House of Representatives to Investigate Hillary Clinton E-Mails
Nick Merrill, a spokesman for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, revised the explanation of how Clinton’s emails were handled, claiming, “Every email was reviewed.”
“What was in the fact sheet were examples of techniques used by the reviewers to double and triple check they were capturing everything,” he explained. “This was NOT in lieu of reading them all, was in ADDITION to reading them all. We did not mean to imply otherwise.”
The Clinton team’s new version of what transpired was prompted by numerous media outlets noting that Clinton’s staff did not read each email before destroying it.
That new information will not stop an investigation by the House of Representatives; according to ABC News, GOP House members said Speaker John Boehner will announce a House investigation of Clinton’s handling of her emails.
Clinton asserted last week that review of her emails had been “thorough” and that she went “above and beyond” requirements of her as Secretary of State. Clinton admitted destroying 31,000 emails deemed “personal,” stating, “We went through a thorough process to identify all of my work-related emails and deliver them to the State Department,” adding her “personal” emails revolved around issues such as “yoga routines,” “family vacations,” and “planning Chelsea’s wedding.” Her staff delineated the steps taken with Clinton’s emails to find out which ones were not “personal” and thus could be deleted:
- All emails Clinton received from a .gov or state.gov account while she was Secretary of State were searched for;
- Of the remaining emails, 100 State Department and other U.S. government officials’ names she would likely have had dealings with were searched for;
- The emails were filtered by sender and recipient to “account for non-obvious or non-recognizable email addresses or misspellings or other idiosyncrasies.”
- Terms such as “Benghazi” and “Libya” were searched for. After that process, a roughly even split was found; there were 30,490 emails deemed work-related and 31,830 emails considered “private and personal.”
