State Department file photo
The Gaps in Hillary Clinton's State Department Calendar
The U.S. presidential candidate excluded several events during her tenure as secretary of state, according to the AP.
Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state has been an ongoing controversy in the United States. Add to that an Associated Press report published on Friday calling into question omissions in her official State Department calendar.
According to the AP, a number of events and meetings with private individuals, including chief executives of various companies, are missing:
The AP review of Clinton's calendar—her after-the-fact, official chronology of the events of her four-year term—identified at least 75 meetings with longtime political donors and loyalists, Clinton Foundation contributors and corporate and other outside interests that were either not recorded or listed with identifying details scrubbed. The AP found the omissions by comparing the 1,500-page document with separate planning schedules supplied to Clinton by aides in advance of each day's events. The names of at least 114 outsiders who met with Clinton were missing from her calendar, the records show.
Clinton Foundation contributors apparently participated in meetings not listed or detailed in Clinton’s calendar. As David Graham has noted, the former secretary of state’s time in the government and her ties to the Clinton Foundation have been a source of criticism about Clinton among Republicans, like her rival Donald Trump. Even so, the AP adds, “no known federal laws were violated and some omissions could be blamed on Clinton’s highly fluid schedule, which sometimes forced late cancellations.”
Still, it’s unclear why some names were not added to Clinton’s official calendar—among them “longtime adviser Sidney Blumenthal, consultant and former Clinton White House chief of staff Thomas ‘Mack’ McLarty, former energy lobbyist Joseph Wilson and entertainment magnate and Clinton campaign bundler Haim Saban.” The AP also notes that it could not determine who specifically was in charge of the calendar in its review.
The revelation comes on the same day as a separate AP report noting the State Department confirmed that an email exchange between the former secretary of state and deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin was not included in a batch of emails provided to the agency by Clinton. It was, however, part of a set of documents Abedin provided to officials earlier this year. “Secretary Clinton had some emails with Huma that Huma did not have, and Huma had some emails with Secretary Clinton that Secretary Clinton did not have,” the Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon told the AP.
Clinton has said the use of a private email server was “allowed” at the time, but conceded, “It was a mistake and if I could go back, I would do it differently.”