State Dept.: Hillary Clinton didn’t turn over all Libya emailsFormer Secretary of State Hillary Clinton withheld from the State
Department several emails related to Libya, the State Department
confirmed Thursday night — calling into question her insistence that she
has handed over her complete public record. The 2016 Democratic front-runner did not hand over 15 exchanges with
longtime Clinton ally Sidney Blumenthal on the security situation in the
Middle Eastern nation. The existence of the new correspondence only came
to light days ago after Republicans subpoenaed the former Clinton White
House adviser’s records and he turned them over. Clinton has said she cooperated with the House Benghazi Committee
investigation by handing over all work-related communications, which she
stored on her own personal server against official record-keeping rules. “This confirms doubts about the completeness of Clinton’s
self-selected public record and raises serious questions about her
decision to erase her personal server — especially before it could be
analyzed by an independent, neutral third-party arbiter,” Benghazi panel
Chairman Trey Gowdy said in a statement. The South Carolina Republican said the implications go “far beyond
Libya, Benghazi and our committee’s work.” “This conclusively shows her email arrangement with herself, which
was then vetted by her own lawyers, has resulted in an incomplete public
record,” he continued. Clinton has come under fire for circumventing government rules
instead of using an official State Department email address, with
critics accusing her of hiding behind a shroud of secrecy. Clinton, for
her part, turned over more than 30,000 work emails to state as part of
its document production to the Benghazi committee. The rest, she said,
were personal in nature — about Chelsea’s wedding or yoga, she said. Then, her team wiped her server clean, they say. Barred from working at the State Department by the Obama
administration, Blumenthal was being paid $10,000 a month by the
philanthropic Clinton Foundation at the time. He was also advising
friends working on a new business venture in Libya — and one of those
business partners is said to have been the author of the intelligence
memos Blumenthal passed along to Clinton. Blumenthal told the committee the emails were unsolicited, but
Republicans say a number of the emails Clinton did not turn over
suggests they were, including responses where she encouraged her old
friend to continue writing. “These new messages in many instances were Clinton’s responses, which
clearly show she was soliciting and regularly corresponding with Sidney
Blumenthal — who was passing unvetted intelligence information about
Libya from a source with a financial interest in the country,” the panel
statement continues. “It just so happens these emails directly
contradict her public statement that the messages from Blumenthal were
unsolicited.” Democrats on the panel, however, have challenged that assertion and
questioned Gowdy’s definition of “unsolicited,” arguing that simply a
response to an email does not constitute solicitation. State, meanwhile, says it is working quickly to produce all the
emails it does have. “We have confirmed that the emails Secretary Clinton provided the Department include almost all of the material in Mr. Blumenthal’s production,” a state official said in a statement. “The State Department is working diligently to review and publish the 55,000 pages of emails we received from former Secretary Clinton, according to FOIA standards so they are available to the general public and the media. All of the materials that she provided will be reviewed as part of this effort.” |