Destruction of Evidence: Hillary Clinton Deleted Half of Emails from Personal Account Used to Conduct Business as Secretary of State

In the interest of government accountability and transparency, all communications of U.S. officials during their tenure in office should be recorded and made available for public scrutiny, except classified records. To facilitate that record keeping, government officials are supposed to use a government email account for their electronic correspondence.

The U.S. secretary of state is no exception to that rule.

But Hillary Rodham Clinton not only used a personal email account (@clintonemail.com) to conduct business as secretary of state, now she’s admitted that half of those emails have been deleted!

Clinton claims that the erased emails were about private matters, like yoga routines, her daughter’s wedding and her mother’s funeral. (New York Times)

Yeah, right.

The American people would not even have known of Secretary of State Clinton’s personal email account were it not for Judicial Watch (JW), the D.C.-based nonpartisan citizens watchdog group. JW made the discovery when it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit more than a month ago demanding details of Clinton’s response to the attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya.

On Feb. 2, 2015, government lawyers handling the case admitted that “In the course of preparing additional information to provide to Plaintiff [JW] for purposes of settlement discussions, Defendant has discovered that additional searches for documents potentially responsive to the FOIA must be conducted.”

Clinton’s allies moved to douse the controversy by pointing to similar practices by her predecessors and to what her supporters say were murky government rules at the time. But all signs are pointing toward a protracted legal morass as advocacy groups, the courts and Congress try to determine whether Clinton’s practice denied them access to critical information during her four years in the Obama Cabinet and thereafter.

Clinton aides and State Department officials argued that the impact of her use of personal email on the government’s permanent files was limited because she turned over 55,000 pages of the emails in December at the department’s request. They also contend that most of Clinton’s work-related emails were preserved on work accounts used by other officials.

However, those explanations overlook or minimize a series of problems caused by the personal email arrangement.

One is that Clinton’s assistants, specifically Huma Abedin, Hillary’s former aide and wife to disgraced former Congressman Anthony Wiener (D-NY), also used a personal email address on the Clinton email domain: huma@clintonemail.com. (American Thinker)

My friend John Molloy sent this email to Huma. LOL

Dear Mrs. Weiner,

I just had an opportunity to speak with the wife of Glenn Doherty to let her know how much I appreciated that at Benghazi he and Tyrone Woods sent many Muslim Brotherhood supporters to meet Allah.

Regards to Anthony.

John Molloy, OSJ
Chairman
National Vietnam & Gulf War Veterans Coalition
Survivor 2/26/93 & 9/11/01 attack on WTC

Another problem is that searches of Clinton’s office files done for Congress, FOIA requests, or for litigation may not have captured relevant emails if the recipient was outside Clinton’s immediate office and that account wasn’t part of the search. Work-related emails that went to parties outside the State Department or to aides’ personal accounts also would have been missed in these searches.

Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, reacted angrily to word that Clinton’s own emails may have escaped scrutiny in the years of litigation the organization has pursued against the State Department over Benghazi and other issues: “It’s a reckless approach to hiding material from the public. We have dozens of FOIA requests and well over a dozen federal lawsuits in which this information is directly relevant. The government has never told us about this. In fact, in some cases they told us they looked through [Clinton’s] office and there was nothing to be found.”

Fitton said his group is preparing to make legal moves to be certain that its demands for information were properly handled and to examine assurances the State Department gave to judges in the group’s lawsuits. “There are a bunch of judges they’re messing with in the federal courts right now,” he said. “Our lawyers are analyzing all of this, and we’ll be taking appropriate steps to insure that records are secured and searched.”

State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf — the same Marie Harf who said what the murderous Islamic State needs are “job opportunities” — arrogantly declared that while the newly provided records will be searched in response to future FOIA requests, there’s no plan to review the accuracy of what the government told the courts or requesters over the past six years. “That’s my understanding, that that will not be happening,” she said. “All of them will now be searched going forward.”

One step Clinton could take to try to defuse the controversy would be to release the records she handed over to State in December. But that would highlight the fact that Clinton’s own aides and lawyers would determine which records were work-related. At a daily State briefing a week ago, Harf faced repeated questions from journalists about why the department was taking Clinton’s word about which emails were official. One journalist even quoted President Ronald Reagan’s famous saying about the Soviets, “Trust but verify.”

Two former State Department officials said that they were surprised that archival questions about Clinton’s work-related emails were not addressed either when she assumed the job in 2009 or when she left in 2013. “I would have expected a secretary of state would, sometime before he or she left office or soon thereafter, make a transfer of email records,” said former National Archives litigation director Jason Baron. (ZeroHedge)

Think about this for a minute:

This is how Hillary Clinton behaved as secretary of state. Imagine how lawless she’ll be as president.

Hillary Clinton would be 69 if she were to become president in January 2017, making her the second oldest to be inaugurated and less than a year younger than Ronald Reagan when he took office. But Americans generally think she’s younger than her actual age, especially voters under age 30 – most of whom say she’s in her 50s or 40s.

To those millions of low-information delusional Americans, here’s a time-lapse video showing how old Hillary really is!