Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said during her testimony in front of the House Select Committee on Benghazi on Thursday that she emailed during the day only on rare occasions, though documents released by the State Department undermine her claim.
Clinton downplayed her daytime email use to explain why she sent relatively few emails about Libya in 2012 compared to 2011 after Indiana Rep. [crscore]Susan Brooks[/crscore] produced two piles of emails Clinton sent and received during that time span. The first pile contained 795 emails Clinton sent or received from February to December 2011. The second pile contained only 67 Clinton emails from early 2012 through Sept. 11, 2012, the day of the attacks in Benghazi.
“I’m troubled by what I see here,” Brooks said.
.@SusanWBrooks displays emails sent/received by @HillaryClinton. 795 in 2011 on Libya. 67 in 2012. #benghazi https://t.co/M8mNgWsaRA
— CSPAN (@cspan) October 22, 2015
Clinton avoided Brooks’ implication, which was that she either lost interest in Libya even as it became a more dangerous country in 2012, or that her emails from that year have not been turned over in full.
“I did not conduct most of the business that I did on behalf of our country on email,” Clinton said in her own defense.
“I did not email during the day except on rare occasions when I was able to,” she added.
But a review of Clinton emails published online by the State Department calls that claim into question.
For example, the first three emails listed on the State Department’s Freedom of Information Act portal under Clinton’s personal email address are messages she sent at 4:30 p.m., 11:25 a.m., and 11:15 a.m.
There are plenty of examples of emails Clinton sent before and after work hours, often late in the evening or early in the morning. But a cursory review of her email habits indicates that she was at least as active on email during normal working hours as she was before and after.