Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s top aide, stated that Clinton’s private email server during her tenure as secretary of state frustrated the entire staff. It caused her to miss a phone call from the French foreign minister:
“She missed the call because . . . I never got the email giving us the signoff to do it [the meeting]. So she wasn’t able to do her job, do what she needed to do,” Huma Abedin testified Tuesday during a deposition in a lawsuit filed by a government watchdog.
Clinton expressed frustration about the missed call:
Mrs. Clinton wrote to Ms. Abedin about the delayed call and said, “This is not a good system.”Ms. Abedin replied, “We should talk about putting you on state email or releasing your email address to the department so you are not going to spam.”In her response, Mrs. Clinton said she was open to a separate email address or phone but added, “I don’t want any risk of the personal being accessible.”
Abedin encouraged Clinton to buy another Blackberry for her work email. Clinton claimed she only used her personal email address because she did not want to carry more than one device. Obviously no one around her knew how to set up two email addresses on one device.
Abedin never thought about how using a private server would interfere with any Freedom of Information Act requests. However, Judicial Watch received emails that showed the Director of S/ES-IRM, the portion of the department that coordinates work between bureaus, reminded Clinton’s team if she used her work address that those emails “would go through the Department’s infrastructure and subject to FOIA searches.”
She also said she never discussed with Clinton about “the preservation of records” since she used her work email the majority of the time:
She said that because most of those emails were State Department-related issues forwarded from her government account, she assumed there was already a record of the exchange in the government account.“Honestly, I wish I thought about it at the time,” she said. “As I said, I wasn’t perfect. I tried to do all of my work on state.gov. And I do believe I did the majority of my work on state.gov.”
Yet, on March 22, 2009, Clinton emailed Abedin and Lauren Jiloty, her former special assistant, about how the State Department treated her records:
I have just realized I have no idea how my papers are treated at State. Who manages both my personal and official files?I am sending out material the way I did w Lauren in the Senate, but I don’t know what’s happening w it all. For instance, I’ve sent a few things to Cheryl but she says she hasn’t read them. Does Claire manage this or does it all go to Joe? Are there personal files as well as official ones set up? If I don’t write anything on paper – as I mostly don’t – Lauren knew how to file it all in the Senate. I’m sending out a mix which sometimes Claire and other times Lauren picks up from the out box. What happens then is a mystery to me!
Abedin told Clinton they’ve discussed the issue before and would explain in person again.
Her staff continued to pressure to use her state.gov email as other problems occurred during her time as secretary. The server caused the State Department to disable security features on their end.
One employee told the team to disable the anti-spam feature, which would make the servers vulnerable to viruses and phishing emails. State Department official Thomas Lawrence admitted the department viewed the solution “as a Band-Aid” and they feared the solution “is not 100% fully effective.”
As John Sexton at Hot Air pointed out, the State Department’s system blocked Clinton’s emails because it viewed her “private server as a security threat.”
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY