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http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/state-department-benghazi-committee-emails-congress-hillary-clinton-aides-120047.html#ixzz3ftgx0wjfState has not turned over 2 Benghazi-related emails to CongressAt issue: A pair of emails from Sept. 29, 2012.
The State Department has not turned over to congressional Benghazi investigators an email exchange between Hillary Clinton and top aides who were prepping the former secretary of state to discuss the 2012 terrorist attack with a U.S. senator.
The House Select Committee on Benghazi has confirmed to POLITICO that it does not have copies of two Sept. 29, 2012, emails between Clinton and her top policy staffer Jake Sullivan, chief of staff Cheryl Mills and spokesman Philippe Reines.
The emails — which surfaced last week in a State Department response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by a conservative group — also mention the talking points for Susan Rice, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, according to a description of the messages in court documents.
In the days after the Sept. 11, 2012, attack that left four Americans dead, Rice had blamed the tragedy on an anti-Muslim video. Hill Republicans would subsequently accuse the Obama administration of misleading the public about how security at the U.S. compound broke down.
State would neither confirm nor deny that the emails had been withheld, other than to refer to the court filing, which argues certain agency deliberations are exempt from disclosure.
“As non-final drafts, the bodies of these messages consist in their entirety of information that is pre-decisional and deliverable in nature,” wrote State Department top record official John Hackett in response to the lawsuit brought by the conservative group, Judicial Watch.
“Release of this material could reasonably be expected to chill the frank deliberations that occur when senior staff are preparing points or other draft remarks for use by senior Department officials in addressing a matter of public controversy,” he continued.
...“There is no legal privilege which protects the administration from embarrassing emails, emails that substantially impeach previous administration positions, or evidence of wholly contradictory statements by administration officials,” said Benghazi committee spokesman Jamal Ware in a statement for this story. “Chairman Gowdy believes these documents should have been produced to the Committee since the Committee is expressly charged with investigating all aspects of this administration’s response to the attacks in Benghazi including any efforts, however meager, to comply with congressional oversight.”
At the crux of the disagreement is the question of whether the department is obligated to turn over all discussions of agency staff about the topic in question. FOIA allows for a number of exemptions, including those cited by Hackett in the court filing — though Judicial Watch plans to ask a judge to overrule it.
But exemptions from congressional subpoenas are a different matter.
The Obama administration has previously invoked executive privilege to withhold documents in Congress’ investigation of the Fast and Furious gun-walking operation.
...State, however, is not claiming executive privilege in this case, but simply arguing that certain Benghazi-related documents constitute “important Executive Branch institutional interests” or should be withheld due to “executive branch confidentiality.” It has made such an argument during several Benghazi document productions, sources say.
Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) has twice requested information about withheld documents, including the number of pages, descriptions of their contents and the reasoning behind the department’s decision not to turn them over.
Republicans say they’ve yet to hear back.
...“There is no privilege or any other legal justification for withholding these documents from Congress except that the existence of these documents may undercut and impeach previous statements by this administration,” Ware said. “While they may wish they did not have to turn over documents that could show their duplicity, the law, nonetheless, requires that they do so.”
Panel Democrats declined comment for this story.
The pair of emails in question came to light last Tuesday in a court filing just before midnight by State Department’s Hackett. Judicial Watch is suing for release of all communications about Rice’s infamous talking points.
Hackett described the exchange that was not released to the conservative group.
Sullivan sent the first email, under the subject line “Key Points,” to Clinton’s private email account and to Mills, according to court documents. (The court filing confirms that Clinton also handed over her copy of this exchange to the State Department — though the department did not release it.)
Three hours later, Mills forwarded what appears to be a revision of the first email to Sullivan and Reines under subject line: “Fwd: REVISED key points.”
The exact contents of the messages are unknown, though Hackett disclosed to the court that it related to Clinton’s talking points ahead of a discussion with a lawmaker.
“The bodies of the messages consist of drafts, composed by advisors to former Secretary Clinton, of a proposed future communication from the former Secretary to a member of the U.S. Senate concerning various issues related to the attacks of September 11, 2012, in Benghazi,” Hackett wrote, later adding that a portion of each draft included “a summery of the talking points that had been sent to Ambassador Rice” a few weeks earlier.
Hackett told the judge the email exchange in question was exempted from the group’s FOIA request because it dealt with the deliberations of staff regarding a controversy, what he called the deliberative process privilege.
...He then argued that releasing the emails would also invade the top staffers’ privacy: “Any individual, including a U.S. Government employee, has a privacy interest in his or her personal email address because the release of this information could result in harassment or unwanted attention,” Hackett writes. “The domain names of the personal email addresses in the email chain are therefore exempt.”
Under government record-keeping rules, staff are supposed to use their State.gov emails for official matters, not their personal addresses.
Hackett “concluded that disclosure … would result in a clear unwarranted invasion of personal privacy and disclosure of the information would not serve the ‘core purpose’ of the FOIA i.e., it would not disclose information about ‘what the government is up to.’”
“Accordingly, I have determined that the privacy interests clearly outweigh any public interest in disclosure of the withheld information.”
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