This is almost starting to become a running gag. Last week the Associated Press reported on a “key message” which Hillary Clinton failed to turn over to the State Department. Today the AP reports that 34 more work-related emails just turned up:
The latest emails were released under court order by the State Department to the conservative legal advocacy group Judicial Watch. The batch includes 34 new emails Clinton exchanged through her private account with her deputy chief of staff, Huma Abedin. The aide, who also had a private email account on Clinton’s home server, later gave her copies to the government.
The emails were not among the 55,000 pages of work-related messages that Clinton turned over to the agency in response to public records lawsuits seeking copies of her official correspondence. They include a March 2009 message where the then-secretary of state discusses how her official records would be kept.
“I have just realized I have no idea how my papers are treated at State,” Clinton wrote to Abedin and a second aide. “Who manages both my personal and official files? … I think we need to get on this asap to be sure we know and design the system we want.”
So Hillary wanted to “design” a system to manage her official files at State. The answer to why this email got deleted seems fairly obvious. It shows that she was thinking about this topic within months of becoming Secretary of State. Presumably someone informed her, way back then, that she was required to turn over all her work-related records before leaving office. And yet, she didn’t do that. She sat on them for nearly 2 years until the State Department requested them. The Inspector General says she broke the rules.
The AP says a total of 50 work-related emails have been uncovered which were not turned over by Clinton. It’s worth pointing out once again that this is completely at odds with what she claimed in her UN press conference
last year:
After I left office, the State Department asked former secretaries of state for our assistance in providing copies of work- related emails from our personal accounts. I responded right away and provided all my emails that could possibly be work-related, which totaled roughly 55,000 printed pages, even though I knew that the State Department already had the vast majority of them.
What is her explanation for the fact that dozens of these emails, including ones in which she is talking about her own email set up, were deleted rather than turned over? Her spokesman didn’t respond to the latest cache of emails but he previously said she turned over everything she had at the time the request came in.
I’m suspicious of this claim as I explained
in detail here. Clinton’s team had 5 months between the time the initial, informal request came in and when the formal request was finally sent to them by the State Department. That’s a lot of time to sift through email and determine what should be deleted. But it allows them to claim she turned over everything she still had when the (formal) request came in.
The real question is why these work-related emails, supposedly subject to FOIA, were deleted at all. So far, no one at the Clinton campaign seems to have an answer for that.
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