Pirate's Cove

The State Department, most particularly spokesweasel Jen Psaki, have dithered for a week or so to answer the question “did Hillary Clinton sign her exit form or not?” Rather than providing a concrete answer, this latest admission either highlights just how incompetent the Department of State is, or is another attempt to row the dithering down the stream

(Politico) The State Department has no record that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signed a standard form declaring that she surrendered all official records before leaving her post in 2013, a spokeswoman said Tuesday.

Critics of Clinton, including the Republican National Committee, said she might have committed a crime by signing the form despite having tens of thousands of work-related emails in a personal account. She provided copies of those emails to her former agency in December.

Someone should let Politico writer Josh Gerstein that she provided less than half of the emails.

“We have reviewed Secretary Clinton’s official personnel file and administrative files and do not have any record of her signing the” form, State spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters at a regular briefing.

Psaki said there also is no record of the form being completed by Clinton’s two most recent predecessors, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell.

With that offbeat addition, I’m more inclined to believe that this is a “let’s move this down the road” form of dithering, though we certainly have seen incompetence from State (Benghazi, for one). Psaki is not saying “she signed it, but we can’t find it” nor “she never signed it”, just that they cannot find the record to determine whether she signed it or not. Though, she does think that Clinton did not sign it

Psaki stopped short of declaring flatly that Clinton never completed the form but said that is the conclusion of state officials.

“I think we’re fairly certain she did not. We do not have record of it,” the spokeswoman said.

Here’s a question: who did the exit interview? Who made sure that Hillary surrendered all her government documents and property on the way out the door? Was there someone who did that, like in pretty much all large companies. The State Department has tens of thousands of employees, possibly as many as 69,000. Do they not have people, perhaps in HR, who do exit interviews? Perhaps people in other Executive Branch departments? What other separation forms did she sign? Do we have them on record?

We also get, via Twitchy

He's only had more than a week to find out. https://t.co/49gAsMfjCk @charliespiering

— RBe (@RBPundit) March 17, 2015

Allahpundit writes

So there you go. The mystery is solved. Hillary avoids a perjury charge for failing to turn over her work e-mails in a timely way because she never formally agreed to make herself accountable in the first place. What a perfectly Clintonian ending to “National Treasure 3: The Search for Hillary’s OF-109.” In fact, I’ll cop here to grudgingly respecting her political acumen in knowing from the start that she could take a steamy dump on every good-government norm of basic recordkeeping without the public batting an eye. That’s the ultimate privilege of being a Clinton: Corruption is assumed, so every discrete act of further corruption carries only the most marginal sting.