“Deleted?” Not so much.
Two government sources revealed last night that the FBI has managed to recover personal and work-related emails from Hillary Clinton’s private server. The sources say that the emails were “not hard” to recover, but did not elaborate as to whether this latest discovery included all 60,000 emails stored on the server.
The story was originally reported by Bloomberg:
The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s success at salvaging personal e-mails that Clinton said had been deleted raises the possibility that the Democratic presidential candidate’s correspondence eventually could become public. The disclosure of such e-mails would likely fan the controversy over Clinton’s use of a private e-mail system for official business.The FBI is investigating how and why classified information ended up on Clinton’s server. The probe probably will take at least several more months, according to the person, who described the matter on condition of anonymity because the investigation is continuing and deals with sensitive information.…Clinton’s attorney, David Kendall, did not respond to phone calls or e-mails seeking comment. Nick Merrill, a spokesman, said, “We’ve cooperated to date and will continue to do so, including answering any questions about this that anyone including the public may have.”…A bureau spokeswoman, Carol Cratty, declined to discuss any aspect of the investigation. Emily Pierce, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, also declined to comment.
The scope of the FBI’s investigation into the server is so large that it could take several more months before we get a good view of the legal landscape. According to Bloomberg, this could drag out well into next year, and into the Democratic primary season which starts on February 1 at the Iowa caucuses.
Meanwhile, the State Department has all but thrown under the bus Hillary’s efforts to downplay the scandal. Following an interview in which Clinton described the investigation as the product of a routine records request, State Department spokesman John Kirby reached out to correct the record.
“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, ‘Okay, great, I will go through them again,’ ” Clinton said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “And we provided all of them.”But State Department officials provided new information Tuesday that undercuts Clinton’s characterization. They said the request was not simply about general record-keeping but was prompted entirely by the discovery that Clinton had exclusively used a private e-mail system. They also said they first contacted her in the summer of 2014, at least three months before the agency asked Clinton and three of her predecessors to provide their e-mails.“In the process of responding to congressional document requests pertaining to Benghazi, State Department officials recognized that it had access to relatively few email records from former Secretary Clinton,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said in a statement e-mailed to The Washington Post. “State Department officials contacted her representatives during the summer of 2014 to learn more about her email use and the status of emails in that account.”Kirby added that the agency then recognized “that we similarly did not have extensive email records from prior Secretaries of State and therefore included them when we requested their records in October 2014.”
This isn’t a new narrative for Clinton. Back in March she held a press conference and went on the record with her story about why her emails were originally called into question:
The Clinton campaign continues to maintain that Clinton handed over what email messages she had as part of a routine request.
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