don’t forget.” 
 
 Sanders, however, did not take questions from the public as candidates on the box usually do — and his day at the fair was brief as he rushed passed Iowans in a hurried brisk walk, cameramen pushing and jabbing annoyed bystanders out of the way. 
 
 Clinton, by contrast, took her time, spending about an hour and a half at the fair as she inched along and people approached. A 30-something Iowan mother named April Stumpf asked her to support legalizing medicinal marijuana nationally. Stumpf’s three-year-old daughter, Quinn, has a severe case of epilepsy and is about to die, she explained to Clinton. Her doctors recommend medical marijuana to ease the pain, but it’s hard to get because it’s illegal to sell in Iowa. The state allows residents to get medical marijuana cards and purchase the drug out of state — but often states that sell it require patients to be present for purchase, and Quinn is too sick to travel. 
 
 “She’s not expected to live past … ” her voice trailed off. “I mean, she can go at any time.” 
 
 Clinton agreed that there should be more research on the subject. And when Stumpf walked away, she dispatched her aides to get her contact information as the crowd continued onward. 
 
 Before meeting the public, Clinton and Harkin gaggled with reporters behind a small, muddied pasture for livestock toward the edge of the fair. Before the press conference they chatted with a young boy behind the pasture fence who was holding a cow on a leash. 
 
 Then Harkin praised Clinton for her public service. 
 
 “I saw Clinton behind the cameras” on Capitol Hill, Harkin said. “She’s always fighting for those kids, those families … for early childhood education … to ensure pay equity for women.” 
 
 Multiple reporters pressed Clinton on the email scandal dogging her back in Washington D.C. She pushed back, reiterating that she used her private account for convenience and vowing that she “never sent any classified material or received any marked classified.” She belittled the issue. 
 
 “It isn’t anything people talk to me about,” she said. “They never raise it in my town halls.” 
 
 During her visit she ran into a number of people she seemed to know, suggesting a little pre-planning on the part of the campaign. She dished about horse racing with one woman related to a longtime Iowa-based Clinton supporter. Then, there was prominent Iowa real estate developer Bill Knapp, and the sister of a former colleague of Clinton’s at the University of Arkansas law school. 
 
 She seemed to have fun. Clinton and her top aide Huma Abedin joked about a straw hat Harkin wore. And Clinton raved on and on about being a grandmother to another fair-goer. 
 
 “Bill and I are crazy [about our granddaughter]. We are just crazy. I am way over the top.” 
 
 By the time she jumped back into the black SUV that whisked her away, Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs had counted 42 pictures that Clinton posed for with fans — many of those were selfies. 
 
 “I’m your biggest fan,” said one sweaty gentleman who jumped to the head of the crowd and draped his arm around her for a photo. 
 
 Clinton smiled for the camera. ||||| Hillary Clinton's much-anticipated appearance before the House Benghazi Committee on Thursday poses any number of potential legal traps, all made more treacherous by the intense partisanship that has surrounded the committee's lengthy investigation. 
 
 To navigate the minefield, Hill veterans and legal experts say, the former secretary of state needs to keep her cool and play upon her years of experience in the hot seat as a former New York senator and as a first lady who led the charge for her husband's failed health care proposal. 
 
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 Clinton has condemned Republicans on the Benghazi ommittee for trying to use the inquiry to hurt her poll numbers in the Democratic presidential contest. Now, the test will be whether Clinton can rise above the fray and focus on straight answers to outstanding questions about her handling of the 2012 Benghazi attacks that killed a U.S. ambassador and the private email setup she relied on while in office. 
 
 Here’s POLITICO’s compilation of advice offered by experts of all stripes: 
 
 Don’t lie 
 
 It’s easy to dismiss a potential future indictment of Clinton for lying to Congress as the fantasy of a fevered conservative mind, but lawyers who prepare witnesses for Capitol Hill testimony say avoiding that unpleasant outcome would be at the top of their list. 
 
 “There’s a federal law saying you can’t lie to Congress and you can’t mislead Congress. It’s actually not all that unusual for congressional committees to refer people to the Justice Department for alleged false statements,” said Robert Kelner, a GOP lawyer with Covington & Burling. “She’s going to want to approach this from a political perspective and say things that will be directed to her political supporters, but there’s a tremendous tension between her political incentives and the advice she must be getting from her lawyers to be extremely factual.” 
 
 Prosecutors coming after congressional witnesses over statements made in testimony is far from rare. Pitcher Roger Clemens was indicted in 2010 for testimony he gave about steroids in Major League Baseball. Sure, he was acquitted two years later after a trial, but who wants to go through that? 
 
