By Robert O'Harrow
Jr.
Hillary Clinton, who at the time was
selected to be secretary of state, checks her BlackBerry on an elevator at the
U.S. Capitol in the District in January 2009. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Hillary
Clinton’s email problems began in her first days as secretary of state. She
insisted on using her personal BlackBerry for all her email communications, but
she wasn’t allowed to take the device into her seventh-floor suite of offices,
a secure space known as Mahogany Row.
For Clinton,
this was frustrating. As a political heavyweight and chief of the nation’s
diplomatic corps, she needed to manage a torrent of email to stay connected to
colleagues, friends and supporters. She hated having to put her BlackBerry into
a lockbox before going into her own office.
Her aides
and senior officials pushed to find a way to enable her to use the device in
the secure area. But their efforts unsettled the diplomatic security bureau,
which was worried that foreign intelligence services could hack her BlackBerry
and transform it into a listening device.
On
Feb. 17, 2009, less than a month into Clinton’s tenure, the issue came to
a head. Department security, intelligence and technology specialists, along
with five officials from the National Security Agency, gathered in a Mahogany
Row conference room. They explained the risks to Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s chief
of staff, while also seeking “mitigation options” that would accommodate
Clinton’s wishes.
“The issue
here is one of personal comfort,” one of the participants in that meeting,
Donald Reid, the department’s senior coordinator for security infrastructure,
wrote afterward in an email that described Clinton’s inner circle of advisers
as “dedicated [BlackBerry] addicts.”
Clinton used
her BlackBerry as the group continued looking for a solution. But unknown to
diplomatic security and technology officials at the department, there was
another looming communications vulnerability: Clinton’s BlackBerry was
digitally tethered to a private email server in the basement of her family
home, some 260 miles to the north in Chappaqua, N.Y., documents and
interviews show.
Those
officials took no steps to protect the server against intruders and spies,
because they apparently were not told about it.
What we learned from Hillary Clinton's
emails
The
vulnerability of Clinton’s basement server is one of the key unanswered
questions at the heart of a scandal that has dogged her campaign for the
Democratic presidential nomination.
Since
Clinton’s private email account was brought to light a year ago in a New York
Times report — followed by an Associated Press report revealing the existence
of the server — the matter has been a source of nonstop national news. Private
groups have filed lawsuits under the Freedom of Information Act. Investigations
were begun by congressional committees and inspector general’s offices in the
State Department and the U.S. Intelligence Community, which referred the case
to the FBI in July for “counterintelligence purposes” after determining that
the server carried classified material.
The FBI is
now trying to determine whether a crime was committed in the handling of that
classified material. It is also examining whether the server was hacked.
One hundred
forty-seven FBI agents have been deployed to run down leads, according to a
lawmaker briefed by FBI Director James B. Comey. The FBI has accelerated the
investigation because officials want to avoid the possibility of announcing any
action too close to the election.
The
Washington Post reviewed hundreds of documents and interviewed more than a
dozen knowledgeable government officials to understand the decisions and the
implications of Clinton’s actions. The resulting scandal revolves around
questions about classified information, the preservation of government records
and the security of her email communication.
From the
earliest days, Clinton aides and senior officials focused intently on
accommodating the secretary’s desire to use her private email account,
documents and interviews show.
Throughout,
they paid insufficient attention to laws and regulations governing the handling
of classified material and the preservation of government records, interviews
and documents show. They also neglected repeated warnings about the security of
the BlackBerry while Clinton and her closest aides took obvious security risks
in using the basement server.
Senior
officials who helped Clinton with her BlackBerry claim they did not know
details of the basement server, the State Department said, even though they
received emails from her private account. One email written by a senior
official mentioned the server.
The scandal
has pitted those who say Clinton was innocently trying to find the easiest way
to communicate against those who say she placed herself above the law in a
quest for control of her records. She and her campaign have been accused of
confusing matters with contradictory and evolving statements that minimized the
consequences of her actions.
Clinton, 68,
declined to be interviewed. She has said repeatedly that her use of the private
server was benign and that there is no evidence of any intrusion.
In a news
conference last March, she said: “I opted for convenience to use my personal
email account, which was allowed by the State Department, because I thought it
would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails
instead of two.”
