RUTHFULLY YOURS

The news shows reported yesterday that the FBI discovered 14,900 emails that Hillary had not turned over to the State Department.  This news again focuses attention on the July 5, 2016 report by FBI Director Comey that no criminal charges be pursued against Hillary, although he criticized her handling of the emails as “extremely careless.”  In his report, Comey said there were “several thousand work-related emails” that Hillary did not turn over to the State Department.  The question is, are those “several thousand” part of the 14,900, and if so, why didn’t Comey say on July 5 that there were 14,900 emails not turned over to the State Department and further explain the nature of the balance of the “several thousand emails”?  It again raises the issue of Hillary’s intent in using a private server.

The relevant text of Comey’s report is as follows:

From the group of 30,000 e-mails returned to the State Department, 110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained Confidential information, which is the lowest level of classification. Separate from those, about 2,000 additional e-mails were “up-classified” to make them Confidential; the information in those had not been classified at the time the e-mails were sent.

The FBI also discovered several thousand work-related e-mails that were not in the group of 30,000 that were returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014. We found those additional e-mails in a variety of ways. Some had been deleted over the years and we found traces of them on devices that supported or were connected to the private e-mail domain. Others we found by reviewing the archived government e-mail accounts of people who had been government employees at the same time as Secretary Clinton, including high-ranking officials at other agencies, people with whom a Secretary of State might naturally correspond.

This helped us recover work-related e-mails that were not among the 30,000 produced to State. Still others we recovered from the laborious review of the millions of e-mail fragments dumped into the slack space of the server decommissioned in 2013[.] …

… I should add here that we found no evidence that any of the additional work-related e-mails were intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them. Our assessment is that, like many e-mail users, Secretary Clinton periodically deleted e-mails or e-mails were purged from the system when devices were changed. Because she was not using a government account—or even a commercial account like Gmail—there was no archiving at all of her e-mails, so it is not surprising that we discovered e-mails that were not on Secretary Clinton’s system in 2014, when she produced the 30,000 e-mails to the State Department.

It could also be that some of the additional work-related e-mails we recovered were among those deleted as “personal” by Secretary Clinton’s lawyers when they reviewed and sorted her e-mails for production in 2014.

The lawyers doing the sorting for Secretary Clinton in 2014 did not individually read the content of all of her e-mails[.]

There are several problems with this.

First, now there are 14,900 emails that Hillary did not turn over.  Comey said there were “several thousand “work-related emails” not turned over.  Are these “several thousand emails” part of the 14,900 emails that were not turned over?

It appears they are, but a troubling question is whether all 14,900 are “work-related,” which demands explanation of what Comey considered work-related.  Did Comey consider emails dealing with the Clinton Foundation and Bill’s speeches as not work-related, even though there is reasonable suspicion that Hillary used her secretary of state position to benefit the Clinton Foundation and Bill’s speech career?  Comey should have stated that there were 14,900 emails that were not turned over and explained what he considered work-related and not work-related.

It may be that Comey considered only several thousand as work-related, but the balance may relate to the Clinton Foundation, speeches, and possibly Hillary’s health issues when she fell in December 2012 and suffered a concussion.  Given the recent attention about Hillary’s health, she may be more concerned about emails dealing with her health than with the Clinton Foundation.

Comey gave Hillary the benefit of the doubt by concluding that he “found no evidence that the additional work-related emails were intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them.”  Maybe Comey was looking for Hillary to say she intended to delete emails dealing with her work, the Clinton Foundation, and anything else she did not want the public to know.

Comey’s “assessment” that Hillary periodically deleted emails from the system when devices were changed should be from direct sworn testimony by Hillary.  Otherwise, Comey is just guessing as to how and why the emails were deleted.

Comey does not say why Hillary deleted or purged emails when devices were changed.

Is there any evidence that this is the sworn testimony of Hillary?.

Just as important, Comey admits that Hillary used a private email server instead of a government or commercial account like Gmail that archives the emails.  Hillary knew that her system did not archive emails.  This, in addition to the extreme negligence he found, should be evidence of intent to not archive emails that could later be discovered, which is evidence from which a jury could infer intent.

Just like Hillary’s billing records with the Rose Law Firm that showed her involvement in Whitewater got lost, then found when convenient, Hillary’s emails got “deleted and purged” when she changed devices.  If one believes this, then Hillary and Bill have some land to sell in Arkansas.