Hillary Gets 3 Pinocchios on Email Claim

Washington Post: '90 to 95%' stat didn't come from the State Department
By John Johnson,  Newser Staff
Posted Nov 9, 2015 1:59 PM CST
Hillary Gets 3 Pinocchios on Email Claim
Hillary Clinton testifies before the House Select Committee on Benghazi.   (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Hillary Clinton may have emerged from her marathon grilling before the House Benghazi panel in fine shape, but she was unable to definitively answer one question in particular. After she repeated her assertion that "90 to 95%" of her emails were in the State Department's system anyway, panel chief Trey Gowdy wondered where she got that stat. "We learned that from the State Department," Clinton responded, though she promised to look into it further. The Fact Checker blog at the Washington Post decided to take a closer look itself, and the result isn't great for Clinton: Three Pinocchios in the five-level ranking. The stat didn't come from the State Department, writes Glenn Kessler, it came from Clinton's staff. And, further, there's no real way to confirm it.

Kessler explains how Clinton's lawyers came up with the figure: They saw that in most of the emails, at least one person in the chain had a state.gov email address. Therefore, that email should theoretically be preserved in the State Department's archives. Most of the email chains made available so far do indeed have a state.gov address included, so that's not an "unreasonable assumption," writes Kessler. "But Clinton cannot make a definitive statement and certainly cannot attribute that to the State Department." On the latter point, she "clearly erred," he adds, and "she should correct the record." Click for the full post. (More Hillary Clinton stories.)

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