But her emails...The Most Outrageous Claims Fox News has made about Hillary Clinton's email scandal
Fox News has decided Hillary Clinton committed worse crimes that what Trump is being accused of.
Within minutes of the world finding out that the FBI had conducted a 9-hour search of Donald J. Trump’s residence and offices at his club Mar-a-Lago, Fox News had pivoted back to a seven-year-old story involving former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a private server and deleted emails.
The email scandal was back. It never really died.
Fox personalities will sometimes dredge up Ted Kennedy’s mysterious car accident in Chappaquiddick Island, Bill Clinton’s affair with an intern, and the terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
Judge Jeanine Pirro has been known to just toss in the word Benghazi in the middle of a rant.
Strangely no one on Fox News ever mentions Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal, the war crimes committed during Iraq War or how the world banking system nearly collapsed while George W. Bush was president.
I wanted to create a cheat sheet of sorts for readers who have a relative, co-worker, neighbor or friend who keeps bringing up Hillary’s emails every time Trump’s current scandal with classified documents makes the news.
A Quick Timeline:
The following facts are not in dispute.
Clinton exclusively used a personal email and private server during the time she was Secretary of State from 2009-2013.
During the time Clinton was Secretary of State she sent or received 62,320 emails.
In 2014, after Clinton had left the State Department, the House Select Committee on Benghazi asked to see her emails. This started an investigation into Clinton’s personal email and private server.
Her lawyers immediately complied with the request and turned over 30,490 work-related emails to to the State Department.
He legal team deleted 33,000 emails they deemed personal.
Clinton did not follow government protocol, and her email records remain incomplete.
The final State Department report published in Oct. 16, 2019, found there was no systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information by Clinton or her associates.
Fox Claim - Hillary broke the law
Here’s a breakdown of why Clinton was not criminally charged.
The legal requirement to immediately preserve emails from nongovernmental and personal accounts was not mandatory until nearly two years after Clinton left the State Department.
“We found no evidence that any of the additional work-related e-mails were intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them,” said FBI Director James Comey in his official statement about the investigation.
“We believe our investigation has been sufficient to give us reasonable confidence there was no intentional misconduct in connection with that sorting effort,” said FBI Director James Comey in his official statement about the investigation.
Ultimately Comey said that no reasonable prosecutor would have pursued a criminal case against Hillary Clinton
On Nov. 6, 2016, The FBI announced their review was complete and no criminal charges were filed.
Subsequent reports by the Department of Justice completed in June 2018 and by the State Department in October 2019 also found that Clinton did not break any laws regarding her use of personal email and a private server.
Clinton’s emails were reviewed by both Rex Tillerson and Mike Pompeo during the Trump Administration and neither one of them could find any illegal activity.
Hillary definitely did not follow protocol and made several poor decisions in regards to her personal server and non-governmental email address but there’s no evidence she committed a crime.
Fox Claim - Hillary Clinton had millions of classified documents.
Jesse Watters used the term millions but the day before he said hundreds. I’m going to break the longer quote down first in sections as it’s filled with inaccuracies. This is what Watters said on the day after the search on Mar-a-Lago, on August 9th, 2022.
“Hillary smashed iPhones with hammers and poured acid over 30,000 emails under subpoena,” said Watters.
Correction: Hillary never used iPhones she had Blackberry phones. She also never had more than one or two at a time. She had a total of eight phones during her time as Secretary of State and most of them were destroyed years before the FBI asked for them.
Hillary also did not pour acid on any server which is discussed in detail later in this article.
“The FBI never raided her house in Chappaqua. They came over and had lunch and handed out immunity deals like candy. Hillary had hundreds of classified documents at her house,” said Watters.
Hillary Clinton did not have any physical documents at her home. What is he talking about in terms of immunity deals? Clinton also had no physical copies of top secret, classified or confidential documents at her home.
The very next day Watters said the following:
“Hillary had millions of sensitive documents in her country home, he didn't even try to get them back. He didn't lift a finger classified documents about al Qaeda, Benghazi, Russia,” said Watters.
Correction: How did Watters come up with the idea that Hillary Clinton had millions of documents in her home?
This is the only media clip I have of anyone on Fox News using the term millions to describe the amount of documents involved with her private server.
