Uh-oh! Hillary caught in lies about emails
It is now established that Hillary Clinton hasn’t been telling the truth about her emails. The only question is how far the lies extend. This is not a comfortable basis on which to run a presidential campaign.
So far, the deceptions are about comparatively minor points, but the important thing is that she has been less than truthful about her emails. Looming over the issue of her honesty is the fact that she destroyed her private email server (that she should not have been using as Secretary of State), and telling investigators in effect, “Trust me. I didn’t destroy anything incriminating.”
We now know that she can’t be trusted.
We now know with certainty that she lied about Sidney Blumenthal’s role as her covert (against her instructions from the Obama administration) advisor, paid by the Clinton Foundation slush fund. She had claimed that Blumenthal’s emails to her were “unsolicited.” Chuck Ross of the Daily Caller:
When asked last month about her correspondence with Blumenthal, downplayed the relationship saying that he “sent me unsolicited emails, which I passed on in some instances.”
That claim is a lie.
Stephen Dinan writes in the Washington Times:
[House Select Committee on Benghazi Chairman Trey Gowdy] said the emails show Mrs. Clinton soliciting help and wisdom from Mr. Blumenthal, who had no official position in the State Department. The former secretary has said his emails were unsolicited.
Bradley Klapper and Matthew Lee of the AP provide some of the actual emails revealing her solicitation of Blumenthal’s help:
Clinton's responses are brief. In one from August 2011, she tells Blumenthal she will be in Paris the next day to meet rebel leaders and says she had "to resort to new iPad" because she didn't have electricity or Blackberry coverage after Hurricane Irene.
In another from March 2012, she passes on an adviser's skepticism regarding one of Blumenthal's reports about political intrigue in post-Gadhafi Libya, saying: "This strain credulity based on what I know. Any other info about it?"
And after a long August 2012 note from Blumenthal about Libya's new interim President Mohamed Yousef el-Magariaf, Clinton writes: "Another keeper — thanks and please keep 'em coming." Four days later, she responds to a follow-up reports about el-Magariaf, saying: "Fascinating. I had a very good call w him."
“Any other info about it?” and “Please keep ‘em coming” certainly demonstrate solicitation of information and help. So she provably lied about Blumenthal.
Then there is the more significant matter of the missing emails that she claimed to have turned over to the State Department. When Sidney Blumenthal responded to a subpoena for the Gowdy Committee, he turned over 15 work-related emails that were apparently not provided by Hullary to the State Department, despite her claim that she had turned over everything that was relevant. Klapper and Lee of AP:
The State Department cannot find in its records all or part of 15 work-related emails from Hillary Rodham Clinton's private server that were released this week by a House panel investigating the 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya, officials said Thursday.
The emails all predate the Sept. 11 assault on the U.S. diplomatic facility and include scant words written by Clinton herself, the officials said. They consist of more in a series of would-be intelligence reports passed to her by longtime political confidant Sidney Blumenthal, the officials said.
Nevertheless, the fact that the State Department says it can't find them among emails she provided surely will raise new questions about Clinton's use of a personal email account and server while secretary of state and whether she has provided the agency all of her work-related correspondence, as she claims.
We can’t know with certainty that Hillary lied about turning over the emails, because it is always possible that the State Department lost the emails. After all, we live in an era when the IRS claims it is so incompetent that it destroys evidence under subpoena inadvertently. But the State Department does have in its records other emails turned over by Hillary, so it would require some explaining to show how just some of them were lost. Perhaps Rose Mary Woods, who implausibly claimed to have accidentally deleted 18 minutes of White House recordings of Richard Nixon, is back from the dead and working as an archivist?