A potentially explosive nugget from the FBI’s Friday document dump of investigatory notes from the Clinton email probe has been all but ignored by the media. And that is the revelation that Hillary Clinton deleted 1,000 work-related emails between herself and General David Petaeus from his time as the director of the United States Central Command.
In Aug. 2015, the Pentagon called the State Department and informed an unnamed official there that “CENTCOM records showed approximately 1,000 work-related emails between Clinton’s personal email and General David Petraeus.”
The FBI noted that “[m]ost of those 1,000 emails were not believed to be included in the 30,000 emails” that Clinton turned over to the State Department in Dec. 2014.
Hillary has long maintained that the emails her lawyers unilaterally deleted were personal emails pertaining to “yoga routines, family vacations” and other matters that had nothing to do with government. She repeated the same nonsense to Congress while under oath. In August of 2015, she signed a statement to a federal judge declaring “under penalty of perjury” that she turned over all work-related emails.
Now we find out that 1,000 emails between Clinton and General Petraeus were not turned over. This should be a bigger story. Petraeus started out as the leader of U.S. Central Command and then became the director of the CIA during Clinton’s tenure as secretary of State, so not only were those emails obviously work related, they very likely were highly classified. The implications here are staggering.
But it gets worse.
The FBI summary also revealed that top State Department officials were actually putting pressure on employees to hide the fact that they were finding classified information in Clinton’s emails.
A State Department employee, whose name was redacted, told investigators they believed senior department officials interfered with the screening of Clinton’s emails for public release last year in a way that helped Clinton.
The employee, who worked on the screening process, said there was pressure to obscure the fact they were finding classified information in the messages. John Kirby, a State Department spokesman, said in a statement the department “strongly disputes” the claim of interference. Clinton repeatedly said last year she never sent or received classified information, but now says she did not do so knowingly since the release of the FBI findings.
Spokesmen for Clinton did not respond to Reuters‘ questions about the new interview summaries.
Friday’s tranche of FBI notes included a number of other revealing developments, including the fact that the DOJ granted top Clinton aide/lawyer Cheryl Mills immunity in exchange for her testimony, an employee at Platte River Networks referred to a Clinton work request as the “Hillary cover-up operation,” and the president of the United States used a pseudonym in email communications with Hillary Clinton on her private email account.
For a list of 27 new things we learned from the FBI’s Friday document dump, see the Washington Examiner.
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