When FBI Director James Comey testified before Congress last month he was asked if he had reviewed Hillary Clinton’s prior congressional testimony about her email server. Comey said Clinton’s testimony was outside the scope of his investigation because he had not received a referral from Congress asking him to investigate it. Today, Rep. Jason Chaffetz of the House Oversight Committee and Rep. Bob Goodlatte of the Judiciary Committee have sent a letter to Channing Phillips, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, listing four instances where Clinton may have perjured herself while under oath. From the Hill:
For one, Clinton repeatedly claimed that none of the material she sent or received via her personal email account was marked as classified. The FBI later declared that at least three emails on her machine contained some classified markings, although they were incomplete and apparently done in error.
Additionally, Clinton previously claimed that her lawyers had gone through each of her emails individually; that all of her work-related emails were given back to the State Department in 2014; and that she used only one server throughout the course of her tenure as the nation’s top diplomat. Each of those points was proven incorrect, the GOP lawmakers claimed.
In addition to the letter, the Oversight Committee also published a video on its You Tube channel asking if Clinton’s statements were false:
As Ed pointed out previously, prosecutions for lying to Congress are rare. In this case, there is some obvious wiggle room for Clinton on most of these points. As to whether there were classification markings in any of her emails, there were markings contained in three of them. However, those markings were incomplete and Director Comey testified that it was “reasonable” to assume that those emails were not classified since they lacked a proper header.
As for her attorneys reading each and every email, Clinton also told Congress she “did not look over their shoulders.” In other words, she can claim she was wrong about the details of how her attorneys processed her emails.
Similarly, it’s not hard to guess what Clinton would say about the fact that there was more than one email sever during her tenure as Secretary of State. She’ll say she didn’t know, which really does seem possible given her apparent level of technical competency. So even if her statement about the number of servers is false (it is), it will be hard to prove she knew it to be false at the time she said it.
It will be interesting to see what the notes on her interview with the FBI reveal about what she told them and how that differs from the story she told the public over the past year.
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