Lois Lerner for President
Mrs. Clinton’s email deceit gets worse.
James Taranto
June 30, 2015 2:31 p.m. ET
171 COMMENTS
The New York Times’s Michael Schmidt has been doing some excellent reporting on the Hillary Clinton email scandal, but one has to wonder if his editors are holding him back. Buried on page A14 of today’s paper is a story that begins as follows:
Hillary Rodham Clinton told reporters last month that the memos about Libya she received while secretary of state from Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime adviser whom the Obama administration had barred her from hiring, had been “unsolicited.” But email records that Mrs. Clinton, according to officials briefed on the matter, apparently failed to turn over to the State Department last fall show that she repeatedly encouraged Mr. Blumenthal to “keep ’em coming,” as she said in an August 2012 reply to a memo from him, which she called “another keeper.” All or part of 15 Libya-related emails she sent to Mr. Blumenthal were missing from the trove of 30,000 that Mrs. Clinton provided to the State Department last year, as well as from the 847 that the department in turn provided in February to the House committee investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya. The emails were reviewed by a reporter. Much more interesting than the content of the emails, though, is the confirmation that Mrs. Clinton was not telling the truth when she said the following at her March 10 press conference:
After I left office, the State Department asked former secretaries of state for our assistance in providing copies of work-related emails from our personal accounts. I responded right away and provided all my emails that could possibly be work-related, which totalled 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. Schmidt had already broken on Friday (albeit back on page A18) the story that “15 emails . . . were missing from records that she has turned over.” But the even more damning detail is mentioned only in passing in both stories—in the third paragraph of today’s, and the sixth paragraph of Friday’s, to wit:
Of the 15 Blumenthal emails in question, only nine were missing in their entirety. Printouts of the other six were turned over with parts missing, which would mean they were identified as official emails and then redacted by somebody in Mrs. Clinton’s employ. That points even more clearly to an active effort at withholding evidence than do entirely missing emails, which might be put down, however unconvincingly, to mere sloppiness.
The full set of 15 emails, Schmidt reports, was “discovered after Mr. Blumenthal turned over to the House committee investigating the Benghazi attacks his own batch of Libya-related email correspondence with Mrs. Clinton.” If Mrs. Clinton told the truth when she said she had destroyed the server that held the emails—a big if, though the assertion doesn’t strain credulity as far as some of her other claims—then there is no way of knowing the extent of the coverup.
And there never will be. More missing emails may turn up as the committee subpoenas other witnesses, but only if the committee knows whom to call and if Mrs. Clinton’s other correspondents didn’t follow her lead and shred the evidence.
What does Mrs. Clinton have to say about all this? She seldom deigns to talk to reporters, and Schmidt is no exception, but his Friday piece includes an official denial:
Nick Merrill, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, who is running for president, said that she had given the State Department “over 55,000 pages of materials,” including “all emails in her possession from Mr. Blumenthal.” That’s obviously false, unless by “in her possession” Merrill means now, after the obliteration of the server. Yet today’s Schmidt story seems to accept the Merrill claim:
In sifting through and producing such a large number of emails, it stands to reason that some would be missed. But the fact that some of the missing correspondence contained expressions of gratitude and encouragement to Mr. Blumenthal is being seized on by Republicans, who plan to use the apparent contradiction, and the missing emails, to raise new questions about Mrs. Clinton’s credibility. That paragraph more than any other is what makes us suspect Schmidt is the victim of agenda-driven editing on behalf of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. The first sentence is laughably credulous. The awkward second sentence attempts to frame Mrs. Clinton’s scandalous behavior as a mere partisan dispute—as if the new details about the coverup would not raise “questions about Mrs. Clinton’s credibility” without the mediation of Republicans.
Today’s Schmidt story contains another denial from Merrill:
A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, Nick Merrill, said, “The idea that this runs counter to the assertion that the emails were unsolicited is a leap.” “Mr. Blumenthal began emailing of his own accord,” Mr. Merrill said. “Polite acknowledgments are not tantamount to solicitation. And I think that any reasonable person who has ever had an email exchange would agree.” Schmidt quotes two of the “polite acknowledgments”: “Greetings from Kabul! And thanks for keeping this stuff coming!” and “This strains credulity based on what I know. Any more info about it?”
Let us acknowledge that Merrill has a bit of a point here. “Polite” seems to understate Mrs. Clinton’s enthusiasm, but one could argue these aren’t quite “solicitations.” If Mrs. Clinton were on trial for perjury over the statement that Blumenthal’s emails were unsolicited, and we were on the jury, we’d vote to acquit if those two quotes were the extent of the evidence. There’s enough ambiguity to leave some reasonable doubt about her guilt.
Is that really the ethical standard to which the Democrats plan to hold their candidate for president? Just kidding, we know it is.
Missing from both of Schmidt’s pieces is any explanation from the Clinton camp of the six emails that were redacted before being turned over, which are very strong evidence of obstruction of justice. Didn’t it occur to Schmidt to ask Merrill about these? Maybe Merrill stonewalled, but that would itself be of interest to the reader. Or did the no-comment get lost somewhere in the editing process?
Meanwhile, get a load of this report from CNSNews.com:
Catherine Duval, the attorney in charge of the Internal Revenue Service’s email production to Congress, has changed jobs: She now manages the State Department’s email production to Congress, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) told a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Thursday, June 25. . . . Meanwhile, members of the Oversight Committee last week accused the IRS of destroying some of Lois Lerner’s emails despite a subpoena and an order to preserve them. “There was a preservation order in place, there’s a subpoena in place, they’ve never complied with it; we’ve had testimony from the IRS commissioner that we would get all this only to find out they’ve been degaussing these tapes and they destroyed evidence,” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) at the June 25 hearing. Which gives us an idea: Why doesn’t Lois Lerner jump into the race for the Democratic presidential nomination? At least she believes in something.
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