 Claims of false congressional testimony have triggered a series of criminal cases in recent years, including one against Steven Griles, a George W. Bush administration deputy secretary of the Interior who was caught up in the investigation into lobbyist Jack Abramoff, and another against former BP executive David Rainey, who was accused of understating how much oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico during the Deepwater Horizon disaster. (Griles pled guilty, while a judge ultimately dismissed the charge against Rainey.) 
 
 There have also been calls for Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to be prosecuted for answers he gave to Congress about the NSA’s then-classified phone surveillance efforts. He apologized, saying he misunderstood the question. No charges have been filed. 
 
 The Iran-Contra scandal brought the largest flurry of lying-to-Congress charges in the past few decades, including indictments against Reagan National Security Adviser John Poindexter and Lt. Col Oliver North. Both men were convicted, but had their convictions overturned on appeal. 
 
 So don’t shade the truth, even if tempted. 
 
 Don’t speculate 
 
 Clinton’s testimony Thursday won’t be her first public statements on Benghazi or on the email controversy that has dogged her presidential campaign, but she and her advisers have already encountered difficulties with claims made about the email situation that later proved incorrect. 
 
 “Her biggest problem is inconsistent statements,” said one prominent Democratic lawyer, who asked not to be named. “That’s the risk of any person going into a situation like this. This is the stuff of independent counsel investigations.” 
 
 Clinton’s campaign said she began using her private Clintonemail.com account on March 18, 2009, but last month the Pentagon produced messages that she exchanged with Gen. David Petraeus on that address weeks earlier. Clinton aides said it now appears that while the server was set up on that March date, the account became active earlier. No one seems sure if or where messages from that period were stored. 
 
 Clinton’s lawyer also told Congress in March that no emails from her account from her tenure as secretary of state “reside on the server or any back-up systems associated with the server.” However, the FBI reportedly has recovered some of those messages, and recently, a service provider to Clinton’s information technology contractor revealed that it had back-up of some of the server's contents. 
 
 Clinton also declared at the outset of the furor in March that she was confident there was no classified information in her account. “There is no classified material,” she told reporters. ”I’m certainly well-aware of the classification requirements and did not send classified material.” 
 
 Now, the State Department has classified more than 400 of the emails with more to come. And the intelligence community says some contained information that was classified “TOP SECRET” or higher at the time. Clinton has since changed her stance to say nothing she received was “marked classified.” 
 
 Clinton also has said repeatedly there’s no indication anyone tried to breach her server’s security, But a Senate committee found evidence of potential intrusions from China S. Korea and Germany after she left office but while the server still contained her email archive. 
 
 For both political and legal reasons, Clinton needs to avoid making any more declarations that are later overtaken by the facts. 
 
 “In life, you never know what you don’t know, therefore you need to be careful not to go out on a limb to assert facts that are not rock solid,” said Ron Weich, dean of the University of Baltimore Law School and formerly the Justice Department’s top adviser to officials testifying on the Hill. 
 
 Expect Clinton to deflect to others as often as she can, relaying what others told her about Benghazi or her emails. She did just this in August, submitting a declaration under penalty of perjury that appeared to certify all her work related emails had been turned over to the State Department. But on closer examination, it said simply that “on information and belief” others did the review. 
 
 Given that her emails already made public show her struggling with technology like fax machines, one easy out for Clinton will be to profess ignorance about any technical questions about her computer setup. 
 
 “I think you will hear a lot of caveats,” Kelner said. 
 
 Don’t rile the FBI 
 
 The FBI team investigating potential security breaches involving Clinton’s private server will undoubtedly tune in to her testimony. Officially there’s no indication that Clinton is the target of the inquiry or even that it’s a criminal probe. 
 
 Clinton would be wise not to follow President Barack Obama’s example of dismissing the idea that the private server posed any national security threat, lawyers said. “This is not a situation in which America’s national security was endangered,” Obama declared recently on CBS’s “60 Minutes.” The comment reportedly angered FBI agents working on the inquiry into Clinton’s server because it seemed to prejudge the outcome of their probe. 
 
 Experts urged Clinton to treat the classification issue seriously, even as she maintains she didn’t knowingly handle anything classified on her private account. 
 
 “She needs to say she takes this seriously, that this is something that needs to be looked at by the appropriate agencies and, hopefully, lessons learned are derived from this,” said Mark Zaid, a lawyer who represents intelligence agency personnel. He said Clinton can also legitimately decline to go into details about any specific cases by saying she “doesn’t want to speak out of turn as departments argue amongst themselves about what should have been classified, then or now.” 
 
 Don’t joke 
 
 Clinton has already tried humor in an effort to defuse the email controversy, but that approach didn’t work out particularly well. 
 
 “You may have seen that I recently launched a Snapchat account,” Clinton said during a speech to Iowa Democrats in August. “I love it. I love it. Those messages disappear all by themselves.” 
 
 Later that month, she answered with a flip response when a reporter asked whether her server was “wiped” at her direction. “Like with a cloth or something?” she replied. 
 
