State Department officials said Thursday they were unable to locate 15 emails between Hillary Clinton and her confidante Sidney Blumenthal that were released earlier this week by the House Select Committee on Benghazi.
The acknowledgement raises questions about whether Clinton disclosed all of her work-related emails to the State Department, as she has claimed.
All of the emails were written before the 2012 terror attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, the Associated Press reported Thursday.
“We have confirmed that the emails Secretary Clinton provided the Department include almost all of the material in Mr. Blumenthal’s production. There are, however, a limited number of instances, 15, in which we could not locate all or part of the content of a document from his production within the tens of thousands of emails she gave us,” a State Department official, who declined to be named, told the Washington Examiner. “Those instances are described in a letter the department sent today to the committee. The substance of those 15 emails is not relevant to the 2012 attacks in Benghazi.”
“There also are instances where the department has produced portions of Secretary Clinton’s correspondence with Mr. Blumenthal that did not appear in his production to the committee,” the State official added.
Blumenthal submitted roughly 60 emails to the committee on June 12 that lawmakers said did not appear in the batch published by State last month.
Those emails were sent between February 2011 and December 2012 — three months after militant Islamists claimed four American lives in Benghazi.
Rep. Trey Gowdy, chairman of the Benghazi committee, has criticized the agency for its refusal to answer questions about why the records, most of which pertained to Benghazi, were not submitted to Congress upon request.
“This confirms doubts about the completeness of Clinton’s self-selected public record and raises serious questions about her decision to erase her personal server — especially before it could be analyzed by an independent, neutral third party arbiter,” the South Carolina Republican said Thursday.
“This has implications far beyond Libya, Benghazi and our committee’s work. This conclusively shows her email arrangement with herself, which was then vetted by her own lawyers, has resulted in an incomplete public record,” Gowdy said.
Democrats on the committee have pushed back by claiming the majority has handled Blumenthal unfairly because of his political links to Clinton.
