IBD EDITORIALS
Hillary Must Explain Her 2-Month Email Gap
6:44 PM ET
Hillary Clinton assured the country in March that she had turned over every single work-related email from her private server. So why are there no emails for two months during a critical time at State?
Here's what Clinton said at that March press conference. "I ... provided all my emails that could possibly be work-related, which totaled roughly 55,000 printed pages, even though I knew that the State Department already had the vast majority of them. We went through a thorough process to identify all of my work-related emails and deliver them to the State Department."
Now it turns out that there are two months during which — if Clinton's statement above is to be believed — she apparently didn't send any emails at all while Secretary of State.
"There are no emails between Clinton and her State Department staff during May and June 2012," reports the Daily Beast — which is hardly a right-wing news outlet — after reviewing 2,000 messages that have so far been made public.
These weren't just any two months, either. They happened to be when violence was erupting in Benghazi and when Clinton's top aide — Huma Abedin — obtained a special exemption that let her work for the State Department and for the Clinton Foundation.
On May 22 of that year, for example, a rocket-propelled grenade hit the International Red Cross's office in Benghazi."
A few weeks later, an IED blew a 12-foot hole in the wall of the U.S. consulate there. Five days after that, an RPG hit a convoy carrying the British ambassador.During that same email gap, Abedin received her "special government employee" status. The Associated Press has been trying for two years to get records relating to this unusual work situation, only to get stonewalled by the State Department.
You'd think there would have been as much email traffic about these events as there were about Hillary's struggles with her office fax machine.
Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., who heads the House Benghazi investigation, had already complained about "gaps of months and months and months" in the Clinton emails that had been turned over to his committee. A particularly suspicious one, he said, is during Clinton's Oct. 18, 2011, trip to Libya, during which she was photographed using her Blackberry.
"We have no emails from that day. In fact we have no emails from that trip," Gowdy said.Of course it's possible that Clinton avoided sending emails during these trying times. And she could have been playing solitaire on her Blackberry when a reporter snapped that picture on her Libya trip.
And maybe she inadvertently deleted 87,640 minutes worth of emails on her server while she was stretching across her desk to grab her iPad.
Her campaign says not to worry, "more emails are slated to be released by the State Department next week, and we hope that release is as inclusive as possible."
Since Clinton has already been caught in several lies pertaining to her highly suspicious and possibly illegal private email account, saying "trust me" won't do.
