Hillary Clinton Emails: John Boehner Expected to Announce New House Investigation Into Her Practices

Top House Republicans say it should happen this week.

By
JONATHAN KARL, LIZ KREUTZ and SHUSHANNAH WALSHE
March 15, 2015, 12:52 PM ET
4 min read

— -- House Speaker John Boehner is expected to announce this week a new investigation into Hillary Clinton's email practices as Secretary of State, including her admission that more than 31,000 emails were destroyed because she determined them to be personal, top House Republicans told ABC News today.

During a news conference last week, Clinton did not go into the details of how the review of her email was conducted, but said it was “thorough” and that she went “above and beyond” what she was required to do in turning over many of her emails to the State Department.

"We went through a thorough process to identify all of my work-related emails and deliver them to the State Department," she said, adding that all other emails were personal and pertained to matters such as "yoga routines," "family vacations," and "planning Chelsea's wedding."

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After the news conference, Clinton’s team distributed a lengthy question-and-answer document that detailed the “multi-step” process. The process appeared to have included an extensive, nuanced search of Clinton’s inbox, but the document did not make clear how many of the emails were opened and read in the review.

On Sunday, Clinton’s spokesman clarified that “every email was read” and that the steps they outlined in the document “were in addition to reading them all, not in lieu of reading them all.”

According to the document, here is a summary of how Clinton’s attorneys, who were tasked with the job, said they sorted through her emails:

  • First, a search was done of all emails Clinton received from a .gov or state.gov account during the period she was secretary of state -- from 2009 to 2013.
  • Then, with the remaining emails, a search was done for names of 100 State Department and other U.S. government officials who Clinton may have had correspondence with during her tenure.
  • Next, the emails were organized and reviewed by sender and recipient to “account for non-obvious or non-recognizable email addresses or misspellings or other idiosyncrasies.”
  • Lastly, of the emails still left over, a "number of terms" were searched, including “Benghazi” and “Libya.”

    • The results of the search were that Clinton’s attorneys found 30,490 work-related emails and 31,830 emails that were deemed “private and personal.”

    Clinton said on Tuesday she deleted all of the personal emails because she felt she “had no reason to save them.”

    The revelation has only raised more questions among Clinton’s detractors about what was in those emails and why she used the private account in the first place.

    Clinton said she did so out of “convenience,” but acknowledged during the news conference it “would have been better” if she had used two separate phones and two email accounts.

    "I thought using one device would be simpler, and obviously it hasn't worked out that way,” she said.

    Democratic strategist and Clinton ally James Carville, speaking on “This Week,” said he suspected the former First Lady “didn't want [Rep.] Louis Gohmert rifling through her e-mails,” and added the controversy “amounts to nothing but a bunch of people flapping their jaws about nothing.”