The State Department on Monday admitted that it has no emails from former Secretary Hillary Clinton during the first few months of her tenure at State, but otherwise tried to downplay reports that even more email traffic is missing.
Government watchdog Judicial Watch announced Monday that based on its own analysis, five months of emails were missing, including a period at the beginning of her tenure at State. The group said these gaps show that Clinton lied about turning over all her emails to the government from her personal server.
But State Department spokesman John Kirby rejected that analysis Monday afternoon, and said the only gap it knows of happened during the start of her leadership at State.
“We’re not aware of any gaps in the Clinton email set, with the exception of the first few months of her tenure, when Secretary Clinton used a different email account that she has already advised she no longer has access to,” Kirby said.
“Beyond that, there’s no gap that we have seen or are aware of,” he added.
When pressed to explain State’s belief that emails went missing from December 2012 until the end of January 2013, Kirby said officials at first thought there was a gap, but then were able to find them.
“Originally, when they all came in, a cursory sort of preliminary look, a very quick look, at the documents by an official here at the State Department revealed a potential gap of about a month or so,” he said. “Going through them in a more fulsome manner after that, we’ve determined that, in fact, there was no gap, that that time period is covered quite well by the emails that have been provided.”
He said State does have emails from that period, and will be releasing them under its court-ordered plan to release a portion of those emails each month.
