Donald Trump blasts Clinton over 30 emails that could be Benghazi-related
Donald Trump turned up the heat on Hillary Clinton Tuesday over the former secretary of state’s handling of classified information, after a new report found that the State Department had identified -- of the thousands of emails uncovered by the FBI in their investigation -- about 30 documents that could be related to the 2012 attack in Benghazi.
“Now, today, another 30 emails were discovered by the State Department that Hillary Clinton failed to turn over – these were emails about Benghazi,” Trump said at a rally Tuesday in Everett, Washington.
“It just never ends with the Clintons,” he opined. “There is only one way to get justice in this totally rigged system -- and it’s a rigged system when they did nothing about the crimes that she committed. It’s a rigged system. Remember that.”
“The only justice we’re going to get is a tremendous victory for everybody in this room and this nation on November 8th,” Trump continued. “A big, big vote.”
The documents Trump referred to were found among the 15,000 or so emails recovered by the FBI during the course of its investigation, after which the Justice Department declined to pursue a criminal prosecution of Clinton. The State Department, however, is still in the process of reviewing whether those emails were duplicates of documents already provided by the former secretary.
“As we have said, the Department agreed to search the materials we received from the FBI in response to several pending FOIA requests and, to the extent responsive records are identified, produce them,” State Department spokesperson John Kirby said in a statement. “Using broad search terms, we have identified approximately 30 documents potentially responsive to a Benghazi-related request. At this time, we have not confirmed that the documents are, in fact, responsive, or whether they are duplicates of materials already provided to the Department by former Secretary Clinton in December 2014.”
The department expects to conclude their review by the end of September.
Trump’s communications director, Jason Miller, also pounded away at Clinton over the emails.
“Today’s disclosure that 30 additional emails about Benghazi were discovered on Hillary Clinton’s private server raises additional questions about the more than 30,000 emails she deleted,” Trump’s senior communications adviser Jason Miller said in a statement Tuesday. “Hillary Clinton swore before a federal court and told the American people she handed over all of her work-related emails. If Clinton did not consider emails about something as important as Benghazi to be work-related, one has to wonder what is contained in the other emails she attempted to wipe from her server.”
Miller was wrong, however, to note that “Clinton swore before a federal court.” The former secretary has never been called before a federal court over her email server.
Brian Fallon, Clinton’s press secretary, responded to a report by the Hill newspaper on the issue, saying that the story “buries the lede” on the issue and that the campaign expects most of the emails to be “duplicates of ones she already provided”:
We actually expect a large number of the 15k emails to be duplicates of ones she already provided. Large number likely to be personal too.
— Brian Fallon (@brianefallon) August 31, 2016