Hillary Clinton did not have lawyers look through her private-email after her departure from the State Department – instead, she her staff used CTRL+F to determine which emails to delete.
A little over half the emails (31,830) did not contain the search words Hillary’s staff used to determine sensitive material. These emails were deemed “private, personal records.”
Hillary’s staff then deleted the emails without reading them.
Ctrl+F allows people to search a document for certain keywords, a benefit congressional investigators will not have because Hillary circumvented that by printing her emails on 55,000 sheets of paper.
Obviously, it is possible for emails to contain classified information without containing one of the search words used by Hillary’s staff. For instance, sensitive places or people could have been discussed using code words.
“I would question why lawyers for Secretary Clinton would use keyword searching, a method known to be fraught with limitations, to determine which of the emails with a non-.gov address pertained to government business. Any and all State Department activities–not just communications involving the keywords Benghazi or Libya–would potentially make an email a federal record. Given the high stakes involved, I would have imagined staff could have simply conducted a manual review of every document. Using keywords as a shortcut unfortunately leaves the process open to being second-guessed,” says Jason R. Baron, a former lawyer at the National Archives and Records Administration.
Do congressional investigators even know what the exact search terms that Hillary’s staff used were?
All State Department employees are required to turn over all classified material at the end of their employment, or face criminal penalties. So Hillary’s staff should never have had access to sensitive emails, let alone been authorized to determine which were classified or which were personal.
And seriously? Ctrl+F? Just when it seemed this scandal could not be any more amateur-hour…