Hillary’s Email Denial Has Already Been Rejected by Two Inspectors General

Has Hillary run out of excuses for her private email server? It seemed that way Saturday when the candidate offered a denial of wrongdoing which directly contradicted a statement released a day earlier by not one but two Inspectors General.

While on the campaign trail in Iowa Saturday, Hillary was asked about the controversy which became news again late Thursday when the NY Times reported that her use of email had been referred to the DOJ for investigation. Hillary told a gaggle of news cameras, “I am confident that I never sent nor received any information that was classified at the time it was sent and received.”

Hillary went on to say, “What I think you’re seeing here is a very typical kind of discussion, to some extent, disagreement among various parts of the government over what should or should not be publicly released.”

While it’s true that the finding of the Intelligence Community Inspector General came about during a FOIA process to release Hillary’s emails, according to a joint press statement published Friday by the IG for the Intelligence Community and the IG for the State Department the issue here is not simply about a release of documents. The joint statement was explicit that four of Hillary’s emails “were not retroactively classified by the State Department; rather these emails contained classified information when they were generated and, according to IC classification officials, that information remains classified today.” In other words, contrary to Hillary’s claim, she did indeed send/receive classified information.

The four classified emails identified by the IC IG came from a tiny sample of just 40 emails. Given that Hillary turned over some 30,000 emails to the State Department, it seems possible the total number containing classified information is in the thousands. However, the State Department has refused to turn over a complete set of the emails to the IC IG, thereby preventing any further accounting.

Hillary’s people pushed back hard on the NY Times Friday and eventually got them to drop the claim that a “criminal referral” had been made to the DOJ. However the correction doesn’t change the fact that a referral was made to the DOJ on the basis of this finding of classified info in Hillary’s inbox.

A source with significant experience with the IG referral process told Breitbart News Friday that IGs only refer things to the DOJ in cases of potential criminal activity. In this case, keeping hundreds or thousands of emails full of “secret” classified information on a private email server in one’s home is a potential crime.