The State Department said a clerical error on its end is to blame for the confusion that arose Tuesday over when officials first withheld an email that revealed Hillary Clinton was using a private email address.
Tuesday morning, the watchdog group Judicial Watch said it got a letter from State that said it withheld that email in November, 2014. That prompted Judicial Watch to claim that State appears to have withheld the email to keep it from seeing Clinton’s private email address.
The group noted that State’s failure to release the email in late 2014 meant everyone had to wait until early March, 2015, when Clinton’s private email was first reported.
But State told the Washington Examiner that due to a low-level clerical error, its letter should have said that State withheld the email on July, 2015. That date implies that State had no reason to withhold the email to keep Clinton’s email a secret, since it was already publicly known at that point.
“[T]here is confusion arising from an administrative error in recent correspondence in which the Department said that the document in question was withheld in November 2014,” a State Department official told the Examiner. “That is incorrect.”
“The department regrets any confusion and will be sending corrected correspondence to Judicial Watch,” the official added.
The official provided the Examiner with a copy of a filing State delivered to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, which stated that the department never received the email in question from Clinton’s lawyers until late June 2015.
In the July filing, State still refused to hand it over, but said its reason is that it revealed too much of the deliberative process among officials. But the official stressed that the reason was not because it revealed Clinton’s personal email address, “[email protected].”
At State’s daily press briefing, spokesman Mark Toner said officials were still trying to understand the confusion surrounding the issue, but he was not aware of State’s clerical error at the time.
Toner did, however, say that he doubted State was purposefully trying to hide Clinton’s email address.
“I would … be highly suspect that there’s any truth to this allegation that we were trying to bury this or somehow hold it back,” Toner said.
Judicial Watch told the Examiner that it’s not satisfied with State’s response.
“Whatever statement they issue, they’re again misleading people,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said. “They can’t track their own coverups, and this is why we have discovery.”
“These changing stories,” he added. “We should believe which story?”
Fitton also argued that State’s explanation for withholding the email in mid-2015 isn’t satisfactory either. While most of the email is redacted, Fitton noted that it shows that State appeared to be massaging its reaction to the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi.
The top of the email, for example, says the subject is “REVISED Key points,” and lower down in the chain, it includes another set of redacted “tp’s,” or talking points about the incident.
Read the redacted email chain here:
