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Put that FOIA down and back away slowly

Latest last update

My friend Karoli wrote an excellent article on all this fooflah. She has more reach than I do, so hopefully this information will eventually work its way around to the original publications.

There’s enough BS about the Clinton emails without additional false associations.

Because we’re all damn tired of hearing about the Clinton emails.

last update

Confirmed. The documents were issued by the State Department in 2014, in response to a FOIA request by The Telegraph’s Philip Sherwell. They have absolutely nothing to do with Clinton, and were not on Clinton’s email server.

Update:

I believe the Philip Sherwell, who instigated the FOIA request, also is the author of this piece, in the Telegraph. I’ve asked him if this was so, and whether he was familiar with the recent stories. Will update when I hear back from him.

earlier

I noticed a story claiming to be about a “smoking gun” proving that Hilary Clinton knew she had top secret information on her server. They got the information from a Daily Mail story. The story has since been picked up by Newsmax, the Telegraph, the BBC, and many other publications too numerous to list.

Five minutes is all it took to discover the FOIA request that produced these documents from the State Department. The request is completely unrelated to Clinton or her email server. The request was initiated by a Philip Sherwell, in August of 2012, and the request was for “references concerning a meeting Saturday April 6, 2002 in Crawford, TX between George W Bush and Tony Blair.”

It has nothing to do with Clinton, and was not among the documents turned over related to the Clinton FOIA requests. We know this for a fact because the FOIA case number and release date are printed at the bottom of the documents. And it seems that the publications weren’t aware that this story was told previously…in 2006. That smoking gun is looking more like a cap gun right about now.