(CNSNews.com) - Last year, on the same day the State Department publicly released the first batch of Hillary Clinton's emails, a Clinton staffer expressed relief that congressional investigators were more concerned about the "self-selected" nature of those emails rather than their classified content.
On May 22, 2015, Hillary Clinton's Commumications Director Jennifer Palmieri sent an email to another Clinton campaign staffer, noting that "Gowdy is focused on how her Benghazi emails are self-selected by her and therefore paint on an incomplete picture. He is not focused on the classified email, which is great."
Palmieri sent the email shortly after Clinton took a few questions from reporters after a campaign event in New Hampshire:
"She did great," Palmieri wrote in the May 22, 2015 email released Thursday by WikiLeaks.
"Body language was very good, relaxed and not at all defensive. The clip MSNBC is using most is her saying that she hopes the release of other emails are expedited. Gowdy is focused on how her Benghazi emails are self-selected by her and therefore paint on (sic) an incomplete picture. He is not focused on the classified email, which is great. She did well on trade, too. I think anyone who heard that would come away thinking she had a lot of doubts about TPP. Definitely the right call to do this - and helpful to get her on camera on trade, too. She was tough..."
Just before Clinton spoke to reporters in New Hampshire, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), the chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, released a statement in Washington, saying:
More than six months after the Select Committee first discovered Secretary Clinton’s unusual email arrangement with herself, and after the media discovered Secretary Clinton relied exclusively on a personal server housing a personal email account eschewing any official email address, State Department transferred 300 messages exclusively reviewed and released by her own lawyers.
These lawyers, it must be noted, owed and continue to owe a fiduciary responsibility to Secretary Clinton to protect her interests. To assume a self-selected public record is complete, when no one with a duty or responsibility to the public had the ability to take part in the selection, requires a leap in logic no impartial reviewer should be required to make and strains credibility.
It is also important to remember these email messages are just one piece of information that cannot be completely evaluated or fully understood without the total record. The Committee is working to collect and evaluate all of the relevant and material information necessary to evaluate the full range of issues in context. We will not reach any investigative conclusions until our work is complete, but these emails continue to reinforce the fact that unresolved questions and issues remain as it relates to Benghazi.
The Select Committee continues to believe the American people have a right to the full and complete record of her official emails and, therefore, asked Secretary Clinton to turn her server and the full body of emails over to a neutral, detached, independent third party for review. This is also why the State Department must comply with a months-old subpoena for emails of the former Secretary’s top aides, whose emails have never been received or reviewed by any congressional committee.
The Committee’s interest is in building a complete record from which the final, definitive accounting regarding the terrorist attacks in Benghazi can be provided. The best way to answer all questions related to the attacks in Benghazi continues to be having access to the full public record, not a "record" controlled, possessed and screened exclusively by Secretary Clinton's personal lawyers.
In his statement, Gowdy did not mention that the FBI had redacted one of the Clinton emails because it involved information later deemed to be classified.
However, later in the day in New Hampshire, NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell did ask Clinton about the redaction: "The criticisms of Chairman Gowdy are that your lawyers vetted these [emails] so they're not really a public release. And that you haven't really cooperated with putting everything out, and at least one of these did contain information that was classified, about the suspects in Benghazi."
Clinton replied that she's glad the emails are finally coming out, "and it is the fact that we have released all of them that have any government relationship whatsoever."
Clinton said she was "aware that the FBI has asked that a portion of one email be held back. That happens in the process of Freedom of Information Act responses, but that doesn't chanage the fact that all of the information in the emails was handled appropriately."
Clinton told Mitchell, "no," she was not concerned that such information was sent through a private server at her home in Chappaqua.
In July 2016, FBI Director James Comey told the nation that of the 30,000 e-mails returned by Clinton to the State Department, "110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received."
Eight of the email chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent.
Moreover, Comey said the FBI also discovered that "several thousand work-related e-mails" were not including in the group of 30,000 that Clinton turned over to the State Department in 2014.
"Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information," Comey said.