State Department email records suggest one official attempted to keep discussions about Hillary Clinton’s private communications out of email messages that could one day become public through the Freedom of Information Act.
Peggy Grafeld, an agency FOIA officer, encouraged her colleagues to “discuss, rather than email” critical information about Clinton’s records, according to conservative nonprofit Judicial Watch.
Grafeld’s message “shows that one of the agency’s top officials for the records management and public disclosure did not want to create a written record about issues,” Judicial Watch said.
Other records obtained by the conservative watchdog show the collection of private emails Clinton turned over to the State Department last year contain months of gaps during which the former secretary failed to turn over any records.
For example, the agency does not have any emails Clinton sent between her first day in office in Jan. 2009 to April 12 of that year, according to an internal State Department document.
Officials also could not find any emails Clinton received between Jan. and March 2009.
The messages she sent during her final month in office were also missing.
The gaps suggest Clinton may have withheld messages from the five months in question, despite her previous claims that she had turned over all work-related emails from her tenure.
Those claims were first called into question in June, when Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime Clinton confidante, gave the House Select Committee on Benghazi more than a dozen Benghazi-related emails involving Clinton that the former secretary had never given the State Department.
A State Department spokesman admitted Monday to missing emails from the first few months of Clinton’s time as secretary, but denied the gap from Dec. 2012 to Feb. 2013.
Records indicate official urged colleagues to discuss Clinton, rather than use email messages. in White House on LockerDome
