This article originally appeared at America Rising. It is reprinted here with permission.
The Washington Post blew a hole in one of Hillary Clinton’s most relied upon stories regarding her email scandal: that she initially turned over her emails because of a routine record keeping practice by the State Department. Not so, says the State Department:
But State Department officials provided new information Tuesday that undercuts Clinton’s characterization. They said the request was not about general recordkeeping 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.
Clinton was asked about the discrepancy just after the news broke by the Des Moines Register’s Jen Jacobs. She stuck to her now-debunked story:
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.”
America Rising compiled a list of the other times Clinton and her team made this false claim:
- March 2015:Clinton said the State Department “asked former Secretaries of State for our assistance in providing copies of work-related emails from our personal accounts.”
- March 2015:Additionally the “Office Of Hillary Rodham Clinton” did the samein March 2015, citing the same request:
- July 2015:Clinton said, “When I was asked to help with the record keeping in the State Department I gave over 55,000 pages to make sure that they had everything that they needed…”
- July 2015:The Clinton campaign even released a “Fact Sheet” (which should now be renamed) in July 2015 citing the State Department’s request as the reason Clinton’s emails were turned over:
- July 2015:And in their own hypothetical question about why Clinton didn’t turn over her emails until December 2014, the Clinton campaign again cites the bogus claimabout the State Department’s compliance with the Federal Records Act:
- August 2015:Clinton told Andrea Mitchell: “In the fall, I think it was October of last year, the State Department sent a letter to previous Secretaries of State asking for help with their record keeping, in part because of the technical problems that they knew they had to deal with. And they asked that that we, all of us, go through our e-mails to determine what was work related and to provide that for them. The letter came to my lawyers. I asked my lawyers to please do that, and it took weeks but they went through every single e-mail.”
Posted by America Rising PAC on Wednesday, September 23, 2015
- August 2015:Clinton’s campaign has also taken great pains to reiterate this debunked claim. Campaign spokesman Brian Fallon:
- September 2015:On Face The Nation, Clinton said: “And 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, ‘OK, great, I will go through them again.’ And we provided all of them.”
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