During a
Democratic debate on March 9, she acknowledged using poor judgment but
maintained she was permitted to use her own server: “It wasn’t the best choice.
I made a mistake. It was not prohibited. It was not in any way disallowed.”
The
unfolding story of Clinton’s basement server has outraged advocates of
government transparency and mystified political supporters and adversaries
alike. Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.,
who is presiding over one of the FOIA lawsuits, has expressed puzzlement over
the affair. He noted that Clinton put the State Department in the position of
having to ask her to return thousands of government records — her work email.
“Am I
missing something?” Sullivan asked during a Feb. 23 hearing. “How in the
world could this happen?”
Hillary
Clinton began preparing to use the private basement server after President
Obama picked her to be his secretary of state in November 2008. The system was
already in place. It had been set up for former president Bill Clinton, who
used it for personal and Clinton Foundation business.
On
Jan. 13, 2009, a longtime aide to Bill Clinton registered a private email
domain for Hillary Clinton, clintonemail.com, that would allow her to send and
receive email through the server.
Eight days
later, she was sworn in as secretary of state. Among the multitude of
challenges she faced was how to integrate email into her State Department
routines. Because Clinton did not use desktop computers, she relied on her
personal BlackBerry, which she had started using three years earlier.
For years,
employees across the government had used official and private email accounts.
The new
president was making broad promises about government transparency that had a
bearing on Clinton’s communication choices. In memos to his agency chiefs,
Obama said his administration would promote accountability through the
disclosure of a wide array of information, one part of a “profound national
commitment to ensuring an open government.” That included work emails.
One year
earlier, during her own presidential campaign, Clinton had said that if
elected, “we will adopt a presumption of openness and Freedom of Information
Act requests and urge agencies to release information quickly.”
But in those
first few days, Clinton’s senior advisers were already taking steps that would
help her circumvent those high-flown words, according to a chain of internal
State Department emails released to Judicial Watch, a conservative nonprofit
organization suing the government over Clinton’s emails.
Cheryl Mills, who served as Hillary
Clinton’s chief of staff, wondered if the State Department could get the
secretary of state an encrypted device such as the one from the National
Security Agency used by President Obama. (Filippo Monteforte/AFP/Getty Images)
Leading that
effort was Mills, Clinton’s chief of staff. She was joined by Clinton adviser
Huma Abedin, Undersecretary Patrick Kennedy and Lewis Lukens, a senior career
official who served as Clinton’s logistics chief. Their focus was on
accommodating Clinton.
Mills
wondered whether the department could get her an encrypted device like the one
from the NSA that Obama used.
“If so, how
can we get her one?” Mills wrote the group on Saturday evening, Jan. 24.
Lukens
responded that same evening, saying he could help set up “a stand alone PC in
the Secretary’s office, connected to the internet (but not through our system)
to enable her to check her emails from her desk.”
Kennedy
wrote that a “stand-alone separate network PC” was a “great idea.”
Abedin and
Mills declined to comment for this article, according to Clinton spokesman
Brian Fallon. Lukens also declined to comment, according to the State
Department.
As
undersecretary for management, Kennedy occupies a central role in Clinton’s
email saga. The department acknowledged that Kennedy, as part of his normal
duties, helped Clinton with her BlackBerry. But in a statement, the department
said: “Under Secretary Kennedy maintains that he was unaware of the email
server. Completely separate from that issue, Under Secretary Kennedy was aware
that at the beginning of her tenure, Secretary Clinton’s staff was interested
in setting up a computer at the Department so she could email her family during
the work day.
“As we have
previously made clear — no such computer was ever set up. Furthermore, Under
Secretary Kennedy had very little insight into Secretary Clinton’s email
practices including how frequently or infrequently then-Secretary Clinton used
email.”
As it
happened, Clinton would never have a government BlackBerry, personal computer
or email account. A request for a secure device from the NSA was rebuffed at
the outset: “The current state of the art is not too user friendly, has no
infrastructure at State, and is very expensive,” Reid, the security official,
wrote in an email on Feb. 13, adding that “each time we asked the question
‘What was the solution for POTUS?’ we were politely told to shut up and color.”
