New trove of Clinton Benghazi emails proves thin
A set of about 30 Benghazi-related messages found by the FBI during their investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email system turns out to contain little fodder for critics or supporters of the Democratic presidential nominee.
A lawyer for the State Department told a federal judge last week that the FBI-provided collection contained up to 30 emails “potentially responsive” to requests for records about the 2012 attack which killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens.
The disclosure of a new set Benghazi-related emails led GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump’s campaign to attack Clinton over the deletion of roughly 32,000 emails from her private account while a House probe into the attack was active.
However, in a court filing early Wednesday morning, government lawyers said a closer review of the records the FBI located revealed only one of the messages was entirely absent from those produced by previous State Department searches: a flattering note sent by a veteran U.S. diplomat following her testimony on Benghazi before a Senate panel in January 2013.
“I watched with great admiration as she dealt with a tough and personally painful issue in a fair, candid and determined manner,” then-U.S. Ambassador to Brazil Thomas Shannon wrote in a message sent to State Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills official account and forwarded on by Mills to Clinton’s personal one. “I was especially impressed by her ability to turn aside the obvious efforts to politicize the events in Benghazi, reminding Americans of the tremendous sacrifice made by Chris Stevens and his colleagues but also insisting that our ability to play a positive role in the world and protect U.S. interests requires a willingness to take risks.”
It’s unclear why the message from Shannon, now Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, for wasn’t produced in previous searches or among the roughly 30,000 emails Clinton’s lawyers deemed work-related and turned over to State early two years ago.
“In response to a Benghazi-related FOIA request, after completing its review of the set of documents previously identified as potentially responsive, State has determined that there is one responsive document that is not a duplicate of the documents provided by former Secretary Clinton in December 2014 and that had not been previously provided to Judicial Watch in this case,” State spokesman Mark Toner said. “The email does not change the facts that have previously been made clear about the Benghazi attacks.”
Two other emails found by the FBI were “near duplicates” of previously produced messages, State’s lawyers said. The FBI provided files simply showed that Clinton had asked an assistant to print out the emails. One contained an end-of-year message she sent to staffers across the department in 2012. Another was a note from a former advance staffer for Clinton, Rick Jasculca, praising her for her response to the Benghazi attack.
“It took some kind of special courage to step to the plate and take responsibility for what happened in Benghazi,” Jasculca wrote on October 16, 2012, following a CNN interview where Clinton said she accepted responsibility for the security failures.
The conservative watchdog group suing for the Benghazi-related records, Judicial Watch, said it did not accept State’s characterization of the released records as “near duplicates” and wants to see all 30 messages in the form turned over by the FBI. Some of the messages contain what State called “internal technical metadata” that the FBI captured or added as it retrieved the messages.
The FBI has recovered about 15,000 messages that State believes may have not been turned over by Clinton or previously located in official searches. No firm schedule has been set for release of most of those emails
In a separate development, the State Department indicated it may have additional records about State’s handling of issues related to Clinton’s private email system after she left the agency in 2013. In a court filing Tuesday in another case brought by Judicial Watch, lawyers for State asked a judge to delay some deadlines in the case because the agency may have overlooked some files that could shed light on how State wrestled with the complexities created by Clinton’s use of an email account not hosted on State’s official systems.
“In the course of preparing a declaration as to the adequacy of State’s search for records responsive to the Request, State realized that certain files that are reasonably likely to contain records responsive to the Request had not been searched. State immediately began to search those files but has not yet completed that search,” Justice Department lawyers representing State said, asking that a filing due Wednesday be put off until September 30.
The judge handling that case, James Boasberg, granted the requested delay, which was not opposed by Judicial Watch.