State Department Wants Access of Clinton’s Email

The trouble started Tuesday night when the Washington Post reported that Clinton’s story about the manner in which she turned over her emails was being contradicted by the State Department.

The discrepancy raises questions about the “rationale for and timing of” the agency’s decision to contact Clinton for her emails. However, it appears that it is not going the way Clinton expected it to be.

The State Department says it has the equivalent of about 63 full-time employees working on the thousands of open records requests the department gets each year, and those staffers are being pushed to meet tight deadlines, including those imposed by more than a dozen judges now involved in some Clinton email-related cases.

In a reversal, the State Department acknowledged Friday that a Congressional investigation into the attack on USA facilities in Benghazi played a role in the agency’s decision to ask Hillary Clinton and three other secretaries of state to turn over copies of all work-related emails they sent or received on private accounts during their tenure.

Clearly, because she wanted to minimize the seriousness of her use of a private server, and the entire decision to take the risky decision to use an unsafe server to for highly classified material. This is speculation, but with revelations the supposedly “private: emails are being recovered by the FBI, and that hacking almost certainly took place, the State Department may be protecting itself in anticipation of the fan getting seriously soiled.Is the State Department throwing Hillary under the bus?”

“We still do not know whether the FBI – or any other government agency for that matter – has possession of the email server that was used by Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Abedin to conduct official government business during their four years of employment at the State Department”, Judicial Watch said. “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”.

“The State Department is being crushed with obligations”, she said. 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.

Judicial Watch did release more than 50 pages Monday of emails it obtained from Ms. Abedin’s account on Mrs. Clinton’s server, and said it was clear she was talking about “sensitive” topics that shouldn’t have been discussed on an insecure account.

“I don’t know that”. Clinton turned over copies of about 30,000 work-related emails to the department in December. Secretary of State John Kerry, who was also learning about her exclusive use of the email account for the first time, was eager to “rip off the Band-Aid”, as two key aides described it, and to make sure the agency provided the Benghazi panel with any records it properly requested.

Apparently, these were emails that had been held back when Citizens United, a group that Clinton has targeted because it made an unflattering documentary about her, had earlier sought “information about contacts between a top aide to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and officials with the Clinton Foundation”.

For months Clinton has pointed to this moment as an example of her desire to cooperate with what she has characterized as a bureaucratic procedure. “I did not print them off. I do not have thousands of pages somewhere in my personal files”, Powell said. “All I know is that they sent the same letter to everybody”.

“Beginning In August, Senior State Department Officials Held Negotiations With Mrs. Clinton’s Lawyers To Gain Access To Her Personal Email Records”, Leading To Letter To Former Secretaries Seeking Their Emails.

The agency is releasing those emails in batches, in accordance with a court order stemming from a public-records lawsuit.

Meanwhile, Kerry has told officials to prioritize fixing long-standing problems in the agency’s outdated archive system. [The New York Times, 3/5/15]. After she left office in 2013, the server was managed by Platte River.

The FBI is investigating how and why classified information ended up on Clinton’s server. Officials have said Clinton is not a target of the inquiry.