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Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Back issues
Courthouse News Service Courthouse News Service

Latest Leak Adds Fuel to Clinton Email Fire

     (CN) — As the race for the presidency tightens under the weight of Hillary Clinton's email scandal, new emails released by Wikileaks on Thursday indicate the former Secretary of State may not have disclosed all her emails.
     In early March 2015, when the news of Clinton's use of a private server despite State Department regulations first broke, her team rapidly scrambled to respond to the ensuing fallout.
     Political consultant Jim Margolis asked a group of Clinton staffers copied on a March 4, 2015, email: "If there is a release of the 55K, are there others that are not being released?"
     To which key Clinton strategist Joel Benenson responded: "Definitely."
     Clinton turned over 55,000 emails to the State Department, which has released them incrementally to the public over the past few months. Benenson's answer indicates there are more the public may never see.
     The email scandal has weighed especially heavily on the Clinton campaign over the last week, as FBI director James Comey announced this past Friday that the agency was looking into whether emails found on the computer of former New York congressman Anthony Weiner — under investigation over text messages he sent to an underage girl — may be from Clinton's time at the State Department.
     Weiner is the estranged husband of Huma Abedin, a top aide of Hillary Clinton.
     Meanwhile, an unusual afternoon dump by Wikileaks of 1,000 emails Thursday — dubbed the "DOJ/FBI/Huma Special" — offered another hint of duplicity by the Clinton camp relating to the email scandal.
     One of the emails showed longtime Clinton lawyer David Kendall's reaction to an investigation into the email scandal by the Associated Press.
     On Aug. 11, 2015, AP reporter Eric Tucker wrote to Kendall in search of comment on a tip the AP received that Clinton was forced to turn over a thumb drive to the FBI, an assertion the Clinton campaign vigorously denied after it was leaked.
     "It's getting out," Kendall wrote to several Clinton campaign staffers after reading Tucker's email.
     The thumb drive in question eventually was turned over to the FBI and subsequently lost in a bizarre turn of events, according to 58 pages of heavily redacted notes that document the FBI's investigation into the private server issue.
     Monica Hanley, a Clinton staffer, downloaded an archive of emails onto a thumb drive and private server, which was supposed to be delivered to Clinton's home in New York.
     According to the investigation, Hanley forgot to do so and by the time she recovered the laptop, there were IT issues that led to the loss of the information.
     The emails indicate Kendall may have thought the thumb drive and the story surrounding it would be problematic for his client.
     Despite Wikileaks' sensationally labeled afternoon data dump, however, a preliminary investigation conducted by Courthouse News shows very little in the cache that relates to either Abedin, the FBI or the Justice Department.

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