If Hillary Clinton hoped that saying sorry would make all of her email problems go away, she was being a tad too optimistic — especially since the Defense Department just found a handful of emails that she didn’t turn over with the rest of her work-related emails. The emails in question, fewer than ten of them, were sent between Clinton — both before and shortly after she became secretary of State — and now-retired general David Petraeus, who was at that point in charge of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to the Associated Press, which broke the news, the emails “largely pertained to personnel matters and don’t appear to deal with highly classified material.”
However, many — especially those critical of Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email account during her tenure at the State Department — are sure to interpret the discovery of these emails as a sign that there may be more work-related emails Clinton failed to make available to the public. She has said that the thousands of emails she deleted from her account before turning over her emails dealt mostly with personal affairs, such as Chelsea Clinton’s wedding or her yoga schedule. Last Sunday on Face the Nation, Clinton said, “We provided all of them,” when discussing her emails.
The first Clinton emails in the State Department’s possession start on March 18, 2009 — nearly two months after Clinton became secretary of State. The emails between Clinton and Petraeus were sent from January 10 to February 1.
The new emails will be released to the public — after being scrubbed of any sensitive material — just like the other 30,000 emails Clinton submitted. The FBI is currently investigating Clinton’s email usage, trying to figure out if any classified material was sent on the server. A few days ago, the investigation recovered a bunch of deleted emails. Several congressional committees are also looking into Clinton’s emails.
Clinton is scheduled to testify in front of the House Select Committee on Benghazi on October 22 — a date conservatives are probably looking forward to given the slow and steady stream of Clinton email news from the past few months, especially since none of the news has done anything to sink her campaign yet.
In other Clinton email news, the State Department is sending a bunch of new emails over to the Benghazi committee. According to the Daily Beast, 925 emails relating to Benghazi, Libya, or personal issues that aren’t explicitly but are maybe, sort of related to the 2012 Benghazi attack will be released to the committee. A State Department official told the Daily Beast, “The documents provided today do not alter the fundamental facts known about the Benghazi attacks.”
And what does this mean for the Clinton email controversy? As with most stories regarding the emails and the investigations around them, the answer is, who knows?
It will take a lot more investigating and reporting to explain what this all means — which means that Clinton is going to continue to answer more questions about this for the foreseeable future. Or as Clinton put it last month, “This didn’t turn out to be convenient at all.”
If you’re hungry for more Clinton email news, get ready for next Wednesday, when the new batch will be released to the public. Based on the last few releases, they will mostly entail bureaucratic boringness, sharing links to stories that say nice things about the secretary of State, and other moments that could have been stolen from an episode of Veep.
