The State Department said it doesn’t believe officials purposefully buried an email that revealed Hillary Clinton’s private email address when she ran the department, on the same day a watchdog group accused the department of doing exactly that.
But a spokesman also couldn’t say on Tuesday what other reasons there might have been for keeping that email out of the public eye.
Judicial Watch released a new, unclassified email from Clinton on Tuesday morning that had been previously withheld by State in November, 2014. The email, from 2012, is mostly redacted, but does reveal Clinton’s personal email address, “[email protected].”
After State refused to release the email in late 2014, it would take nearly four more months before it was revealed that Clinton used a private email and a private server.
When asked Tuesday afternoon if State held back the email in order to hide Clinton’s email address, State Department spokesman Mark Toner rejected that theory.
“I would, without knowing all the details yet because we just found out, be highly suspect that there’s any truth to this allegation that we were trying to bury this or somehow hold it back, you know, keep it from getting out because it would somehow lead to the discovery of her private server,” Toner said.
At the same time, however, Toner admitted that he wasn’t sure exactly why the email was held back in the first place.
“I don’t know what the … and I was looking into what the delay was caused by,” he said. “So let me get more facts and more details about that and I’ll share that with you.”
When it was pointed out that the State Department had never released a single email with Clinton’s private email address on it, Toner said that was “partly” because she was “sitting secretary of state at the time.”
Clinton’s email scandal escalated over the last year after Clinton, the front-runner Democratic presidential candidate, insisted that she never referred to any classified material in her email, which many feared would be more open to hacking. But since then, it’s been shown that more than 1,300 emails had sensitive information on them, and that 22 of them have been held back as “top secret.”
Federal officials have been investigating whether the information on those emails was classified at the time they were sent, or whether they were retroactively deemed to be classified.
