The State Department disputes Hillary Clinton’s claim about her decision to turn over her email records

Hillary Clinton has made the claim that the State Department only asked for more of her email correspondence as part of a routine records-keeping venture and not because she has become embroiled in a scandal in which she deliberately tried to hide her official business from the American people, FOIA requests, and the oversight committees on a personal homebrew email server.

Here is her defense:

Throughout the controversy over her use of a private e-mail system while she was secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton has described her decision last year to turn over thousands of work-related e-mails as a response to a routine-sounding records request. “When we were asked to help the State Department make sure they had everything from other secretaries of state, not just me, I’m the one who said, ‘Okay, great, I will go through them again,’ ” Clinton said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “And we provided all of them.”

But the State Department is now disputing this claim, stating this request was not because of a routine record-keeping venture but rather because the department learned it did not have all of her emails because they were hidden on a personal homebrew email server:

But State Department officials provided new information Tuesday that undercuts Clinton’s characterization. They said the request was not about general recordkeeping but was prompted entirely by the discovery that Clinton had exclusively used a private e-mail system. They also said they first contacted her in the summer of 2014, at least three months before the agency asked Clinton and three of her predecessors to provide their e-mails. “In the process of responding to congressional document requests pertaining to Benghazi, State Department officials recognized that it had access to relatively few email records from former Secretary Clinton,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said in a statement e-mailed to The Washington Post. “State Department officials contacted her representatives during the summer of 2014 to learn more about her email use and the status of emails in that account.”

The State Department is now claiming that it was not until it realized it did not have all of Hillary Clinton’s emails that it realized it might be missing emails from other former Secretaries of State–that is obviously NOT what Hillary Clinton has been claiming.

This was met with condemnation by Ron Johnson, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee:

The discrepancy between Clinton’s timetable and the new information from the State Department prompted a terse letter Tuesday from Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, who has been investigating whether Clinton’s e-mail practices compromised national security. In the letter, he pointed to documents suggesting that Clinton’s staff moved quickly that summer after she was first contacted about her private account. He cited a July 23, 2014, e-mail in which employees at Platte River Networks, the private company that was then maintaining her server, discussed sending copies of Clinton’s e-mails overnight to Cheryl Mills, a longtime Clinton adviser. A spokesman for the company confirmed Tuesday that its workers started pulling Clinton’s e-mails to submit to Mills in July 2014.

The Clinton campaign was unavailable for comment so the question is who do you believe?

Malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium