Agency: Clinton's email lot short some

WASHINGTON -- The State Department cannot locate "all or part" of 15 emails provided to the House Select Committee on Benghazi by Sidney Blumenthal from his exchanges with then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, officials said Thursday.

It was the first indication that 55,000 pages of emails Clinton provided to the State Department from a private server she used while in office were not a complete record of her work-related correspondence.

Committee chairman Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., who has raised repeated questions about whether Clinton covered up her activities related to the September 2012 attacks on U.S. diplomatic sites in Benghazi, Libya, called the State Department disclosure "significant and troubling."

When the existence of the private server was revealed, Clinton said she had discarded "personal" emails and had given the rest to the State Department.

The department then culled about 300 emails related to Benghazi in response to a committee subpoena. Many were from Blumenthal, a former aide in President Bill Clinton's White House and a close friend, who forwarded what he said were inside intelligence reports from sources with access to the Libyan government between 2011 and 2013. The documents, which were publicly released last month, shed no new light on the Benghazi attack.

The committee then subpoenaed Blumenthal, who appeared for a private deposition last week. He also supplied the committee with additional Libya-related emails that Gowdy said may not have been among those culled by the State Department.

In response to a committee query, Gowdy said in a statement Thursday, "the State Department has informed the Select Committee that Secretary Clinton has failed to turn over all her Benghazi and Libya related records. This confirms doubts about the completeness of Clinton's self-selected public record."

"This has implications far beyond Libya, Benghazi and our committee's work," he said. The statement said it "conclusively shows her email arrangement with herself, which was then vetted by her own lawyers, has resulted in an incomplete public record."

A State Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity under ground rules imposed by the department, said there were "a limited number of instances -- 15 -- in which we could not locate all or part of the content of a document from [Blumenthal's] production within the tens of thousands of emails she gave us ... The substance of those 15 emails is not relevant to the 2012 attacks in Benghazi."

At the same time, the official said, some of the documents Clinton had already turned over "do not appear" in Blumenthal's "production to the committee."

A Section on 06/26/2015

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