Supporters of Hillary Clinton have continued to deride the work of the Benghazi committee as a “political” effort by her opponents and a “distraction” from the serious issues under discussion during the presidential campaign. We’ve been repeatedly assured that all of the relevant information has been released and there’s nothing to see here, so everyone should just move along and get on with their lives. But if that’s the case, it’s difficult to understand how it is that more and more information keeps mysteriously appearing. The latest example of this showed up at the Washington Free Beacon this week, where we learned that electronic folders with hundreds of relevant documents were somehow whisked away from the State Department and into an archive after a subpoena was issued for all such material early last year.

State Department officials removed files from the secretary’s office related to the Benghazi attack in Libya and transferred them to another department after receiving a congressional subpoena last spring, delaying the release of the records to Congress for over a year.

Attorneys for the State Department said the electronic folders, which contain hundreds of documents related to the Benghazi attack and Libya, were belatedly rediscovered at the end of last year.

They said the files had been overlooked by State Department officials because the executive secretary’s office transferred them to another department and flagged them for archiving last April, shortly after receiving a subpoena from the House Select Committee on Benghazi.

The Department of State is a big organization with a lot of data to keep track of, so mistakes can and do happen, right? Sure. But the timing of this leaves more than a few questions to be answered. By the time the committee had finished the “asking nicely” portion of events and got around to playing hardball, State had long since been given plenty of notice that communications relating to Benghazi were under scrutiny and needed to be prepared for examination. The subpoena didn’t show up until March of 2015, fully two and a half years after the attack took place. Now we learn that certain electronic folders “which contain hundreds of documents related to the Benghazi attack and Libya” were not included in the initial trove of documents which were delivered.

Why? They were “belatedly rediscovered” a few months ago, so the mystery deepens. The folders were part of the records of the State Department Executive Secretary’s office and contained communications from senior department officials serving under Hillary Clinton. The month after the subpoena was received, the folders were transferred to “another bureau” for archiving and, as such, were not searched as part of State’s response to the subpoena.

I don’t want to sound like the overly suspicious type here, but that sounds awfully convenient, doesn’t it? If you’ve been under scrutiny for more than two years over a story this big, one might assume that you had long since done a comprehensive search for every document which made reference to Libya, Benghazi, Chris Smith or any other relevant search terms. And once you’ve gotten a subpoena and sat on it for a month, wouldn’t any transfer or archiving of document folders be scrutinized at a minimum, if not put on hold entirely until the material could be confirmed as irrelevant to the investigation?

Of course, unless there’s some serious forensic computer analysis work going on it strikes me as highly unlikely that we’ll ever know if everything which once existed in those folders is still there. But as I said… I suppose I’m just the suspicious type.