A judge on Thursday ordered the U.S. State Department to determine whether it has found any new emails between Hillary Clinton and the White House from the week after the 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya, and to release any such documents by September 13.
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The Justice Department cleared Clinton of allegations that she mishandled classified information while she was Secretary of State but still criticised her use of the private email server.
But the judge only ordered the release of documents related to the Benghazi attacks, and it’s possible that none of those documents exists, the State Department said.
“This number reflects both non-record (meaning personal) and record materials (meaning work related)”, said a USA official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The amount of the newly uncovered emails is nearly half of the roughly 30,000 work-related documents that Clinton’s lawyers turned over to the State Department in 2014.
Conclusion: Access to Secretary of State Clinton could be bought, but it was not cheap. It withheld or redacted some messages found to contain classified information, but the vast majority of the emails were released in batches starting in May 2015. Meanwhile, the FBI has turned over about 15,000 other emails and documents to State that were discovered during the agency’s investigation of Clinton’s private server.
“As we have always said, Hillary Clinton provided the State Department with all the work-related emails she had in her possession in 2014”, spokesman Brian Fallon said in a statement.
“Those interrogatories, as the lawyers call them, are going to be produced by Judicial Watch over the next few weeks and given to Mrs. Clinton”.
Boasberg is overseeing production of the emails as part of a federal public-records lawsuit filed by the conservative legal advocacy group Judicial Watch.
But a year later – and with just over three months until the election – Clinton is still being asked questions about her decision to use a personal email account for work during her tenure as secretary of state. Not all requests appear to have been granted, but the coziness between State and the Clinton family charity raise questions about the integrity of Hillary’s promise to President Obama to build a firewall between the two institutions when she became his secretary of state. Clinton and the foundation have vigorously denied the charge. However, according to The Washington Post, the emails show that, in these and similar cases, the donors did not always get what they wanted, particularly when they sought anything more than a meeting.
The Powell defense has given Clinton shills something to say on TV, but it doesn’t make much sense.
Comey announced that day that the Federal Bureau of Investigation would not recommend that criminal charges be filed against Clinton or any State Department staffers for mishandling classified information. An Estee Lauder exec (that company made an additional donation of $100,000 to $250,000 to the foundation) also scored a meeting with Clinton at a breakfast the secretary hosted at the New York Stock Exchange.
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“Our concern is that politics will intrude upon the process and as, they’ve already done, delay the records unnecessarily”, Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said, calling State’s arguments that reviewing the documents is resource-intensive “ridiculous”.
