The emails, released at 2 a.m. Friday and a week after the State Department said it would miss the originally intended deadline, feature Clinton commenting on another employee’s use of personal email and exchanges with friends and family.
Advertisement
A top government watchdog says that the State Department may be protecting former top diplomat and current Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton by providing “inaccurate and incomplete” responses to information requests. He said the fact it was originally to be sent on a secure fax did not mean it was classified. “It is false that Hillary Clinton asked for classified material to be sent over a nonsecure system”, Fallon said in an email to ABC News. (He works for her.) She then expresses surprise that Godfrey would use his personal email account to send professional emails.
The latest batch of Hillary Clinton emails released by the State Department early Friday contain what may be the smoking gun that forces the Justice Department to charge the former secretary of state with a crime, according to former federal prosecutor Joseph diGenova. Clinton’s chief of staff “had an obligation to correct the record”, the group’s leader told the New York Times. Clinton has long maintained that she never received or sent anything “marked” classified.
It was unclear what the talking points, which are typically used to summarize material to be discussed in public, were about or whether they contained any sensitive or classified information.
To keep on pace, the State Department says it will comply with all the recommendations for improvement and has already hired a “transparency coordinator”, which the report noted as a positive step.
On Feb. 27, 2011, Clinton was forwarded an email from someone named John Godfrey, whom an aide described to Clinton as “one of our most knowledgeable officers on Libya“. State Department spokesman John Kirby said Thursday the latest release would bring the department in line with that goal.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) blasted Clinton after the discovery of the “smoking gun” e-mails, calling her time as Secretary of State “disturbing” and that she should “come clean” about what she did. Clinton said she passed the memo on to the White House. “I was surprised that he used personal email account if he is at State”, Clinton wrote to Jake Sullivan.
In June 2011, Clinton was supposed to talk with Maryland Senator Ben Cardin about his proposal to sanction Russian Federation over the prison death of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who represented a Western-owned investment firm accused by the authorities of fraud and tax evasion.
Records involving Clinton’s private email account, requested in 2012 by the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, turned up no records. A Grassley spokeswoman only pointed to the mention of the secure fax as evidence the material would have been classified.
Advertisement
The U.S. State Department has failed in its ability to handle Freedom of Information Act requests, a report released by the Office of Inspector General (OIG) on Thursday has claimed. If so, has the Federal Bureau of Investigation opened a criminal inquiry into these circumstances?
