In a press release on Thursday with the calm and understated title of “DONALD J. TRUMP ADDRESSES CLINTON CORRUPTION AND HER SABOTAGE OF THE INNER CITIES,” Donald Trump distorted the news of Hillary Clinton’s discovered emails by accusing her of leading a “major criminal enterprise,” and exaggerating the number of emails by 100%.

Hillary Clinton’s actions constitute all of the elements of a major criminal enterprise.

She created a private illegal email server in order to hide her corrupt dealings. She did so knowing full well it would put American lives at risk by making classified information highly vulnerable to foreign hacking. But, she didn’t care – as long as it helped her get away with her crime, no risk to America was too great.

Then, to further cover-up her crime, she deleted 33,000 emails to keep them out of the hands of authorities and the American public.

As a further element of the criminal cover-up, she claimed under penalty of perjury that she turned over all of her work related emails. We now know this to be one more massive Clinton lie. The FBI found thousands of work-related emails she failed to turn over, including the new discovery this week of 15,000 more work-related emails she failed to disclose.

While it is true that the FBI found thousands of work-related emails the Clinton campaign did not turn over, there was no new “discovery” of 15,000 more emails. The FBI actually found 14,900 work related emails total in their year long investigation, many of which were not work related and thus irrelevant to the investigation. So Trump exaggerated the number of emails by more than 100%.

Trump accused Clinton of deleting the emails to “cover-up her crime,” but a massive FBI investigation failed to turn up any crime. Director Comey went so far as to state that “no evidence that any of the additional work-related e-mails were intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them.” Comey recommended that no criminal charges be filed and that there were no violations committed concerning the handling of classified material.

Comey went on to say that it “there was no archiving at all of her e-mails, so it is not surprising that we discovered e-mails that were not on Secretary Clinton’s system in 2014, when she produced the 30,000 e-mails to the State Department.”

Trump retweeted an article from Daily Caller that alleges that the Clinton office used an email shredder called BleachBit to completely delete emails. While giving a much higher level of security to deleted emails, which seems like a good thing, it consequently makes them much harder to recover. The FBI didn’t comment on the use of the shredder, or if the emails uncovered were part of the emails disposed of in this way.

Trump is lying that the FBI just found a “new discovery” of 15,000 emails. That is just didn’t happen. 15,000 is the total number of emails turned over to the FBI, but Trump couldn’t be bothered to fact check himself. Would it have made any difference if he knew it was untrue?

Trump is also making a completely unsubstantiated claim that she deleted the emails to “cover-up her crime,” a claim that for which he provides no evidence and is direct opposition to the findings of an intense FBI investigation.

Sources:
http://www.factcheck.org/2016/08/trump-on-clintons-emails/
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/08/25/fact-check-trump-clintons-emails/89337162/
https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/donald-j.-trump-addresses-clinton-corruption-and-her-sabotage-of-the-inner