As you likely recall, when James Comey released the findings of his investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private bathroom email server, he mentioned the fact that they had recovered “thousands” of emails which had been intentionally purged from the system but were work related in nature, with at least three that were marked classified. What wasn’t immediately brought up during the brouhaha which followed was the question of if and when the public would see these emails. They are, after all, public records if they were related to State Department business.
According to new reporting from The Hill, we’ll probably be getting most of them. But through what I’m sure is just one of those curious coincidence of the universe, possibly not until after the election.
None of the work-related Hillary Clinton emails discovered by the FBI after being deleted from her private server have been released, raising questions about whether any will be seen in public before Election Day.
The FBI says it found “several thousand” work-related emails deleted by Clinton, but the State Department has not committed to a schedule for their release, and it will be up to a federal judge to determine when they could be made public.
“As we have just received this material from the FBI we are still assessing what our process will look like,” State spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau said in a statement to The Hill on Tuesday.
Freedom of Information requests for these documents have already been filed by Judicial Watch and other media outlets, but the wheels of justice can grind along awfully slowly in these matters. A judge is expected to rule on a timetable for their release in the coming weeks, but as we saw last winter, the State Department can simply “run out of time” or cite other logistical concerns and blow through those deadlines. And unlike last summer, the clock is now ticking down fairly quickly. We’ve really only got about twelve weeks to go before people head to the polls and the original email releases took far longer to process than that.
Here’s something else which seems to be missing from the discussion I’m seeing in the media. The emails in question are the ones that the FBI had to “recover” because Clinton and her team had deleted them. Not “lost” them or “misplaced” them… they were intentionally deleted. You may recall that these 30,000 plus emails were none of our business because they had to do with planning Chelsea’s wedding and yoga classes. But James Comey determined that “several thousand” of them were indeed work related and at least three of them contained classified information. Clinton deleted those. Where is the media outrage over this? Once again the initial statements made by Secretary Clinton regarding her private server were shown to be outright lies. Sure, Comey can call it a case of “sloppiness” in handling her records, but “thousands” represents a pretty significant percentage of 30,000. That’s not some minor oversight or fat fingers on the delete key. Clinton and her team attempted to destroy a huge quantity of government information including classified material.
How does that not immediately disqualify her to be President of the United States? Would anyone in the cable news business care to field that question?
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