The FBI concluded that Hillary Clinton should not be prosecuted over her decision to conduct State Department business exclusively over a private email server, but Donald Trump pledged to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the matter if he becomes president.
At the second debate between the two presidential nominees, Trump criticized Clinton for turning over half her emails held on her server to the State Department and deleting the rest. He said Clinton should be "ashamed" of herself for deleting 33,000 emails.
"There has never been anything like this," Trump said at the Oct. 9 event in St. Louis. "You get a subpoena, and after getting the subpoena you delete 33,000 emails."
Clinton and her campaign don’t dispute that she deleted these 33,000 emails. They argue that these were personal in nature, rather than work-related, and therefore were not necessary to turn over.
However, they have denied that they deleted the emails after receiving a congressional subpoena from the House Select Committee on Benghazi on March 4, 2015. But an August 2016 FBI report on its investigation shows that Trump’s claim has some merit.
Let’s take a look at the timeline of relevant events, according to the FBI report. (The most pertinent information is on pages 15-19 of this document.)
Feb. 1, 2013: Clinton serves her last day as secretary of state.
July 23, 2014: The State Department reaches an agreement with the Benghazi committee about producing records for its investigation into the 2012 attack on a U.S. embassy in the Libyan city.
Oct. 28, 2014: The State Department sends an official letter to Clinton’s staff requesting "emails related to their government work." Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall, and aide Cheryl Mills oversaw the review of Clinton’s email archives to produce work-related documents to the department.
Dec. 5, 2014: Clinton’s team provides 55,000 pages of emails, or about 30,000 individual emails, to the State Department. Mills tells an employee at Platte River Networks, which managed the server, that Clinton does not need to retain any emails older than 60 days.
March 2, 2015: The New York Times breaks the story that Clinton used a personal email account while secretary of state.