The State Department announced that it had discovered 30 additional deleted emails on Benghazi that the FBI had recovered from Hillary Clinton’s private server.
Previously, Clinton had claimed that all relevant emails on Benghazi had been turned over to Congress.
A judge asked the agency to hasten its review of the documents in preparation for release to Judicial Watch, the conservative-leaning group that filed the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
The emails were included among the roughly 15,000 emails FBI agents said they pulled from Clinton’s server in the course of a year-long probe.
Others were deleted beyond recovery after the Democratic nominee’s team used a digital tool called BleachBit to scrub the hardware that was eventually confiscated by law enforcement agents.
Agency lawyers said during the hearing Tuesday before Judge Amit Mehta of U.S. District Court that they had not yet determined how many of the Benghazi-related emails had already been disclosed in the batch of 55,000 pages of emails Clinton turned over in late 2014.
Judicial Watch attorneys had asked the State Department to examine the deleted records in order to determine whether any fell under to its FOIA request for emails that mentioned Benghazi.
The discovery of 30 such emails is significant because Clinton has repeatedly assured the public, Congress and FBI agents that she turned over all work-related communications in late 2014.
Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, noted on Tuesday that the State Department had asked for 30 days to review the new records before releasing them to the group.
Chances are, a few of those emails are duplicates that have already been released. I’m sure the rest will be interesting, if not damning. I can’t imagine Hillary Clinton would have ever put anything in writing that could destroy her.
But it would be killer karma if Clinton’s hubris led directly to her ultimate downfall.
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