It appears as if two months worth of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's emails are missing from the hundreds released by the State Department.
Of the 2,000 messages that the department released from Clinton's private email account, there are no emails from the months of May and June 2012, according to The Daily Beast. The two-month gap coincides with a period of escalating violence in Libya leading up to the September 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, and also with the obtaining of a special conflict of interest exemption by Clinton's top aide, Huma Abedin, so she could work for both the State Department and the Clinton Foundation.
The State Department confirmed to The Daily Beast that all Clinton emails relating to the security of U.S. diplomats in Libya or the consulate in Benghazi were turned over to the House select committee investigating the Benghazi attack.
If that is indeed true, then neither the Democratic presidential front-runner nor her staff communicated by email during a period in which there were three attacks on international compounds in Benghazi, including one on the U.S. consulate, Fox News points out.
Clinton alone was responsible for determining which emails from her private account were considered work-related, and therefore required to be turned over to the State Department for record-keeping, and which were considered personal in nature. After handing over some 30,000 emails, she unilaterally decided to delete about 30,000 more, with no independent oversight.
Clinton claimed that she turned over every email that bore any relation to her work as secretary of state. However, the Benghazi committee subpoenaed Clinton's longtime confidant Sidney Blumenthal and discovered at least one email sent in that two-month period related to Benghazi and had in fact not been given to the State Department, as HNGN previously reported.
So far, the State Department has released seven percent of Clinton's emails, with the rest scheduled to be released on a rolling, monthly basis until the last set is released in January 2016, to comply with a federal judge's order. The next batch is expected to be released this Friday.
The other issue raised concerning the two-month email gap has to do with Abedin, a longtime aide to Clinton and the wife of former New York congressman Anthony Weiner. The Daily Beast noted that Abedin was granted "special government employee" status on June 3, which allowed her to remain employed by the State Department, the Clinton Foundation, the Clinton-linked consulting firm Teneo and as a private adviser for Clinton herself. By obtaining that "special government employee" designation, Abedin was spared from being subjected to various conflict of interest ethics rules.
The Associated Press sued the State Department in 2013 for copies of Abedin's emails from that time period, but it has so far been unsuccessful.
A federal judge told the State Department last week that it had one week to respond to AP's two-year-old request, and at midnight on Tuesday, just before the deadline, the department's lawyers revealed they found 68 pages of "potentially responsive" documents. It was the first time the department has acknowledged any agency documents relating to Abedin's arrangement.
The House Republicans investigating the Benghazi attacks have suggested that Clinton may have deleted any emails that would have implicated her in covering up details related to the attacks, calling the gaps in emails "inexplicable."
"There are gaps of months and months and months," Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., chairman of the Select Committee on Benghazi, said in March.
"The State Department transferred 300 messages exclusively reviewed and released by [Clinton's] own lawyers," he said in May of the email gaps. "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."
The committee confirmed Wednesday that Clinton is scheduled to testify before the committee on Oct. 22, The New York Times reported.
