Trump Claims Clinton Committed Perjury. He Has No Evidence
“Just a few minutes ago, CBS News just announced and confirmed that the 650,000, you wonder why things don't get done, 650,000 emails discovered by the FBI include brand new emails not previously seen. Remember when they said they're all duplicates, they're duplicates? Well how can there be duplicates when 650,000 is even more than all of them that are missing, right? How can there be duplicates? Hillary therefore committed perjury, absolutely, because of her statements, in addition to all of her other crimes, probably also in that batch are classified emails at the highest level that would now have been hacked by foreign countries, because you saw today where they said, 'Yup, she was hacked.' This is a person that's running for president?” Trump said Thursday night, overstating the FBI's inquiries into her for the second time in one day.
This is a pretty broad claim. Let’s break it down.
CBS News reported that the emails discovered on Anthony Weiner’s laptop were “related to Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state” and that they were not duplicates of previously-reviewed emails. The report does not say there are 650,000 — that number comes from a Wall Street Journal report about how many total emails were discovered on a laptop seized in an inquiry about Weiner’s alleged sexting with an underage girl. It’s still unclear how many of those emails are related to Clinton; several reports have put that number in the “thousands.”
Clinton's team deleted more than 30,000 emails that were determined by staffers to be personal, though work-related emails from this group were later found on other government servers. Trump's claim that all 650,000 emails found on Weiner’s laptop are Clinton’s emails and therefore she committed perjury during investigations is baseless. We just don't know how many of Clinton's emails from her time as secretary of state turned up on Weiner's laptop.