posted 09-23-2015 09:25 AM                  

By Carol D. Leonnig and Rosalind S. Helderman September 22 at 9:50 PM 

This article has been updated.

Throughout the controversy over her use of a private e-mail system while she was secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton has described her decision last year to turn over thousands of work-related e-mails as a response to a routine-sounding records request.

“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.”

The State Department also realized it was not automatically preserving internal communications, with some other senior officials’ e-mails missing.

The discrepancy between Clinton’s timetable and the new information from the State Department prompted a terse letter Tuesday from Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, who has been investigating whether Clinton’s e-mail practices compromised national security.

posted 09-23-2015 09:28 AM                  

Another apparent discrepancy has arisen in what Hillary Clinton has said about her emails.

When The Des Moines Register asked her about the latest twist in the private server saga on Tuesday, she said she had no new answers.

Just before Clinton sat down for a 105-minute meeting with the Register's editorial board, the Washington Post posted a news story that said the State Department's request for her emails was "prompted entirely by the discovery that Clinton had exclusively used a private e-mail system."

That contradicts what Clinton has been saying, which is that agency officials asked her for her emails as part of a benign, general record-keeping effort to sweep up "everything from other secretaries of state, not just me," as she said Sunday

After the editorial board meeting, a Register reporter asked Clinton if she could explain the discrepancy between her characterization of why she turned over the emails and the State Department's.

"I don't know that. I can't answer that," Clinton answered. "All I know is that they sent the same letter to everybody. That's my understanding."

The Register told Clinton that the Post was reporting that State Department officials contacted her in the summer of 2014 — a sign that officials had been caught off guard upon discovering she had used a private server to conduct government business. That was at least three months before the agency asked Clinton and three of her predecessors to provide their e-mails, the Post reported.

DES MOINES REGISTER

Hillary Clinton: In her own words, on emails, the race

"You're telling me something I don't know," Clinton said. "All I know is what I have said. What I have said is it was allowed. The State Department has confirmed that. The same letter went to, as far as I know, my predecessors, and I'm the one who said, 'Hey, I'll be glad to help.'

"But we'll give you additional information as we get it."

Clinton campaign aides said later that what she has said all along is consistent with what transpired — and consistent with the details explained in the Post story.

"As we have said, Secretary Clinton responded to a request of her and other prior secretaries of state to assist with the department's record keeping," campaign spokesman Nick Merrill said. "Due to her practice of emailing her colleagues on their state.gov email addresses, 90 percent of her work-related correspondence occurred on the department's email system, and she provided her copies as well, about 55,000 pages total. Everything she has said in answering questions has been consistent with this."

posted 09-23-2015 09:54 AM                  

EMAIL NEWS WIPES HILLARY’S SECOND RESET

Hillary Clinton’s furious effort to refocus her struggling campaign on something other than the scandals that have dogged it from the start just ran smack into a brick wall.

First, the WaPo reported that Clinton had misrepresented why she turned over emails from her private server. It wasn’t routine records keeping as Clinton claimed, but the discovery of her secret email server more than a year ago that triggered the request for her documents and her eventual compliance. That dropped just as Clinton hit the Des Moines Register for a meeting with editors and she was caught flat-footed.

The shambles of her initial claims about her email is nearly complete. Pro tip: When you are busted being shady, don’t be shady in your explanation.

Clinton was hoping to get back to her new focus: trying to paint herself as more liberal than the Obama administration (seriously!) as she pushes for a huge increase in refugees from the Syrian civil war and for – quite suddenly – the rejection of a new oil pipeline from Canada. Clinton’s goal is to paint herself as left of Vice President Joe Biden.

It’s revealing that Clinton has set her new ideological position in the space between Biden and the Democrats’ version of Ron Paul, Sen. Bernie Sanders. That’s a weird space, dude. And it’s one in which a general election bid would have a cramped launch pad, to say the least. She must really be worried about defeating a historically weak field to torch so many general election votes.

Transparent, rapid-fire pandering is usually bad news, but it’s still better than being reduced to legalistic dissembling in front of a gaggle of reporters. Yet there Clinton was, watching the second reset of her second campaign fall apart like cheap shoes in a rainstorm.

But her bad day wasn’t over yet. Not by a long shot.

Bloomberg was about to report that the FBI probe into Clinton’s handling of secret documents as secretary of state had unlocked the more than 30,000 documents that Clinton in March had declared destroyed.

The sounds of heads exploding in Brooklyn could be heard across the land.

Remember that Clinton took the brazen step of destroying evidence she said would exonerate her. She claimed she handed over all official emails and destroyed the rest in the interest of her family’s privacy. It would clear her name against allegations of ethical and national security misconduct, but she didn’t want anyone nosing around her and her husband’s emails.

It sounded absurd, but hey, if the server was “wiped” or shredded, cooked on high in a microwave for an hour and then dumped into the Marianas Trench, there wasn’t anything that could be done about it.

Unless Clinton was foolish enough to have deemed the emails gone when they really weren’t and when the server itself wasn’t in her custody. Which now, it appears, was the case. She was bluffing.

As Stephan Dinan reports, though, the FBI isn’t exactly advertising its findings. The agency is refusing even to discuss the investigation with the State Department, which was ordered by a judge to try to collaborate with the Justice Department to determine what might be recovered from Clinton’s email.

How, when and if the contents of the once-secret server are made public are all open questions. But, if the emails Clinton said she ordered be destroyed have been recovered and if that discovery is confirmed, the emails can be had by congressional investigators.

It goes like this: The first and most immediate threat to Clinton’s campaign and, potentially, her freedom is the possibility of criminal prosecution for knowingly mishandling state secrets. If she is even charged with a crime for her email practices, she’s toast. And if the emails she said would “remain private” reveal any sensitive government business, she’s burnt toast.

But even if the emails Clinton wanted destroyed yield no charges for her or her intimates, they will certainly be sought by the House committee investigating the 2012 Benghazi terror attack. And that’s where the risk of the discovery of something not criminal but politically devastating comes into play.

Outside of the real, but still unlikely chance that Clinton would get popped for national security violations, the existential threat to her bid to return to the White House is in her and her husband’s convoluted and ethically dubious moneymaking practices of the past decade. If the committee gets evidence that supports the claims that Clinton did inappropriate favors for patrons while in office, that’s probably a death knell, depending on how gross of a violation.

And then there’s the embarrassment factor of what was said by Clinton and her top aides in unguarded conversations.

Gulp…