Earlier this month, we learned that Sidney Blumenthal turned over to Trey Gowdy’s committee 61 emails in which he corresponded with Hillary Clinton that the State Department hadn’t produced in response to a subpoena by the committee for such documents. The question was: did State have the documents but fail to produce them to the committee or did State not have the documents because Hillary, who kept them on a private server, didn’t give them to State?
The answer, it appears, is “both.” According to this report, the State Department found 46 of the 61 emails. It says it didn’t produce them to Gowdy because it didn’t consider them responsive to his committee’s request.
However, State also says it cannot find all or part of 15 of the Clinton emails that Blumenthal produced. Of these 15, nine emails are missing in their entirety.
In response, Rep. Gowdy said:
The revelation these messages were not originally produced to the State Department by Clinton is significant and troubling. This has implications far beyond Libya, Benghazi and our committee’s work. This conclusively shows her email arrangement with herself, which was then vetted by her own lawyers, has resulted in an incomplete public record.
He added:
This confirms doubts about the completeness of Clinton’s self-selected public record and raises serious questions about her decision to erase her personal server — especially before it could be analyzed by an independent, neutral third-party arbiter.
It does, indeed. And it raises serious questions about her honesty.
If Clinton turned over all of her work-related emails to the State Department, as she insists she did, then all of the Blumenthal emails should be in State’s possession. If they are not (as State reports), it is overwhelmingly likely that, contrary to her assertion, Clinton didn’t turn them over as she was required to do.
The Blumenthal emails had already exposed Clinton as less than honest on the subject. AsChuck Ross reminds us, after it was revealed that she received intelligence reports from Blumenthal, Clinton downplayed the news saying that the correspondence was “unsolicited.”
However, the emails Blumenthal turned over to Gowdy’s committee show that Clinton actively encouraged the vicious one to send more intelligence reports. In one exchange, Clinton asked for “additional info” on a Libya-related issue. In another, she asked Blumenthal to send along “any other info.”
Can Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign survive this serial dishonesty about her emails — emails that should never have been maintained on a private server — a server that should never have been destroyed? Probably. In the absence of serious opposition from within her Party, an awful lot of people are determined to elect her no matter what.
But if Hillary enters the White House as president, she will be entitled to roughly the same amount of trust as Richard Nixon was after we learned about the destruction of 18 minutes worth of tape recording.
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