The FBI refused to cooperate Monday with a court-ordered inquiry into former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s email server, telling the State Department that they won’t even confirm they are investigating the matter themselves, much less willing to tell the rest of the government what’s going on.
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But the State Department said Tuesday they only asked Clinton for her emails after discovering, for the first time, her use of a private server. “And we provided all of them”.
Instead he gave the department until the end of this week to have all of their emails put in a searchable database within the department, and gave them until next week to perform an initial search by keyword to determine the universe of documents that might be responsive to Citizens United’s request for information.
They said the request was not simply about general record-keeping but was prompted entirely by the discovery that Clinton had exclusively used a private email system.
Clinton had never mentioned that agency officials reached out to her months before they formally requested all her emails so they could respond to subpoenas from the House Select Committee on Benghazi. The State Department has been inundated with the staff’s emails and has been very slow to process them.
Beginning in August, senior State Department officials held negotiations with Mrs. Clinton’s lawyers and advisers to gain access to her personal email records.
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell says he doesn’t have any emails to turn over to the State Department.
If the Federal Bureau of Investigation recovers work-related emails that were deleted rather than provided to the State Department, Clinton could potentially face legal consequences, given her declaration.
Judicial Watch did release more than 50 pages Monday of emails it obtained from Ms. Abedin’s account on Mrs. Clinton’s server, and said it was clear she was talking about “sensitive” topics that shouldn’t have been discussed on an insecure account. She submitted her records in December 2014.
Mills’s attorney, Beth Wilkinson, said in an interview that Mills was properly responding to the State Department’s concerns.
The report also showed contradictions to Clinton’s insinuation that she had turned over the emails as her submission to the record-keeping request.
Clinton’s own State Department conflicted with her story, noting that the record request was completely prompted by discovery of Clinton’s unusual and unorthodox use of a private email system for official government business.
“This all raised the question to us: What else are we missing, and what do we need to comply’ with the request, said one official briefed on the matter”.
“In the process of responding to congressional document requests pertaining to Benghazi, State Department officials recognized that it had access to relatively few email records from former Secretary Clinton”, Kirby told the Washington Post. Due to her practice of emailing her colleagues on their state.gov email addresses, 90% of her work-related correspondence occurred on the Department’s email system, and she provided her copies as well, about 55,000 pages total. “Every effort is being made”, she said.
Clinton’s description of her interactions with the State Department over her use of the private system as secretary has emerged as an issue in her presidential campaign. Clinton is now seeking the Democratic Party’s nomination for president. She has said repeatedly that it was “permitted” by the State Department and widely known in the Obama administration. But they noticed that among the 15,000 documents they examined, there were no emails to or from an official departmental account for Mrs. Clinton. State Department spokesman John Kirby also said the agency realized it had “relatively few” of Clinton’s emails while trying to respond to congressional investigators seeking emails related to Benghazi.
Ms. Shapiro rejected that, saying they were caught unaware by the new emails Ms. Mills and Ms. Abedin turned over more than two years after they left the State Department.
The issue has led to frustrations within the State Department in recent months, as some officials have grown exhausted of having to answer for a political controversy not of their making, according to three senior officials.
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GOP-led committees in both the House and Senate are investigating Clinton’s use of a private email and server while she was secretary of state.