Watters does have one of the most highly rated shows on the network. He sometimes beats Tucker Carlson in the ratings. That might have just been some sort of ad lib line on his part but roughly 3-4 million Americans heard him say it and would most likely believe every word.
Some emails that were made publicly accessible actually show how Clinton and her team specifically avoided using her private server to email classified information. They took pains to move to an appropriate venue when discussing classified or sensitive information.
The 9-page report that was released by the State Department in October 2019 noted that none of the messages in question were marked as classified. The report also pointed to ambiguity about how “forgiven government information” should be treated and what could be shared in an unclassified system.
Fox Claim - When the government asked for Hillary Clinton’s phones she smashed them with hammers.
“Saying Hillary Clinton complied when they literally smashed Blackberrys with hammers is really like laughable. So I just want to throw that in there. Hammers. They smashed them. They smashed them with hammers. That’s not complying. I'm pretty sure that's not part of the process,” said Dan Bongino, August 12, 2022.
Correction - This is patently false.
The investigation into Hillary’s emails didn’t start until after she had left the State Department.
When Clinton was the Secretary of State she used Blackberry phones to send email. During her tenure in that department she used a total of eight phones in succession.
This number often gets confused. She had a total of 13 mobile devices with two known phone numbers.
During the FBI investigation, Clinton turned over two Blackberry devices but an FBI forensic analysis found no evidence that they were connected to any of Clinton’s private servers or contained any emails from when she was Secretary of State.
Fox News acts as if the FBI asked for all 13 phones which she quickly destroyed with a hammer to keep them out of the hands of investigators. All of the phones in question were long gone when the FBI asked about them.
They didn’t just take Clinton’s word on this one as her entire team was questioned about this and they corroborated her story.
From James Comey’s statement on July 6, 2016 about the investigation,
“Secretary Clinton used several different servers and administrators of those servers during her four years at the State Department, and used numerous mobile devices to view and send e-mail on that personal domain. As new servers and equipment were employed, older servers were taken out of service, stored, and decommissioned in various ways,” said Comey.
Clinton’s team had destroyed her old phones with hammers in an imperfect attempt to protect any data that could be scrubbed from them.
Fox Claim - Hillary used bleach and acid to destroy devices and the emails they contained.
“Remember Hillary Clinton's house was never raided. Even though she stored troves of classified material on a personal server. She deleted 33,000 emails. Remember, nobody had ever heard of BleachBit before Hillary Clinton,” said Sean Hannity, August 8, 2022.
“I forgot about the BleachBit of the Blackberries or whatever that was called,” said Ingraham, August 8, 2022
“Hillary Clinton was able to delete and acid wash 33,000 emails after they were subpoenaed by Congress. Absolutely nothing has happened to hold her accountable,” said Jesse Watters as he read from a statement by Donald J. Trump, August 8, 2022.
Correction: Some of the Fox News personalities at least got the term “BleachBit”correct, others claimed Hillary Clinton used actual bleach or acid. Her personal emails were removed using a free software called BleachBit.
Why would anyone promote the idea that computer hardware can be stripped clean of data using bleach or acid? Computers aren’t made out of fabric.
I’d love to ask any of these Fox personalities to pour some bleach on a circuit board or a hard drive and then watch what happens. The bleach might cause some damage but it would most likely just sit there until it evaporated.
Clinton’s legal team used software called BleachBit when they deleted emails from her server. BleachBit does not contain actual bleach.
This misconception got started after former U.S. Representative Trey Gowdy brought up the software doing an interview on Fox News in August 2016.
“They didn’t just push the delete button; they had them deleted where even God can’t read them . . . You don’t use BleachBit for yoga emails or for bridesmaids emails. When you are using BleachBit, it is something you really don’t want the world to see,” said Gowdy.
Soon after Gowdy’s appearance Trump worked the software into one of his campaign speeches. BleachBit quickly morphed into simply bleach then acid or acid-washed.
Trump would often use the terms bleach and acid in the same line.
”Hillary Clinton’s staff deleted and digitally bleached - which is acid cleaned - her emails,” said Trump during a campaign speech on September 8, 2016.
This myth was transformed into dramatic scene where Clinton herself took apart hard drives and servers and poured acid or bleach on them to hide any evidence of her nefarious deeds. It’s complete fiction.
