Subject: Proposed response to upcoming State Dept disclosure on Sid emails
From: Brian Fallon <[email-masked]>
To: Cheryl Mills <[email-masked]>, Heather Samuelson <[email-masked]>, Jennifer Palmieri <[email-masked]>, John Podesta <[email-masked]>, Nick Merrill <[email-masked]>, Tony Carrk <[email-masked]>, Christina Reynolds <[email-masked]>, [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2015 12:30:34 -0400

All - In preparation for the possibility that the State Department may
acknowledge as soon as today that there were 16 Sid emails missing from the
55k pages of material produced by HRC, I wanted to circulate the below
draft plan for responding to the inquiries that Nick will get. Thanks.

*Q: The State Department says that at least 16 of the emails
that Sid Blumenthal turned over to the Benghazi Select Committee were not
included in the 55,000 pages of materials produced by Hillary Clinton.
Doesn't this prove that Hillary Clinton deleted certain emails at some
point before producing them to the Department?*

*ON-THE-RECORD RESPONSE FROM SPOKESMAN NICK MERRILL:*

"Hillary Clinton has turned over 55,000 pages of materials to the State
Department, including all emails in her possession from Mr. Blumenthal."

*ADDITIONAL POINTS ON BACKGROUND FROM CLINTON AIDE:*

Not only did Clinton turn over all emails that she has from Blumenthal, she
actually turned over more than a dozen emails that were not included in
what Mr. Blumenthal handed over to the House committee.

We do not have a record of other correspondence between Mrs. Clinton and
Mr. Blumenthal beyond that which was turned over to the State Department.
In terms of the documents provided by Mr. Blumenthal to the House
committee, we do not recognize many of those materials and cannot speak to
their origin.

*OFF RECORD, if pressed on whether we are essentially admitting the
possibility that she deleted some emails:*

Look, we do not know what these materials are, or where they came from.
Just take a look at them: many of the documents are not even formatted as
emails.

For all we know, it could be that, in the course of reproducing his emails
after his account was hacked, Sid misremembered which memos he actually
forwarded to her and which he did not.

And hey, even if Sid is right and some of these documents were at some
point sent to Clinton, this is unremarkable anyway for two key reasons:

One, she would have been under no obligation to preserve them since
Blumenthal wasn't a government employee.

Two, there is nothing in any of these emails that is remotely new or
interesting. Indeed, none of these 16 emails are qualtitatively different
than the dozens of others that Hillary already produced to the State
Department. So it is completely ridiculous to suggest that there might have
been any nefarious basis for her to want to delete any of Sid's
correspondence.