State Department spokesman John Kirby said Monday the agency is still trying to determine whether the dozens of previously undisclosed emails sent to and from Hillary Clinton and published by the House Select Committee on Benghazi were records State “didn’t have.”
Kirby stressed the State Department had submitted emails to the committee that discussed Benghazi, and not necessarily everything related to Libya.
The uncertainty suggests it was not immediately clear that Clinton had submitted the newly published emails to the State Department upon request last November. Her former aide, Sidney Blumenthal, provided the emails to the committee earlier June 12.
“There has been communication between the committee and the State Department over the Blumenthal emails,” Kirby said. “We’re working through that right now to determine if there are emails in that batch that we either didn’t have or may have not provided.”
Kirby noted several of the emails released by the select committee Monday appeared to overlap with records the agency published last month.
But he did not deny the possibility, raised by several reporters at Monday’s briefing, that some of the Blumenthal emails may not have been given to the State Department by Clinton’s staff.
Clinton hand-selected which records she would provide for the agency from her private server before reportedly erasing the rest.
Many of the emails posted online Monday reference Benghazi specifically, raising questions about State’s earlier claims that it did not give the committee the emails in question because they pertained to Libya, not Benghazi, and thus fell outside the initial request.
