The revelation erroneously reported by the New York Times that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton may have violated the law by using a personal email address to conduct official business is just the latest tank of gas in the Benghazi clown car.
The scoop, which was apparently fed to the New York Times by congressional sources associated with the Select Benghazi Committee, is now being used by the committee as an excuse to subpoena Clinton for emails the committee more than likely already has access to.
The House Select Committee on Benghazi, which first discovered Clinton’s use of a personal e-mail based on a home server in its inquiry into a fatal 2012 terrorist attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, is asking for all e-mails related to the attack from all Clintonemail.com accounts and any other staff members’ personal accounts.
The subpoenas are expected to go out to the State Department later Wednesday.
As Bob has already pointed out, over 55,000 pages of Hillary Clinton's emails have been handed over to the State Department.
Furthermore, most of those emails are duplicates of emails already stored by the federal government.
According to [State Department] officials, the printed emails Clinton's team turned over to the State Department in recent months were largely duplicative of what was already stored on government servers. They argued the need to turn over the pages was merely a response to outdated regulations requiring hard copies of messages the government has already preserved electronically.
This big honk of nothing is just the latest fake scandal in a long line of fake scandals used to carry on a witch hunt.
The New York Times should be embarrassed for diligently regurgitating a nothingburger handed to them by congressional trolls who had a specific, partisan goal in mind -- to put Benghazi back in the headlines.
The fact that the would-be scandal has been thoroughly debunked is immaterial. The mere suggestion that something scandalous has occurred is enough to get the ball rolling even if none of it is rooted in fact.
It's unlikely that the Select Solyndra IRS Committee to Investigate the Benghazi ACORN Birth Certificate will uncover new information in emails they've already examined over the course of several years, but a subpoena of Hillary Clinton does sound sexy and will almost certainly generate a lot of page clicks.
The idea that Hillary Clinton used a personal email account for the explicit purpose of avoiding FOIA requests is more or less a conspiracy theory and an improvable thesis. It's also a theory undercut by the fact that John Kerry is the first Secretary of State to use an official government email address. The only thing that distinguishes Clinton from her predecessors in this regard is the fact that she's probably running for president.