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National Security & Defense

Remember Gowdy’s Accusation of Withheld Benghazi Documents?

I guess we know why we’ve never heard about what Hillary Clinton was saying or hearing in e-mails during and after the Benghazi attack, huh?

Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record.

Mrs. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act. It was only two months ago, in response to a new State Department effort to comply with federal record-keeping practices, that Mrs. Clinton’s advisers reviewed tens of thousands of pages of her personal emails and decided which ones to turn over to the State Department. All told, 55,000 pages of emails were given to the department. Mrs. Clinton stepped down from the secretary’s post in early 2013. 

Her expansive use of the private account was alarming to current and former National Archives and Records Administration officials and government watchdogs, who called it a serious breach. “It is very difficult to conceive of a scenario — short of nuclear winter — where an agency would be justified in allowing its cabinet-level head officer to solely use a private email communications channel for the conduct of government business,” said Jason R. Baron, a lawyer at Drinker Biddle & Reath who is a former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration.

Back in May:

Representative Trey Gowdy, the chairman of the special panel, says Congress is getting some documents 20 months after requesting them, and for what it is worth, says he has evidence “there was a systematic, intentional decision to withhold certain documents from Congress.” However, he has not yet produced that unspecified evidence.

Was this what Gowdy had in mind? 

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