Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Tuesday that her attorneys reviewed more than 62,000 emails she sent while in office to find work-related correspondence to comply with a department request to turn over records from her time in office.
After her press conference, her office released a nine-page explainer which said that her lawyers used automated searches and a scan of senders and recipients to navigate the emails, rather than reviewing each one manually.
According to the statement, 30,490 emails were provided to the State Department, and the remaining 31,830 were deemed by her attorneys to be private, personal records, that Clinton later “chose not to keep.”
Here’s how Clinton’s office says her lawyers examined her email records:
A search was conducted on Secretary Clinton’s email account for all emails sent and received from 2009 to her last day in office, February 1, 2013.
After this universe was determined, a search was conducted for a “.gov” (not just state.gov) in any address field in an email. This produced over 27,500 emails, representing more than 90% of the 30,490 printed copies that were provided to the Department.
To help identify any potential non-“.gov “correspondence that should be included, a search of first and last names of more than 100 State Department and other U.S. government officials was performed. This included all Deputy Secretaries, Under Secretaries, Assistant Secretaries, Ambassadors-at-Large, Special Representatives and Envoys, members of the Secretary’s Foreign Policy Advisory Board, and other senior officials to the Secretary, including close aides and staff.
Next, to account for non-obvious or non-recognizable email addresses or misspellings or other idiosyncrasies, the emails were sorted and reviewed both by sender and recipient.
Lastly, a number of terms were specifically searched for, including: “Benghazi” and “Libya.”
These additional three steps yielded just over another 2,900 emails, including emails from former Administration officials and long-time friends that may not be deemed by the Department to be federal records. And hundreds of these emails actually had already been forwarded onto the state.gov system and captured in real-time.
Here’s the full statement from Clinton’s office:
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