“This Is An Absolutely Corrupt Process” – Clinton’s Deleted Emails Won’t Be Released Until After The Election

One month ago, we reported that the State Department announced some good and some bad news for transparency advocates was disclosed, when Hillary Clinton’s former employer said it would release all of the deleted work-related emails that the FBI recovered from Hillary Clinton’s private system, eliminating the possibility that the messages will remain secret. The State Dept had “voluntarily” agreed to produce non-exempt agency records responsive to Judicial Watch’s FOIA request. That was the good news. The bad news was that as we said, it remains unclear if the full set of emails would be released by the presidential election on Nov. 8.

Now we know the answer: no, it won’t.

According to a new timetable set Friday by a federal judge, most of Hillary Clinton’s deleted, and then recovered, emails won’t be made public until after Election Day. As the WSJ reports, Judge James Boasberg on Friday ordered the State Department to finish processing 1,050 pages of material for release by Nov. 4—just a fraction of what could be as much as 10,000 pages of material. 

The farcical development, and latest confirmation of corruption at all echelons of US government, was revealed when the judge set the new timetable, which previously was expected to play out in the coming weeks, after acknowledging that the State Department was struggling to manage the burden of dozens of lawsuits and thousands of requests for records from Mrs. Clinton’s time in office.

In other words, because Clinton has been sued so many times for non-compliance with subpoenas, for destroying evidence, for purging servers, for crushing cell phones with hammers, and generally for hiding information, the State Department – with its thousands of government employees – is unable to provide the public with what may be the most important glimpse into Hillary’s allegedly criminal activities: the not so arbitrary deletion of up to 15,000 emails.

According to the WSJ, the new schedule would push the release of most of the newly discovered emails past Election Day, at which point not even the most scandalous revelations would have any impact on the outcome of who is America’s next president.

To be sure, some emails will be made public: the first batch, appropriately filtered to exclude any sensitive topics, is due to be released on Oct. 7, with two other pre-Election Day releases scheduled for Oct. 21 and Nov. 4. After that, the State Department has committed processing 500 pages a month.

The State Department says it has identified roughly 15,000 email messages to or from Mrs. Clinton that the FBI recovered and turned over to the State Department. Of those 15,000, about 9,400 have been deemed purely personal and will be excluded from release, according to lawyers representing the Department.  Another 5,600 emails were deemed work-related but State Department attorneys warned that up to 50% of those are duplicates of emails that Mrs. Clinton already turned over.

It is worth repeating: nearly 6,000 work-related emails were deleted by the same person who assured Congress that none such emails were purged, and only personal stuff was “BitBleached.”

As the WSJ adds, department lawyers said they aren’t sure how many total pages the newly discovered emails comprise but that each email comprised on average about 1.8 pages, they said.

But while this legal travesty should infuriate all Americans, no matter if on the left or right, the one person most outraged was Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton, the man single-handedly responsible for the countless of Clinton emails revealed in the past year (whatever happened to independent, investigative media), who said that “the American people could be deprived of this information at this essential time.”

“this is an absolutely corrupt process the State Department has come up with,” Fitton said, blaming the department for the continuing delays.

As a reminder the either blatantly corrupt, criminal or merely grossly incompetent FBI closed its investigation into Hillary without recommending any charges, although recent Reddit revelations that Hillary’s tech aide had sought outside assistance to purge her email server, provides some hope that some less corrupt government organization, clearly not the FBI, may actually get to the bottom of Hillary’s ongoing email scandal. That said, having seen how the US legal system works, we are not holding our breath.