BleachBit is considered a fairly innocuous software. Bleach isn’t even an acid, it’s a base. Trump’s invented story about bleached or acid-washed servers simply got repeated enough that it’s become the narrative many on the right believe.
Fox Claim - Hillary lied when she told the FBI none of her emails contained classified information.
“Well remember when she said there was a “C” on the document, she played stupid, and she didn't know what it meant. Remember that?” said Dan Bongino, August 12, 2022.
Originally it did appear that Clinton may not have been truthful when she said she had never knowingly sent or received classified information.
After further investigation by the Department of Justice and the State Department Clinton’s statements look far less suspect.
In the original FBI investigation, of the tens of thousands of emails investigators reviewed, 113 contained classified information and three had classification markers. Clinton told the FBI that she didn’t know that marking (C) meant a document was classified. Three emails would constitute less than one-hundredth of one percent of the total number of emails.
This was later updated as the by State Department spokesman John Kirby addressed this in two press briefings on July 6 and 7, 2016:
From the FactCheck.org article “Revisiting Clinton and Classified Information,”
Comey said three emails had “portion markings” on them indicating that they were classified, but they were not properly marked and therefore could have been missed by Clinton. He said the emails were marked as classified with the letter “C” in the body of the email.
Kirby said the State Department believes that at least two of the emails were mistakenly marked as confidential. He could not speak to the third email, saying the department didn’t have “all of the records and documents that the FBI used in their investigation.”
Comey told the committee he is “highly confident” that FBI investigators consulted with the State Department about the marked emails. But he said he did not know that the department believes that any of them were marked in error.
In June 2018 a Justice Department report found the classification markings were ambiguous and not clear. The final State Department report that was also completed during the the Trump Administration in Oct. 2019 also found that the classification markings were unclear.
Federal agencies sometimes classify information after the fact. Some emails were not classified at the time Clinton sent or received them but were deemed classified later.
Clinton may have honestly thought she never sent any classified information.
Deleting the personal emails was the biggest mistake Clinton and her legal team made during the FBI investigation. It created a huge unknown which her critics were able to fill with whatever they wanted.
Fox Claim - Hillary Clinton’s private server was hacked by a hostile foreign power.
“Hillary Clinton . . .was caught with the classified information that our other countries were able to hack into nothing no raid on them,” said Ainsley Earnhardt, August 12, 2022
“Hillary server was just wide open for business pretty much every enemy penetrated it,” said Jesse Watters August 10, 1022
Correction: “With respect to potential computer intrusion by hostile actors, we did not find direct evidence that Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail domain, in its various configurations since 2009, was hacked successfully,” said James Comey in his official statement July 5th, 2016.
The Inspector General report found hackers attempted to access Clinton’s server on Jan. 9, 2011 but were unable to do so. The attempt was detected and Clinton’s technical support adviser caught it and shut the server down.
It’s always possible that Clinton’s server was hacked but that the hacker did not leave any evidence behind.
Ironically had Clinton used the official government email address there is a high likelihood that she might have been hacked. Russian actors did manage to hack the State Department email system in November 2014.
In May 2016 a Romanian hacker known as Guccifer told Fox News he had successfully accessed Clinton’s email server several times.
This has been disputed by the Clinton campaign and the State Department and Guccifer offered no evidence to support his claims. Guccifer was serving time in a U.S. prison on felony hacking charges when he made this claim.
Fox Claim - Whatever nonsense Jason Chaffetz says here…
“I dealt with this. I was the chairman of the Oversight Committee. I did issue subpoenas on Hillary Clinton. He at the time she had no security clearance, none. And there were thousands of documents in her safe at her attorney. They had no security clearance. And you know what, nobody was prosecuted. Nobody was raided. Nobody went in there in the dead of night. None of the media was given given this, then made it very large didn't even report it,” said Jason Chaffetz, August 8, 2022.
Correction: Sometimes a claim is so outlandish I don’t even know how to begin to find the evidence to debunk it. I would love to know specifically what he issued but his statement is quite vague so there’s no way to look that up. Her lawyer did keep the emails on a thumb drive in a safe. He did not keep thousands of documents. Chaffetz is correct in that Hillary wouldn’t have had a security clearance once she left the State Department. His statement that the media didn’t report on Hillary Clinton’s email scandal flat out absurd. Every aspect of this scandal was documented by multiple media companies. This was the story that would not die.