According to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, that’s her story and she’s sticking to it (for a day or two). Originally the Clintonistas said that the way she selected which emails were personal — and thereby subject to deletion — was by sorting them according to key word. So for example, emails containing the word Benghazi were deemed business and saved. (I assume emails with the term “bimbo-eruption” were treated as family matters).
Last night the Clinton camp sent Fox News a note indicating a change in that narrative. The new claim is that each individual email was read before discarding the private ones.
Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill made the clarification in a written statement to Fox News. This comes after the former secretary of state’s office revealed last week that while more than 30,000 “work-related” emails were turned over to the State Department, nearly 32,000 were deemed “private” and deleted.
This admission raised questions over how her team decided to get rid of those messages. Merrill on Sunday clarified an earlier fact sheet that described some of those methods but did not say every email was read.
“We simply took for granted that reading every single email came across as the most important, fundamental and exhaustive step that was performed. The fact sheet should have been clearer in stating that every email was read,” Merrill said.
It wasn’t just Fox that missed the part about reading all the emails but almost every news report said they used the “key word” approach to delete “private” emails.
Whether the assurance that “every email” was read before being either deleted or turned over eases those concerns remains to be seen.
“I have zero interest in looking at her personal emails,” South Carolina GOP Rep. Trey Gowdy said on “Fox News Sunday.” “But who gets to decide what’s personal and what’s public? And if it’s a mixed-use email, and lots of the emails we get in life are both personal and work, I just can’t trust her lawyers to make the determination that the public’s getting everything they’re entitled to.”
Here’s the real problem with Emailgate is that the Clintons never find a convincing way to deflect a scandal. Oh, they might fend off the legal attacks, but they always leave you with the basic questions unanswered. In the matter of Hillary’s private emails there are plenty of questions remaining. One of the most trenchant is: If she has nothing to hide why doesn’t she just turn over the server to a third party to be examined? Obviously the most probable explanation is that she has much to hide, but there is no proof without the server either.
Cross-posted at The Lid
