You gotta love this:
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| These are the "scrubbed" emails. Wonder what was in those she didn't want us to see? Notice the timing? Dumped on Friday going into Memorial Day. |
At an impromptu news conference in Hampton, N.H., on Friday, Mrs. Clinton said she was "glad" that the emails are being released.
"This is something that I've asked to be done… for a long time," she said. She defended her practices of using a private email server and account while at the State Department, and said the contents of her emails were handled "appropriately."
The Clinton servers in hyperdrive deleting emails prior to this announcement:
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By
Byron Tau
Updated May 22, 2015 2:02 p.m. ET
The State Department Friday released emails it said that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sent and received in the aftermath of the September 2012 attacks on an American diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya.
The department made public nearly 300 emails from Mrs. Clinton's time in office related to the attacks in which four Americans, including an ambassador, were killed.
The emails offer a look at a seminal foreign policy crisis of Mrs. Clinton's tenure at the State Department, which came just weeks before the presidential election. Republican have charged that the Obama administration, including Mrs. Clinton, at first sought to play down the role of organized terrorist groups in the attack.
The records are part of a larger trove of about 55,000 pages Mrs. Clinton turned over to the State Department since leaving office. The entire set is being reviewed for public release, a process that a judge ruled this week couldn't be delayed until next year. The judge instead ordered the department to release the emails on a rolling basis.
The Obama administration said its intelligence initially suggested that the Benghazi attacks stemmed from a spontaneous demonstration sparked by an anti-Islam video made by an U.S. resident. Later evidence, the administration said, suggested members of the Ansar al Sharia militant group had planned the attack.
"The emails we release today do not change the essential facts or our understanding of the events before, during, or after the attacks, which have been known since the independent Accountability Review Board report on the Benghazi attacks was released almost 2½ years ago," said State Department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf in a statement.
The emails have threatened to become a major distraction in Mrs. Clinton's bid for the presidency. The documents come from a private email server maintained by Mrs. Clinton's staff, rather than a government system. That arrangement was legal, though discouraged, under Obama administration policy. A congressional committee is investigating why Mrs. Clinton used her own email server rather than government technology—and whether the archive she turned over to the State Department is complete.
The department made releasing the Benghazi emails a priority because they were already the subject of a congressional investigation into the 2012 attacks.
The Republican-led House Select Committee on Benghazi, led by Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, is now also probing Mrs. Clinton's email arrangement.
On Friday, Mr. Gowdy said the emails were "self-selected" for release and reiterated his call for the former secretary to turn over her email server to the committee.
The "State Department transferred 300 messages exclusively reviewed and released by her own lawyers," he said. "These lawyers, it must be noted, owed and continue to owe a fiduciary responsibility to Secretary Clinton to protect her interests. To assume a self-selected public record is complete, when no one with a duty or responsibility to the public had the ability to take part in the selection, requires a leap in logic no impartial reviewer should be required to make and strains credibility."
Mrs. Clinton said earlier this year that she had wiped her server clean after turning more than 55,000 pages of relevant emails over to the State Department.
At an impromptu news conference in Hampton, N.H., on Friday, Mrs. Clinton said she was "glad" that the emails are being released.
"This is something that I've asked to be done… for a long time," she said. She defended her practices of using a private email server and account while at the State Department, and said the contents of her emails were handled "appropriately."
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