The State Department says there won’t be an internal investigation into why the agency couldn’t find part or all of 15 emails from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s personal email server.
“I know of no such investigation, certainly not by the State Department, no,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said during a Friday press briefing.
Clinton’s former agency found it lacked the communications following the House Select Committee on Benghazi’s release of nearly 60 emails it had received from Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal earlier this month.
{mosads}“We were clear about that in our communication with the committee that of the 15 that we did not have, that Mr. Blumenthal had, they were not specifically related to Benghazi, which was the original mandate on the select committee,” Kirby said.
“Again, we only knew about these 15 because Mr. Blumenthal had them and provided them to the select committee, so there was something to check it against,” he told reporters. “We don’t know the degree to which there may be other emails that another third party may have, in this case, Mr. Blumenthal, that we do not have.”
Earlier this year, Clinton, a 2016 presidential candidate, gave her old agency around 30,000 emails from the private server she used while serving as the nation’s top diplomat.
Clinton’s attorney later said all data stored on the server has been destroyed.
The missing memos all predate the Sept. 11, 2012, siege on the diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, but the select committee seized on the discovery as another sign Clinton has not been forthcoming about her State Department tenure.
“This confirms doubts about the completeness of Clinton’s self-selected public record and raises serious questions about her decision to erase her personal server — especially before it could be analyzed by an independent, neutral third party arbiter,” panel Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) said in a statement Thursday night.
He said the revelation “is significant and troubling” and “has implications far beyond Libya, Benghazi and our committee’s work.”
“This conclusively shows her email arrangement with herself, which was then vetted by her own lawyers, has resulted in an incomplete public record,” Gowdy said.
Kirby said the emails “would appear” to be work-related, thus meeting the benchmark for Clinton set for herself before turning them over.
But he said it’s not up to the State Department to determine how the emails were initially missed.
“That would be a matter between the select committee and former Secretary Clinton,” Kirby said.