State Department officials said Tuesday that their request that
Hillary Clinton turn over thousands of work-related emails from her time as
secretary of state was prompted by the disclosure that Clinton had used a
private e-mail account to handle her correspondence, according to a published
report.
The Washington Post also reported late Tuesday that the State
Department first contacted Clinton about turning over the emails at least three
months before it made similar requests of three of her predecessors: Madeline
Albright, Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice.
The Post report contradicts Clinton's implication that she had
turned over the emails as part of a standard record-keeping request.
"When we were asked to help the State Department make sure
they had everything from other secretaries of state, not just me, I’m the one
who said, ‘Okay, great, I will go through them again,'" Clinton said in an
interview broadcast Sunday on CBS' "Face The Nation." "And we
provided all of them."
State Department spokesman John Kirby told the Post that
officials first asked Clinton to provide her emails in the summer of 2014 in
response to document requests from the House select committee investigating the
2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Kirby added that the
State Department realized that "we similarly did not have extensive email
records from prior Secretaries of State and therefore included them when we
requested their records in October 2014."
The Post quoted one State Department official as saying "We
realized there was a problem" when the department's congressional affairs
office found Clinton's personal e-mail address on documents related to the
Benghazi attack, but could not find a government e-mail account for her.
Clinton ultimately turned over about 30,000 work-related emails
to the department this past December, but said she had deleted another 30,000
emails she deemed personal from the server. Late Tuesday, Bloomberg and The New
York Times reported that some of those emails had been recovered by FBI
investigators.
Clinton was asked about the discrepancies between her account of
the e-mail requests and that of the State Department in a meeting with The Des
Moines Register editorial board.
"I don't know that. I can't answer that," Clinton
answered, according to the paper. "All I know is that they sent the same
letter to everybody. That's my understanding."
When a Register reporter described what the Post was reporting,
Clinton repeated, "You're telling me something I don't know. All I know is
what I have said. What I have said is it was allowed. The State Department has
confirmed that. The same letter went to, as far as I know, my predecessors, and
I'm the one who said, 'Hey, I'll be glad to help.'
"But we'll give you additional information as we get
it."
The FBI is currently investigating whether classified
information that passed through Clinton's private, so-called
"homebrew" server was mishandled. Clinton and her campaign has
repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.
"Due to her practice of emailing her colleagues on their
state.gov email addresses, 90 percent of her work-related correspondence
occurred on the department's email system, and she provided her copies as well,
about 55,000 pages total." Clinton campaign spokesman Nick Merrill told
the Register. "Everything she has said in answering questions has been
consistent with this." foxnews
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