Back in March Time revealed that this is how Hillary determined which her emails were private and which should be printed out and handed over to the government:
She commissioned a review of the 62,320 messages in her account only after the department—spurred by the congressional investigation—asked her to do so. And this review did not involve opening and reading each email; instead, [Mrs.] Clinton’s lawyers created a list of names and keywords related to her work and searched for those. Slightly more than half the total cache—31,830 emails—did not contain any of the search terms, according to Clinton’s staff, so they were deemed to be “private, personal records.”
This process raises some important questions that I hope Congressional investigators and private plaintiffs are raising:
- I doubt that David Kendall, who no doubt charges hundreds of dollars an hour, spent any time poring over these emails with his keyword list in hand. So, exactly who were the lawyers who did this work. Did they all have appropriate security clearances? I assume “Mrs. Clinton’s lawyers” means her personal or political lawyers, not State Dept. lawyers. Why, then, would they have top secret clearances, since she has insisted all along that her email contained no classified information? But we know now that it did (does, if it still exists), and so we need to know whether lawyers who did the key work searching had the necessary clearances. If they did not, the Democrats who support her anyway will have one more get out of jail free card to print.
- What were the “names and keywords” these lawyers used. In one of my several former lives I owned and operated a small firm specializing in online research for business and law firms, but one need not be a professional researcher to know that simple keyword searching alone could not possibly distinguish her private from her public records. Does anyone believe that simply because an email did not include the words “Benghazi” or “J. Christopher Stevens,” our murdered ambassador, — or what about just “Stevens”or “Christopher” or “Chris” alone? — it was not about Benghazi?
- Why 55,000 pages of the emails that were turned over printed out instead of handed over in their original electronic form? Could that have been intended to make it much difficult and time-consuming to evaluate and use them?
- Why was the thumb drive given to her lawyer, David Kendall, to hold rather than simply turned over to the State Dept.?
