Late in yesterday’s Benghazi testimony — well after most of the media declared Hillary Clinton the runaway “winner” — there was an illuminating exchange about her email correspondence with Sidney Blumenthal.
Trey Gowdy asked Clinton how she knew that she turned over all of her emails that were work-related, given that Blumenthal had turned over emails from Clinton that she herself had not turned over. Clinton responded:
And the ones that I decided that were work related I forwarded to the state.gov accounts of the people with whom I worked.
GOWDY: Madam Secretary, is there any question that the 15 that James Cole turned over to us were work related? There’s no ambiguity about that. They were work related.
CLINTON: No. They were from a personal friend, not … any government official. And they were, I determined on the basis of looking at them, what I thought was work related and what wasn’t. And some I didn’t even have time to read, Mr. Chairman. (Emphasis added)
This is a far cry from what she said back in March, regarding her work-related emails:
Note the shift. In March, she says any “emails that could possibly be work-related” were turned over. So, only the yoga routines get left out. Today, she has a much narrower definition: because Blumenthal was “a personal friend, not any … government official,” she did not turn those emails over, even though they were obviously related to her work.
It just goes to show that, when it comes to the Clintons, you have to parse every word. In this case, it all depends on the definition of “work-related.”
It also suggests that, should the FBI recover data from her old hard drives, they might find a lot more than yoga routines and vacation plans.
Jay Cost is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard and the author of A Republic No More: Big Government and the Rise of American Political Corruption.
