A Thursday report in the New York Times claims that a batch of Hillary Clinton emails reviewed by the paper “appear to back up” Clinton’s assertion that she never received classified information at her personal email account, which she relied on while serving as secretary of state.
The State Department has released thousands of emails Clinton turned over to the federal government to the House Select Committee on Benghazi, which is investigating the 2012 attack on an American consulate in Libya. State is working on releasing those same emails to the public in the coming days, in a form that is expected to include more redactions.
Clinton stored those emails on a private server, making her the sole arbiter of which ones to make public and which ones to delete. She later deleted tens of thousands of emails on her own that she deemed to be of a personal nature.
A key question being asked by Republicans is whether Clinton used her personal email to access classified information. But the Times agreed with Clinton, after reviewing some of those emails, that no classified information was transmitted.
“The Times obtained about a third of the 850 pages of emails,” Times reporter Michael Schmidt wrote. “They appear to back up Mrs. Clinton’s previous assertions that she did not receive classified information at her private email address.”
Clinton, a Democratic presidential candidate, has said she never received classified material on her private email account, which could have been vulnerable to malicious hackers. However, that claim has never been corroborated by an independent investigation of her server, and in late March, Clinton’s lawyer said that the server had been wiped clean.
Asked by the Washington Examiner media desk how the Times was able to discern that the newly released emails support Clinton’s assertion that she never received classified information on her private server, Schmidt declined to comment on the record.
While the report said no classified information was included in the emails, it also said “some of the emails” contain “sensitive but unclassified information,” including the location of some State Department officials.
And importantly, the emails also show that Clinton was “circulating information about the attacks in Benghazi that contradicted the Obama administration’s initial narrative of what occurred, and that she was concerned about how Republicans could use the incidents to undermine President Obama.”
The story wasn’t specific, but Republicans have argued for years that the Obama administration purposefully tried to blame the 2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on a controversial video. Earlier this week, it was reported that Clinton ally Sidney Blumenthal may have helped create that initial narrative.
