Either Hillary Clinton inaccurately stated that she turned over all of the official emails she sent or received as secretary of state, or the State Department failed to make them available to the House Select Committee on Benghazi.
That was made apparent when longtime Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime Clinton insider, gave the House committee dozens of pages of emails that were not included in the trove of Clinton records provided by the State Department in February.
Multiple news reports cited people familiar with the House committee’s investigation.
Blumenthal sent Clinton dozens of emails about a wide range of issues while she was in office. Many of those were reports Blumenthal wrote based on intelligence culled from his sources in various countries and regions, including Libya, the Middle East, Algeria and Ukraine.
Clinton’s correspondence with Blumenthal was first uncovered in 2013 when Blumenthal’s email account was hacked. The revelation came as a surprise at the time since Blumenthal had explicitly been blocked by the Obama White House from working in the Clinton State Department because of his nefarious activities during the 2008 Democratic primary. Last month’s release of the 297 Libya- and Benghazi-related emails revealed that Clinton often forwarded Blumenthal’s reports to her top aides.
The new Blumenthal-Clinton correspondence was included in a batch of emails Blumenthal gave in response to a subpoena from the Benghazi committee. He will testify in a closed-door session in front of the panel on Tuesday.
It is unclear exactly why Blumenthal’s emails are only now being provided to the committee, though there are two likely explanations. Either Clinton failed to turn the records over to the State Department in December, or the State Department received the emails from Clinton but for some reason failed to turn them over to the Benghazi committee, which is led by South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy.
If the failure is Clinton’s, that would undermine a claim she made in March after the revelation of her private email use that she had turned over all of her government business-related emails to the State Department in December. Clinton said her handlers had sifted through her private email account to find her official emails. She said her personal emails were deleted. A private email server Clinton used to host the email account has also reportedly been wiped clean.
The rest of Clinton’s emails will be released in increments beginning at the end of the month.
