Fox News selectively quoted a statement from Hillary Clinton's lawyer to suggest that she lied about having a “second email account” during her time as secretary of state. But the network ignored in several segments that the supposed discrepancy was explained months ago.
On May 18, The New York Times published selected emails from Clinton's time at State, which appeared to show her sending emails from two private addresses: HDR22@clintonemail.com and hrod17@clintonemail.com. Right-wing media immediately jumped on the story to claim that it contradicted Clinton's previous statement that she only used one email address while at State.
Fox went so far as to suggest Clinton “was lying” about her use of email, missing key context in several of their segments on the topic. On the May 19 edition of America's Newsroom, guest co-host Gregg Jarrett asked: “Either she forgot, or she was lying. What do you think?” Fox reporter Doug McKelway also claimed that the “second email” was a “direct contradiction” to Clinton's previous statements, noting those remarks were “not made in testimony, nor was it made under oath, so perhaps there's some wiggle room there, but I'm not sure how she gets out of that.”
Later on Happening Now, McKelway highlighted a letter sent from Clinton's lawyer that stated “hrod17@clintonemail.com is not an address that existed during Secretary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State.”
However, this seeming discrepancy was explained in the same letter McKelway selectively quoted from.
As Clinton's lawyer noted back in that March 2015 letter -- and which Fox News ignored in these segments -- Clinton changed her email address when she left State because Gawker had published emails that revealed the “HDR22” address. That was when she changed the address to “hrod17.”
According to her office, when this change occurred, the new address replaced the old address on the digital records of her previous emails. Thus, as explained in a release several months ago, when her emails were printed out and provided to the State Department, the new email address “appeared on the printed copies as the sender.”
While this context was missing from Jarrett and McKelway's morning reports, Fox Chief White House Correspondent Ed Henry reported the Clinton campaign's explanation in a separate segment on America's Newsroom, saying that “when she printed out all the emails to turn over back to the government, that second account came up, even though that was not the one she was using months earlier.”
The old “HDR22” address still appears in some of the documents the Times highlighted, but seems to only occur in the text of the body of emails that were replies or forwards from other individuals. For example, a printed email from Clinton aide Jake Sullivan which was published by the Times still shows “HDR22” in the text of his email, because he was replying to her original message.
The backdating of the email addresses “led to understandable confusion” for the congressional Select Committee on Benghazi earlier this year, prompting Clinton's office to issue this explanation in March.
The original Gawker report, which highlighted emails sent to Clinton during her time at State, also includes screenshots of those emails. The emails shown are all clearly sent to Clinton's original email account, HRD22, in keeping with Clinton office's explanation for the email address confusion.