| The usual late Friday afternoon document dump, revealed the previous day by the New York Times as a special revelation. |
Hillary Clinton... sometimes described as
America's Blond Eminenceand at other times as Mrs. Bill, never as
Another John C. Calhoun...
, giving an unprecedented glimpse into the work of the former top diplomat in the wake of a deadly 2012 attack on a U.S. mission in Libya.
A total of 296 emails -- out of a trove of 30,000 -- sent or received by Clinton were released Friday and uploaded onto a State Department website, which promptly crashed under the weight of traffic.
"The emails we release today do not change the essential facts or our understanding of the events before, during, or after the attacks," State Department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf insisted.
The emails span two years from January 1, 2011 when the political upheavals in Libya began to December 31, 2012. And many of them have been heavily redacted after being deemed to hold classified information.
Paper copies of the emails sent on two private addresses (hdr22@clintonemail.com and hrod17@clintonemail.com) were handed over in December in 12 large boxes labelled with a rough time stamp for the documents inside.
A State Department team has been busy digitizing them and plowing through the emails since March to black out any classified or sensitive information.
Clinton said she had handed over every email relevant to her job as America's top diplomat and destroyed all the rest, which she maintained were personal.