Everyone is wondering what’s in the 30 previously unknown emails related to Benghazi the FBI managed to discover on Hillary’s server and turned over to the State Department for potential redaction.  But the manner by which they escaped destruction may tell us a lot, no matter how much redaction takes place.

The very fact that the emails were recoverable has got Hillary and her team of lawyers in a lot of trouble.  Ed Morrissey of Hot Air explains:

All along, Hillary and her team insisted that they had nothing responsive to investigators and those filing FOIA demands, and that the entire Benghazi probe consisted of rehashed questions already answered.

The new admission from State raises even more questions about the e-mail scandal. The claim from Hillary and her team that the lawyers checked all of her e-mail individually to determine whether they related to official business has long since been debunked. However, one would have expected Hillary and her team to specifically look for materials responsive to Congressional investigations in progress, especially on Benghazi and Libya, even if they were segregating other material by keyword search. Given that the State Department repeatedly argued in court that no such records existed until Hillary’s private e-mail system became public knowledge, the judicial branch may hold State and Hillary to those expectations.

Hillary misrepresented to Congress the thoroughness of the search process.  Let’s use that word instead of “lied,” because it leaves open the door of scapegoating the lawyers.  Bad things often happen to people who work with the Clintons when they are no longer useful.

So how on Earth did those emails escape the highly touted ability of BleachBit to make data inaccessible to God Himself?  Presuming for the sake of discussion that BleachBit really works, that leaves two possibilities.  Keep in mind that the 30 emails were found in a batch of 14,900 emails the FBI recovered through various methods.

1. The FBI recovered the emails through its thorough search of the records of every recipient of an email from the secret email account.
2. Somehow, an error was made, and the 14,900 emails were not deleted with BleachBit.

If number two is true, that was a highly incompetent effort at sanitizing.  Honestly, it seems unlikely.  So we are likely facing 30 emails that were sent to computers and accounts the FBI gained access to.

If the emails were sent to official government accounts, they are probably pretty innocuous.  Hillary had to have realized that anything sent to those accounts was going to be subject to discovery.  The very purpose of her email server was to evade discovery, so she knew that .gov accounts are discoverable.

The reason these emails were deleted from the records she handed over probably is that they included a keyword like Benghazi.  Instead of being marked to hand over, they were marked for destruction, even if the contents were comparatively innocuous.  Non-incriminatory emails should have been handed over but weren’t because the destruction was too inclusive.

But if some of these emails were sent to confidantes like Sidney Blumenthal and recovered via their failure to BleachBit everything, then Katy bar the door.  Assuming they are not completely redacted by the State Department.