State Dept. releases hundreds of Clinton Benghazi emails

Paul Singer and Mary Troyan | USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was keenly interested in the events in Libya before and after the Sept. 11, 2012, attack that killed the U.S. ambassador there and three other Americans, emails released by the State Department on Friday show.

The emails, from the personal email account Clinton kept while at State, showed she and her staff tracked the political fallout from the attack, including claims that she had tried to misrepresent the cause of the raid on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.

On the campaign trail in New Hampshire on Friday, Clinton noted that the House Benghazi committee has been in possession of the emails for several months and said she is pushing the State Department to publicly release "all of them as soon as possible."

Friday's release contained 296 emails that are all of the Benghazi-related emails Clinton sent from her personal account. The messages include a series of routine exchanges, such as reactions to news stories and preparations for hearings. The documents also are heavily redacted — one email about "revised talking points" has the content blanked out entirely.

The files also include emails from the night of the attack, as Clinton is being updated by her staff and being notified about the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens. "Cheryl told me the Libyans confirmed his death," Clinton wrote to top aides late on Sept. 11. "Should we announce tonight or wait until morning?" Chief of staff Cheryl Mills replied, "We are awaiting formal confirmation from our team. We are drafting a statement while we wait." Early the following morning Mills informed Clinton the bodies had been recovered and a statement would be released.

The emails also provide some insight into the Clinton camp's response to charges that she and others in the administration had tried to downplay the fact that the attack was a pre-planned terror attack, instead blaming worldwide protests over an anti-Muslim video. In a Sept. 24 email, her deputy chief of staff provided a collection of her public statements and said, "You never said spontaneous or characterized the motives. In fact you were careful in your first statement to say we were assessing motive and method. The way you treated the video in the Libya context was to say that some sought to *justify* the attack on that basis."

The Associated Press reported Friday that one of the emails was classified Friday at the FBI's request but was unclassified at the time Clinton received it. Clinton has said she did not send or receive classified material on her private account. She said again Friday that "all of the information in the emails was handled appropriately."

"The emails we release today do not change the essential facts or our understanding of the events before, during, or after the attacks," the State Department said in a tweet before the emails were released.

That is unsurprising, said Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., who chairs the House Benghazi panel that is investigating the matter, because the emails were selected and vetted by Clinton's own attorneys.

"To assume a self-selected public record is complete, when no one with a duty or responsibility to the public had the ability to take part in the selection, requires a leap in logic no impartial reviewer should be required to make and strains credibility," he said in a statement Friday. Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, seconded this view.

Clinton has been broadly criticized for conducting official business over a personal email account, a practice that threatens to undermine the public record of official acts.

In March, she said the personal email account was simply a matter of convenience. "Looking back, it would have been better for me to use two separate phones and two separate email accounts," Clinton said at a news conference following a speech at a U.N. conference on women's economic status. "I thought using one (mobile) device would be simpler. Obviously, it hasn't worked out that way."

Her office said that she turned over to the State Department about 30,000 emails, a little less than half the 62,000 total that she sent as secretary of State. The rest she deemed personal, and they were deleted.

Federal officials are required to retain records related to decision-making and essential functions of the government, but it was only after Clinton left her post at the State Department that Congress passed a law tightening rules on use of private email accounts.

Gowdy — tapped by Republicans last year to investigate the attacks on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Libya — has said that his committee needs all of Clinton's emails to ensure it has a complete record of information on Benghazi. Clinton was originally expected to testify before the committee this week, but Gowdy said the committee needs to settle the email questions first.

The New York Times first reported this week that emails provided to the committee show Clinton corresponded about Benghazi with longtime advisor Sidney Blumenthal, who did not have an official government position at the time. The committee has also subpoenaed Blumenthal to discuss his correspondence with Clinton. Those emails show Clinton passing along Blumenthal's impressions of the situation in Libya to others, sometimes with suggestions that they look into his findings. Blumenthal was apparently in contact with business executives working in Libya.

Democrats have accused Gowdy and Republicans of turning the committee into a political witch hunt. The Blumenthal subpoena is "one more example of a partisan, taxpayer-funded attack against Secretary Clinton and her bid for president," said Rep. Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on the Benghazi committee.

Cummings said Friday the emails "contain no evidence to back up claims that Secretary Clinton ordered a stand-down, approved an illicit weapons program, or any other wild allegation Republicans have made for years" about the Benghazi attacks.

But Republicans are clearly not ready to give up the investigation. Gowdy said the emails "are just one piece of information that cannot be completely evaluated or fully understood without the total record . . . We will not reach any investigative conclusions until our work is complete, but these emails continue to reinforce the fact that unresolved questions and issues remain as it relates to Benghazi."

Contributing: Ray Locker

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