Fox Admits New Clinton Emails Mostly Duplicates, Hypes Scandal Anyway

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published

Fox News scandalized a report on the release of nearly 3,000 emails from Hillary Clinton’s time as Secretary of State while admitting that nearly half of the emails were duplicates.

According to Politico, the State Department has agreed to process for release nearly 3,000 emails from Clinton’s tenure as head of the department. Officials from the State Department have noted that “roughly half of those may be wholly or largely duplicates of emails that have already been released.”

On the September 29 edition of On The Record with Brit Hume, Chief intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge reported that the email release coming before the election will give critics “evidence” that records laws may have been broken, despite admitting that many of these will be duplicate emails:

BRIT HUME (HOST) :In the meantime, more email headaches for Hillary Clinton. About 3,000 emails recovered by the FBI from Clinton's private email server will be released before election day. Fox News chief intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge is here. Hello, Catherine. What do we know about these.

CATHERINE HERRIDGE: Just for some context, these are the emails that the Clinton team scrubbed, the FBI recovered and they provided to the State Department on a series of disks in July just after the FBI director said he would not recommend criminal charges. So the argument before the federal court here in Washington has been its July since you have had them. It's time to process them and release them. The State Department said we don't have the resources to do this. But the judge said you need to put more resources on it, speed it up and process them so they are out before November. At the State Department today, spokesman John Kirby seemed to really waffle on whether they would make them public by early November. He was very noncommittal about whether they would be able to do that.

HUME: So do we have any sense about what these might contain, and what the subjects are, or anything about them?

HERRIDGE: Well, I think what we can expect   is a lot of duplication from records that are already out there. Critics will say it's evidence that she did destroy government-related records in the emails. Others will say, look, there is nothing here anymore. You have to keep driving. There will be some Benghazi records. But what we know is that almost all of them are duplicates. But, for those who feel that records laws were broken, it will be more evidence that, in fact, they were broken because of the thousands of records that were recovered and eventually released leading up to the election.