Did Secretary Clinton Sign Form OF-109?
Did Secretary Clinton Sign Form OF-109?
United States House of Representatives
March 17, 2015
Speaker of the House John Boehner
Did Secretary Clinton Sign Form OF-109?
March 17, 2015
Matt Wolking
You can’t just become Secretary of State and refuse a government phone and email address without anyone noticing. You also can’t regularly contact your boss from your personal email account for years without him noticing that you never use the work account you’re supposed to have. Especially when your boss is the guy who has the nuclear codes.
But that’s what President Obama would like you to believe. Asked when he first learned about Hillary Clinton’s private email system, he said, “The same time everybody else learned it, through news reports.” His staff even rushed to tell reporters how shocked they all are, as if Secretary Clinton went rogue and this never would have been allowed if the occupant of the Oval Office had only known what was she was up to.
The fact is that Secretary Clinton wanted to skirt the law and avoid oversight, and President Obama went right along with it, national security and transparency and the law be damned.
Now, Clinton’s team and the White House are scrambling to answer a simple question about whether or not she signed form OF-109, as all State Department employees must do when they leave their jobs. Signing the form certifies that the employee has turned over all official records and emails to the federal government, as required.
State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki couldn’t say last week, or on Friday, or again yesterday whether Clinton signed the document. And Hillary Clinton herself ignored the question, quickly scurrying away when confronted by a reporter in Manhattan. As for President Obama, he thinks the whole thing is pretty funny.
It’s not. From the very beginning of the investigation into what happened in Benghazi, the Obama administration’s response and their attempts to blame a YouTube video, document requests and even congressional subpoenas were ignored. It wasn’t until after the Select Committee on Benghazi demanded the records that the State Department asked Clinton to turn over her emails, and it wasn’t until Clinton received that request that she provided only the email she wanted to – nearly two years after she left the administration.
That’s a big problem if she signed that form like she was supposed to. And that’s also why Clinton is being urged “to turn her server over to a neutral, detached third-party arbiter who can determine which documents should be public and which should remain private.”
Meanwhile, her story keeps changing. First her team said they provided the State Department with some of her emails based on keyword searches. Now they say each one of her emails were read before being deleted or turned over. What is the truth?
One thing is certain: the Select Committee will continue seeking just that.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it is a work of the United States federal government (see 17 U.S.C. 105).
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