Today a federal judge pressed the State Department to turn over 14,900 emails recently discovered by the FBI before their planned release (perhaps mid October but likely to be later.) The judge wants State Department lawyers back in court on September 22nd with a new plan for releasing this latest batch of hidden emails. From the Post,
“The FBI’s year-long investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email server uncovered 15,000 more documents from her time as secretary of state that were not previously disclosed by her attorneys. The State Department is expected to discuss when and how it will release the emails Monday morning in federal court.
“The total — confirmed by the Justice Department — was disclosed by a conservative legal group after the State Department said last week that it would hand over the emails. The number to be released is nearly 50 percent more than the 30,000-plus that Clinton’s lawyers deemed work-related and returned to the department in December 2014.”
Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post reports these facts:
1. Clinton is the first secretary of state to exclusively use a private email account for official business.
2. She is also the first secretary of state to have a private email server housed at her home.
3. When asked by the State Department to turn over her emails, Clinton had a team of lawyers go through them to separate those that were purely personal and those that touched on some aspect of her professional life. The personal emails were deleted permanently off the server. The professional ones were turned over to the State Department. Here’s how that broke down:
50% of the Clinton’s emails were withheld as personal and private,
44% emails released with a state.gov address
5% released with other addresses
In other words, Hillary deleted as many emails as she turned over. And the FBI is just fine with that. FBI director James Comey admitted Hillary lied and she did have classified information on her private email server but there’s nothing to see here, move along. Trump’s right about one thing, the system is rigged. But we all knew that.
More here and Colin Powell objects to Clinton trying to pin it on him here.
