State Department officials appear to have altered their public account of how the agency acquired 55,000 printed pages of Hillary Clinton’s emails.
While a report Tuesday indicated Clinton and the State Department had told conflicting stories about the agency’s initial document request, a review of the State Department’s previous statements reveal State also contradicted itself with its latest admission.
Marie Harf, former State Department spokesperson, described the document request in March as a routine housekeeping inquiry that was not targeted at Clinton.
“The notion that the Department didn’t have the content of these emails until she turned them over isn’t accurate. A vast majority of them were to or from State.gov addresses or to addressees. So they were obviously retained and captured in that moment,” Harf said.
However, John Kirby, State Department spokesman, told the Washington Post Tuesday that the agency only reached out to Clinton to inquire about her emails after discovering it didn’t have any in its archives.
State Department officials had been trying to piece together records for the House Select Committee on Benghazi, which was asking for documents as it began the early weeks of its congressional probe.
But they soon discovered Clinton did not have a government email account on file, nor was the agency able to locate more than a handful of her emails.
Harf delivered a very different version of events during the March 3 press briefing, which was shortly after news of Clinton’s private email use first broke in The New York Times.
“When in the process of updating our records management — this is something that’s sort of ongoing given technology and the changes — we reached out to all of the former secretaries of state to ask them to provide any records they had,” Harf said. “Secretary Clinton sent back 55,000 pages of documents to the State Department very shortly after we sent the letter to her. She was the only former secretary of state who sent documents back in to this request.”
Clinton repeated that narrative Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” when she suggested she provided her emails in response to a routine housekeeping request.
“When we were asked to help the State Department make sure they had everything from other secretaries of state, not just me, I’m the one who said, ‘OK, great, I’ll go through them again,'” Clinton said. “And we provided all of them. And more than 90 percent were already in the system.”
Clinton struggled to explain the discrepancies between the original account of the email request and the one provided by Kirby.
“I can’t answer that,” she told The Des Moines Register editorial board Tuesday when confronted with details from the Post story.
Harf’s suggestion that Clinton screened her emails and sent them to the agency “very shortly” after officials contacted her was challenged this week by new information from Sen. Ron Johnson that indicated Clinton began combing through her records 10 months before she turned them over.
Clinton paid Platte River Networks, the Denver-based technology company that has managed her server since 2013, to begin archiving her old emails and transferring them onto a new system in February 2014, Johnson said in a letter to Patrick Kennedy, State’s undersecretary for management.
The State Department formally requested Clinton’s emails in October of last year, and although she had initiated the process of separating personal emails from work-related ones eight months prior, she still did not hand them over until December.
Correct the Record, a left-wing group aligned with Clinton, said Wednesday the account given by Kirby “is not new information” and argued the story “does not contradict Clinton’s account.”
The group called a spate of new reports questioning the candidate’s past statements about her emails “nothing-burgers” in a memo to supporters.
According to the select committee, the State Department handed over a batch of documents in August 2014 that only included eight emails to or from Clinton, even though congressional investigators had asked for a more comprehensive set of her records.
The State Department therefore would have recognized the fact that Clinton used a private email account well before it asked for her private emails in October, as officials would have made the discovery months earlier while compiling records for the production to Congress.
