Hillary Clinton Must Be Held Accountable for Withholding and Destroying the Public's Emails and Server

More than 55,000 pages of emails from Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State were printed out into paper copies by somebody in her entourage, put into 12 large document boxes and delivered to the State Department. They represent 30,000 emails, half the 62,000 total emails she sent as Secretary of State. The other half of her emails she deemed personal. They were deleted. After making her personal, private selection of emails to share with Ametica and printing them out onto paper, Mrs. Clinton destroyed their electronic originals by erasing her private email server. The State Department was unable to meaningfully evaluate the paper copies of the emails, so State organized a team that has spent more than four months simply scanning them, thus returning them to their original electronic format. This makes it possible to sort them by date, topic, receiver, people copied, and other key words. ~~~~~ While this major delaying tactic by Hillary Clinton was being corrected, several Freedom of Information Act requests and requests of the House Select Committee on Benghazi languished at the State Department. On Monday, State told a federal judge in a case, brought by Vice News in United States District Court in Washington, that the 55,000 pages of Hillary emails would not be available until January 15,2016. John F. Hackett, acting director of the Office of Information Programs and Services at the State Department, said in the response to the court request in the Vice News case that : “Currently, this project is staffed full time by a project manager and two case analysts, as well as nine FOIA reviewers who devote the entirety of their time at the State Department to this effort, plus other analysts and information technology specialists who provide collateral assistance to this review in addition to their regular duties....The team managing this project has met daily since early April to implement and oversee this large undertaking....In consultation with the National Archives and Records Administration, the Department also conducted a page-by-page review of the documents to identify, designate, mark, and inventory entirely personal correspondence, i.e., those documents that are not federal records, included within the 55,000 pages,” Hackett wrote. ~~~~~ Earlier this week, the State Department said in a separate announcement that it would "soon" release to the House Select Committee on Benghazi just under 900 pages of Mrs. Clinton’s emails related to Libya and the attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi that killed US Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. There is, of course, no indication by the State Department that the emails to be sent to the Select Committee were selected by being subjected to an electronic search. Further, they may not be an exhaustive response to the Committee's request because they were originally selected by Hillary Clinton. ~~~~~ Like all federal judges, the judge in the Vice News case did not take fools and non-compliant defendents lightly, so he said waiting until January next year is not acceptable and ordered the State Department to file a plan to release the emails on a "rolling basis." The State Department said Tuesday that it would comply with the court order to develop a plan for releasing the emails it has received from Clinton, and would announce that plan within a week. State Department spokesman Jeff Rathke told reporters that he doesn't know much about the process of preparing the 55,000 pages of Clinton emails for public release. Rathke doesn't know, for example, how many of those pages had been reviewed yet, or why State preferred to release all the emails at once, when they already exist in dozen of separate batches that have been through varying degrees of review. Rathke told reporters, when asked what was taking so long, that it was the sheer number of email pages to sift through. But he didn't have an update on how many pages had been reviewed so far. "I'm not in a position to preview where that stands," he said. The State Department's court filing in the Vice News case indicated some information may have to be redacted because it could reflect poorly on countries that might be named in the emails. But Rathke declined to say whether State was talking with other countries about the impact on them of any releases. ~~~~~ And while Congress may be slower to react to fools and non-compliant targets than federal judges, finally Congress acts. In the case of the State Department's delays in providing Hillary Clinton emails related to Benghazi, Congress has threatened to use the power of the purse to pressure the State Department into releasing more documents about how former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton handled her job during and after the 2012 Benghazi terror attacks. In what has become a stand-off, investigators in the House of Representatives have warned that entire portions of State's budget for public affairs and the Office of the Secretary could be set aside if it doesn't comply with congressional email demands. ~~~~~ Well, threats to withhold funds get attention fairly quickly, and the State Department today released a batch of 296 emails, about 850 pages that the State Department says are all the Clinton emails related to her handling of the attacks on the US consulate in Benghazi. They are part of the 55,000 pages of emails she turned over to State from her private email server, which she used almost exclusively to conduct both private and public business during her time at State.“The emails we release today do not change the essential facts or our understanding of the events before, during, or after the attacks,” the State Department tweeted shortly after the announcement given to the House Select Committee on Benghazi. Representative Trey Gowdy, chairman of the Committee, said he was not surprised by the State Department statement, because the emails were selected and vetted by Clinton's own attorneys. "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," he said in a statement Friday. Gowdy also said it was important to note that Clinton's email messages are just one piece of information related to Benghazi and cannot be fully evaluated without other documents and emails from other top officials at the State Department. "The committee is working to collect and evaluate all of the relevant and material information necessary to evaluate the full range of issues in context. We will not reach any investigative conclusions until our work is complete, but these emails continue to reinforce the fact that unresolved questions and issues remain as it relates to Benghazi," Gowdy said. ~~~~~ Dear readers, Hillary Clinton has been broadly criticized for conducting official business on a private email server, destroying 30,000 e-mails of her choosing and providing the rest in 12 large boxes of unsearchable paper records. Then, having done all she possibly could to prevent and/or slow the process of understanding her positions and commentary as Secretary of State, she had the gall to tell the media this week : “I want those emails out. Nobody has a bigger interest in getting [the emails] released than I do." Having erased 30,000 of those emails and continuing to refuse to turn over to the government her private server, from which experts could certainly recover much that she deliberately erased -- she added : “They are not mine; they belong to the State Department. But as much as they can expedite that process. That’s what I’m asking: please move as quickly as they possibly can.” For the first time in her public career, Hillary has told the entire truth. The emails and the server are not hers. Therefore, Mrs. Clinton should turn over the server to the National Archives or the State Department immediately. It is the only way we will ever know what her and President Obama's roles in the Benghazi tragedy were. Former Deputy CIA Director Michael Morell believes Clinton’s decision to use the private email server for official State Department business was poor judgment : “I don’t know who gave her that advice, but it was not good advice....She’s paying a price for it now....It was not good.” No other public servant could get away with such a lack of cooperation in obeying federal procedures and in destroying evidence. Neither should Hillary Clinton.