http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/clinton-started-editing-emails-8-months-earlier-than-thought/article/2572728Clinton started editing emails 8 months earlier than thought
By Sarah Westwood (@sarahcwestwood) • 9/24/15 12:01 AM
Hillary Clinton and her aides began collecting Clinton's private emails in February of last year, eight months before the State Department formally requested copies of her work-related records.
The process of separating Clinton's official communications from her personal ones therefore lasted nearly ten months, as her aides did not provide 55,000 printed pages of emails to the State Department until Dec. 2014.
On Feb. 15, 2014, Clinton paid Platte River Networks, the technology company hired in June 2013 to move her emails onto a new server, to set up a "separate archive email box" for her records.
Nearly two weeks later, she paid the company to shift emails from the archives onto a new system, according to Sen. Ron Johnson.
Johnson, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee, wrote to Patrick Kennedy, State's top records official, asking for documentation of the agency's contact with Clinton aides prior to its official email request on Oct. 28, 2014.
The Wisconsin Republican suggested in his letter Tuesday that either the State Department or Clinton herself had misrepresented the nature of the agency's initial request for Clinton's emails.
Clinton has maintained her decision to hand over work-related emails was prompted by a routine housekeeping inquiry from the State Department, which she said had sent the same request to other secretaries of state.
However, John Kirby, State Department spokesman, told the Washington Post Tuesday the State Department only asked Clinton for her emails after discovering she never used a government account.
Officials made the discovery after unsuccessful attempts to locate Clinton's records in response to congressional requests from the newly-formed House Select Committee on Benghazi.
Johnson cited a March statement from Clinton that implied she did not begin screening her emails until after the State Department approached her in October.
"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," Clinton said in a press conference just days after the New York Times first broke news of her private email use.
"I responded right away and provided all my emails that could possibly be work-related, which totaled roughly 55,000 printed pages, even though I knew the State Department already had the vast majority of them," she said.
But Johnson said new information obtained by congressional investigators cast doubt on Clinton's account of the exchange.
"[F]rom the information obtained by the committee, it appears that Secretary Clinton's archiving and review of her emails were in fact aspects of a multi-month-long process that began as early as eight months prior to the State Department's formal request," he wrote.
Johnson said the discrepancy raises questions about the "rationale for and timing of" the agency's decision to contact Clinton for her emails.
The new information about how long Clinton's staff spent filtering her emails appears to have come from a pair of invoices for technical services that Platte River billed to Clinton Executive Services Corporation, a private company registered in New York, state records show.
Clinton's team downplayed reports Wednesday that Clinton and the State Department had given conflicting accounts of the agency's email request, repeating her defense that everything she has ever done in regards to her emails was legal and similar to actions taken by her predecessors.
