Earlier this month, Hillary Clinton participated in a highly-criticized press conference regarding her decision to exclusively use a private e-mail system while at the State Department.
Since the news conference — which pretty much failed to satisfy the public demand for answers regarding her secrecy — the scandal has remained alive, with the latest developments breaking last week.
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Specifically, Trey Gowdy, the Republican congressman who chairs the Select Committee investigating the 2012 Benghazi terror attack, said Friday that Clinton wiped her private e-mail server clean.
“While it is not clear precisely when Secretary Clinton decided to permanently delete all e-mails from her server, it appears she made the decision after October 28, 2014, when the Department of State for the first time asked the Secretary to return her public record to the Department,” Rep. Gowdy (R-S.C.) said in a statement.
The committee had subpoenaed all of Clinton’s documents related to the Benghazi attack. Unfortunately, she has not provided any new e-mails and her lawyer is insisting that the mere 900 pages of e-mails she already gave to the committee are sufficient.
In light of this new juicy detail, we thought we would revisit Clinton’s atrocious March 10 press conference and examine five particular statements she made then that appear even more false now.
1. “I opted for convenience to use my personal email account — which was allowed by the state department — because I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails, instead of two.”
You know what’s inconvenient? Wiping a server clean. In fact, it sounds nearly as inconvenient as having your staff delete over 30,000 e-mail messages after deeming them personal. Americans aren’t buying the “I don’t want to carry around two phones” excuse.
2. “It would have been probably, you know, smarter to have used two devices.”
At this point, it really really looks like Hillary Clinton is hiding something. When you’re trying to hide something, you know what’s smart? Clearing your tracks — or in this case, your server. So, if Clinton really is trying to hide something, it would actually be the opposite of smart for her to keep the server, because then she would be found out. Now, we’ll probably never know for sure! Hah!
Unfortunately for the former secretary of State, this isn’t quite the kind of “smart” Americans are looking for in a U.S. leader.
3. “We did not [delete government-related e-mails]. In fact, my direction to conduct the thorough investigation was to err on the side of providing anything that could be possibly viewed as work related.”
Suuuure, she deleted over 30,000 e-mails solely about “planning Chelsea’s wedding or [her] mother’s funeral arrangements, condolence notes to friends as well as yoga routines, [and] family vacations” after having her staff conduct a word search. We’re betting that some work e-mails — at least accidentally — were deleted during the project.
4. “I fully complied with every rule that I was governed by.”
We already knew this was false, as Clinton violated a 2009 regulation when she didn’t ensure that her e-mails were stored with the State Department upon leaving her post. Now, it’s just harder to imagine that she actually believes she did nothing wrong amid her sketchy behavior.
5. “They have nothing to do with work, but I didn’t see any reason to keep them.”
Perhaps what Clinton was really thinking was that she saw a reason not to keep them. Why else go through the process of deleting the communications and wiping the server clean if there merely wasn’t “any reason” to retain the e-mails? E-mails that would undoubtedly have been obtained by the House Select Committee on Benghazi if they were kept, no less.
You can read the full transcript of Clinton’s press conference here.
