State Department officials are uncertain whether they have a complete record of Hillary Clinton’s emails because the former secretary decided which ones she would withhold from the agency.
“We don’t know the degree to which there may be other emails that another third party may have, in this case Mr. Blumenthal, that we may not have,” spokesman John Kirby said Friday.
Kirby noted the impossibility of determining whether Clinton had submitted all her emails “unless you have another inventory to check it against,” such as the private server she reportedly used to shield her records or, in the case that emerged this week, a cache of emails held by another person.
“We did not determine what 55,000 pages were turned over, former Secretary of State Clinton did after she went through her emails and decided what was work-related,” Kirby said.
The State Department admitted Thursday that Blumenthal had produced 15 Libya-related emails to the House Select Committee on Benghazi that Clinton had withheld from the department. Those records cast doubt on Clinton’s previous statement that she had provided State with all her work-related communications.
Blumenthal submitted roughly 60 emails to the select committee on June 12 that had not been included in the records provided by the State Department earlier this year.