 The jokes didn’t sit well with some Clinton donors and advisers, who thought she appeared to be belittling legitimate concerns about government transparency. 
 
 Probably best to leave the jokes aside this time, particularly since the House hearing is supposed to be focused on Benghazi and the brutal deaths of four Americans. With that grim context, humor might be in poor taste. 
 
 Don’t join the food fight 
 
 Clinton has signaled recently that if Benghazi committee members come after her, she’s ready to throw back at them some righteous indignation. 
 
 “Look at the situation they chose to exploit to go after me for political reasons--the death of four Americans in Benghazi,” Clinton said angrily on NBC earlier this month. “This committee was set up as they have admitted for the purpose of making a partisan political issue out of the deaths of four Americans. I would have never done that, and if I were President and there were Republicans or Democrats who were thinking about that, I would have done everything to shut it down.” 
 
 At a Senate Benghazi hearing in 2013, a frustrated outburst from Clinton grabbed headlines. "Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night and decided they’d go kill some Americans?" Clinton said. "What difference – at this point, what difference does it make?" 
 
 
 
 Clinton’s campaign has taken a decidedly combative tone with the Benghazi panel recently, shifting away from litigating facts of the email dispute and towards heated claims that Gowdy’s effort is brazenly partisan. Clinton may choose to keep that up Thursday. But some Capitol Hill vets say rather than claiming unfairness from the witness table, she’d score more points if she lets the panel’s five Democratic members slug it out with the GOP. 
 
 “The witness should stand back and not get in the fray of a Congressional food fight,” Weich said. “The Democrats on this committee are very, very adept at defending witnesses from unfair attacks…Ranking Member Cumming and his troops will do their job and protect here. She doesn’t need to be the one to raise points when her allies on the committee are ready to do so.” ||||| Both Colin Powell, left, and his successor Condoleezza Rice have been contacted by the FBI regarding their own use of personal email during their respective tenures as secretary of state. | AP Photo FBI contacts Colin Powell as part of email probe The State Department finding of classified emails sent to other secretaries could give Clinton new cover 
 
 Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said the FBI has contacted him about his use of personal email when he was the nation's top diplomat, as a review conducted by the State Department inspector general concluded that Powell and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice both received classified information through private email accounts. 
 
 The revelation that the State Department now believes both Rice and Powell received sensitive information via private accounts could give former secretary Hillary Clinton a new line of defense as she tries to dampen the controversy over classified information found on her own private email server. 
 
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 The State Department inquiry identified 10 messages sent to Rice's immediate staff that were classified and two sent to Powell, according to Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the ranking member on the House Oversight and Benghazi committees. 
 
 The emails, Cummings said, appear to have no classification markings, and it is still unclear if the content of the emails was or should have been considered classified when the emails were originally written and sent. 
 
 In an interview with POLITICO Thursday. Powell vigorously disputed the sensitivity of the information sent to him through personal email, but he acknowledged the law enforcement interest in his email routine. 
 
 "The FBI has come to us," Powell said. Two FBI agents visited Powell late last year for a discussion an aide described as a casual conversation about email practices during his term as secretary from 2001 to 2005. 
 
 Powell said the pair of messages State is now calling classified had come from two different U.S. ambassadors abroad. 
 
 "They’re fairly innocuous and very benign and neither ambassador classified them at the time. They were merely information memos sent to State.gov," Powell said. "My executive assistants thought they should send them to me on my personal email. I found that personally acceptable. That's why I bought all those computers in the first place." 
 
 Powell seemed exasperated by State's latest claim. The agency has designated the two messages "Confidential," which is the lowest tier of classification. 
 
 "Now, 11 or 12 years later, as part of a whole process of reviewing things somebody in the department says, 'Well, they're classified.' My response to that is no they were not," Powell said. " You can say your judgment is they should have been classified but at the time they were not classified. 
 
 Clinton's presidential campaign said the news and Powell's reaction reinforces their view that Clinton's messages are being overclassified and that the retroactive judgments to do that are unfair. 
 
 "We agree with Sec. Powell that his emails are being overclassified & they should be released along [with] Hillary's," Clinton campaign chair John Podesta said on Twitter. 
 
 Campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said that the disclosures about Powell and Rice's emails reveal the controversy over purportedly classified information on Clinton's emails is "bogus." 
 
 “This is a major development. In fact, I would go as far as to say it’s a game changer," Fallon said on MSNBC. "You have a government bureaucracy that has an excessive treatment of what should be considered classified information and now we’re finding that the same agency that has been looking into Hillary Clinton’s emails and having that excessive definition of what should be treated as classified is making the same judgment about Hillary Clinton’s predecessors...We think that any fair minded person if they judge the contents would see that this is overreach — this is excessive classification." 
 
