State Department has Libya e-mails Clinton did not produce

26 June 2015 - 09:26 By New York Times

Despite claims by Hillary Rodham Clinton that she gave the State Department all of her work-related e-mails from the personal account that she used exclusively when she was in office, the department said that it had received several related to Libya that she had not handed over. The disclosure is the first significant evidence to raise questions about whether Clinton deleted e-mails from the account that she should have given to the State Department because they were government records.The State Department said that in comparing e-mails from Sidney Blumenthal, a confidant of Clinton’s, to the ones she gave to the department, officials could not find nine and portions of six others. At the time they were exchanging the e-mails, Blumenthal did not work at the State Department but was routinely providing her with intelligence memos about Libya, some with dubious information, which Clinton circulated to her deputies.The disclosure is likely to increase pressure on the House speaker, John A. Boehner of Ohio, from fellow Republicans to subpoena the server that housed the personal email account. Clinton has said that last year she gave the State Department about 30,000 e-mails that were related to her work as secretary of state. She said that she deleted roughly the same number of e-mails from the account, saying those messages “were private, personal” ones about her daughter’s wedding, her mother’s funeral, family vacations and yoga.Nick Merrill, a spokesman for Clinton, said that she had given the State Department “over 55,000 pages of materials,” including “all e-mails in her possession from Blumenthal.”In recent weeks, Republicans have raised concerns about whether Clinton gave the State Department all of her work-related e-mails. On June 12, Blumenthal gave the House committee investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, about 60 emails related to Libya that he had exchanged with Clinton. Blumenthal handed over the e-mails in response to a subpoena from the committee.Many of the e-mails that Blumenthal divulged had not been given to the committee by the State Department, which has taken the lead in responding to requests for documents related to the attacks that killed four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens.Concerned that the State Department might have withheld the emails from the committee, its chairman, Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., asked why the panel had not been given the e-mails and whether Clinton had handed them over to the department.The State Department then went through the e-mails that Clinton had turned over, discovering that there were some that Blumenthal had given to the committee that Clinton had not handed over.Last week, the committee sent the State Department the e-mails that Blumenthal had handed over and asked whether it had them. The committee asked for a response by Monday, but the department said it would need more time to review its records. On Thursday, the State Department sent its response to the panel. -2015 New York Times News Service..

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