Ivanka Trump is now in hot water over using a personal cell phone to conduct government business. Trump has claimed what Hillary Clinton did was far worse. Trump claimed that Hillary Clinton defied the Benghazi committee’s subpoena and deleted emails. This is untrue. This has been investigated exhaustively by the Benghazi committee,
Here’s what happened (see Wikipedia link below):
In 2014, months prior to public knowledge of the server’s existence, Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills and two attorneys worked to identify work-related emails on the server to be archived and preserved for the State Department. Upon completion of this task in December 2014, Mills instructed Clinton’s computer services provider, Platte River Networks (PRN), to change the server’s retention period to 60 days, allowing 31,830 older personal emails to be automatically deleted from the server, as Clinton had decided she no longer needed them. However, the PRN technician assigned for this task failed to carry it out at that time.[98]
After the existence of the server became publicly known on March 2, 2015,[99] the Select Committee on Benghazi issued a subpoena for Benghazi-related emails two days later. Mills sent an email to PRN on March 9 mentioning the Committee’s retention request.[98] The PRN technician then had what he described to the FBI as an “oh shit moment,” realizing he had not set the personal emails to be deleted as instructed months earlier. The technician then erased the emails using a free utility, BleachBit, sometime between March 25 and March 31.[100]
Since this episode, Clinton critics have accused her or her aides of deleting emails that were under subpoena, alleging the server had been “bleached” or “acid-washed” by a “very expensive” process[101] in an effort to destroy evidence, with candidate Donald Trump stating the day before the 2016 election that “Hillary Clinton erased more than 30,000 emails as part of a cover-up.”[102] Trump continued with this narrative as late as August 2018, asking “Look at the crimes that Clinton did with the emails and she deletes 33,000 emails after she gets a subpoena from Congress, and this Justice Department does nothing about it?”[103]
Thus, there was never an attempt by Hillary Clinton to disobey the subpoena by deleting personal emails, so Trump’s statements in 2016, 2017 and now in 2018 are all FALSE.
Trump yesterday, November 20, 2018, repeated the deletion allegations. Factcheck.org reviewed allegations made by both Trump and Pence, and found them to be False.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump falsely claimed Clinton “acid washed” 33,000 personal emails to delete them, calling it “an expensive process.” The FBI said Clinton’s tech team used BleachBit, which is a free software program. It does not use chemicals.
Mike Pence, Trump’s running mate, falsely claimed the FBI found “more than 15,000 additional emails dealing with national security.” The FBI recovered about 14,900 emails, but not all of them are work-related and only three contained classified information.
End of story. At least it should have been. It was a lie in September 2016 that Clinton ordered deletion of emails. It is still one today. Trump is playing to his base, but are they that gullible?
Stay tuned,
Dave
Links:
Wikipedia – Deletion of Emails
https://www.factcheck.org/2016/09/trump-pence-acid-wash-facts/
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