 But conservative groups disputed that, saying Clinton's situation was significantly different than Powell's. They also pointed to the sheer volume of classified documents that passed through Clinton’s server, and noted that some classifications reached higher, more sensitive levels, including “top secret.” 
 
 “The fact remains Secretary Clinton is the only cabinet official to ever house and maintain a private server in her basement that contained all of her work and personal emails,” said Jeff Bechdel, America Rising PAC communications director, in a statement. “The security of that server and the risk it posed to national security is at the heart of the FBI's ongoing investigation — not 12-year-old emails sent to Secretaries of past administrations." 
 
 Rice has maintained she did not use email during her tenure as secretary. The messages sent to her apparently were emailed to her close aides. NBC News, which first reported State's conclusions said the ten messages sent to her are a mix of information classified at the "Confidential" level and the "Secret" level, which is the middle tier of classification. 
 
 An aide to Rice, Georgia Godfrey, said the messages in question did not contain intelligence reports but solely diplomatic exchanges. 
 
 "She did not use email as Secretary nor have a personal email account. My understanding is that the report is in reference to emails sent to her assistant reporting diplomatic conversations and they contained no intelligence information," Godfrey said in a statement. 
 
 Godfrey told POLITICO Rice had not been contacted by the FBI. 
 
 More than 1,600 of Clinton's messages have been deemed classified — although they were not marked that way when sent. Dozens have now been designated "Secret" or "Top Secret." 
 
 Cummings, a longtime defender of Clinton, held up the new information about the former secretaries as proof that the email controversy surrounding the 2016 Democratic frontrunner was overplayed. He blasted Republicans for trying to use the issue to hurt Clinton in the polls. 
 
 “My concern has been that Republicans are spending millions of taxpayer dollars singling out Secretary Clinton because she is running for President — often leaking inaccurate information — while at the same time disregarding the actions of Republican Secretaries of State,” Cummings said. “Based on this new revelation, it is clear that the Republican investigations are nothing more than a transparent political attempt to use taxpayer funds to target the Democratic candidate for President,” 
 
 Cummings indicated he has requested copies of the emails. 
 
 Rep. Eliot Engel, Ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the news proves that use of private email is a systematic problem in government — not just a Clinton problem. 
 
 “The truth couldn’t be plainer: the private-email problem is not a Hillary Clinton problem,” he said in a statement. “It’s a government-wide problem that’s existed since the advent of email itself. The manner in which sensitive information is dealt with just hasn’t kept up with advancements in technology. And that's the problem we should be focused on.” 
 
 The State inspector general has been reviewing the email practices of the five previous Secretaries of State. In a letter sent to Undersecretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy and shared Wednesday with Congress, the internal watchdog office expressed concerns that additional classified information may still reside on State’s unclassified archive of email messages. 
 
 State Department spokesman John Kirby declined to elaborate on the inspector general's findings but confirmed receiving the report. 
 
 "We’re in receipt of a letter from the IG regarding sensitive information....We’ll respond accordingly," Kirby said. "Obviously, we take the protection of sensitive information very seriously." 
 
 Powell also noted some ways his situation was different from Clinton’s, for example, that he used a commercial email account. “I had no private server, no private domain. I did not take [any messages] anywhere when I left the department,” he said. 
 
 Clinton’s messages resided on a private server that was kept mainly at her family home in Chappaqua, N.Y. She turned over about 30,000 such messages to the State Department at its request in late 2014 and discarded another roughly 32,000 messages deemed personal. 
 
 Powell did say that he believes the debate over Clinton’s emails is being colored by her presidential run. 
 
 “You know the politics,” he said. 
 
 Eliza Collins contributed to this report.
– Hillary Clinton paid the obligatory visit to the Iowa State Fair today, and Politico sounds impressed that she could be seen "embracing the masses that engulfed her." It's a contrast to campaign events in the past, including her team's now-infamous use of a moving rope line last month to protect the candidate. It's also a notable departure from her appearance in Iowa in 2008, when she didn't want to mingle with the commonfolk, writes Rachel Bade. Clinton also made headlines this weekend for joking about her email controversy, notes NBC News. "You may have seen that I recently launched a Snapchat account," she said at a dinner last night. "I love it. I love it. Those messages disappear all by themselves." Today, reporters grilled her anew about the controversy, including whether her joke suggested she was taking it too lightly. "We'll see how this all plays out, but it's not something the people raise with me as I travel around the country," said Clinton, again reiterating that she never sent or received email marked as classified. The "marked as classified" is an important distinction: It turns out that some emails were indeed considered top secret, though it's unclear whether that designation came about after the emails were sent or whether State Department officials were careless. To help figure it out, the FBI will try to gain access to the accounts of State Department officials who were there during Clinton's tenure, reports the New York Times.