Clinton
would continue to use her BlackBerry for virtually all of her government
communication, but not on Mahogany Row.
Her first
known BlackBerry communication through the basement server came on
Jan. 28, 2009, when Clinton exchanged notes with Army Gen. David H.
Petraeus, then chief of the U.S. Central Command, according to a State
Department spokeswoman. It has not been released.
Few knew the
details behind the new clintonemail.com address. But news about her choice to
use her own BlackBerry spread quickly among the department’s diplomatic
security and “intelligence countermeasures” specialists.
Their fears
focused on the seventh floor, which a decade earlier had been the target of
Russian spies who managed to plant a listening device inside a decorative
chair-rail molding not far from Mahogany Row. In more recent years, in a series
of widely publicized cyberattacks, hackers breached computers at the department
along with those at other federal agencies and several major corporations.
The State
Department security officials were distressed about the possibility that
Clinton’s BlackBerry could be compromised and used for eavesdropping, documents
and interviews show.
After the
meeting on Feb. 17 with Mills, security officials in the department
crafted a memo about the risks. And among themselves, they expressed concern
that other department employees would follow the “bad example” and seek to use
insecure BlackBerrys themselves, emails show.
As they
worked on the memo, they were aware of a speech delivered by Joel F. Brenner,
then chief of counterintelligence at the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence, on Feb. 24 at a hotel in Vienna, Va., a State Department
document shows. Brenner urged his audience to consider what could have happened
to them during a visit to the recent Beijing Olympics.
“Your phone
or BlackBerry could have been tagged, tracked, monitored and exploited between
your disembarking the airplane and reaching the taxi stand at the airport,”
Brenner said. “And when you emailed back home, some or all of the malware may
have migrated to your home server. This is not hypothetical.”
At the time,
Clinton had just returned from an official trip that took her to China and
elsewhere in Asia. She was embarking on another foray to the Middle East and
Europe. She took her BlackBerry with her.
In early
March, Assistant Secretary for Diplomatic Security Eric Boswell delivered a
memo with the subject line “Use of Blackberries in Mahogany Row.”
“Our review
reaffirms our belief that the vulnerabilities and risks associated with the use
of Blackberries in the Mahogany Row [redacted] considerably outweigh the
convenience their use can add,” the memo said.
He
emphasized: “Any unclassified Blackberry is highly vulnerable in any setting to
remotely and covertly monitoring conversations, retrieving e-mails, and
exploiting calendars.”
Nine days
later, Clinton told Boswell that she had read his memo and “gets it,” according
to an email sent by a senior diplomatic security official. “Her attention was
drawn to the sentence that indicates (Diplomatic Security) have intelligence
concerning this vulnerability during her recent trip to Asia,” the email said.
But Clinton
kept using her private BlackBerry — and the basement server.
The server
was nothing remarkable, the kind of system often used by small businesses,
according to people familiar with its configuration at the end of her tenure.
It consisted of two off-the-shelf server computers. Both were equipped with
antivirus software. They were linked by cable to a local Internet service
provider. A firewall was used as protection against hackers.
Few could
have known it, but the email system operated in those first two months without
the standard encryption generally used on the Internet to protect
communication, according to an independent analysis that Venafi Inc., a
cybersecurity firm that specializes in the encryption process, took upon itself
to publish on its website after the scandal broke.
Not until
March 29, 2009 — two months after Clinton began using it — did the server
receive a “digital certificate” that protected communication over the Internet
through encryption, according to Venafi’s analysis.
It is
unknown whether the system had some other way to encrypt the email traffic at
the time. Without encryption — a process that scrambles communication for
anyone without the correct key — email, attachments and passwords are
transmitted in plain text.
“That means
that anyone could have accessed it. Anyone,” Kevin Bocek, vice president of threat
intelligence at Venafi, told The Post.
The system
had other features that made it vulnerable to talented hackers, including a
software program that enabled users to log on directly from the World Wide Web.
Four
computer-security specialists interviewed by The Post said that such a system
could be made reasonably secure but that it would need constant monitoring by
people trained to look for irregularities in the server’s logs.
“For data of
this sensitivity . . . we would need at a minimum a small team to do
monitoring and hardening,” said Jason Fossen, a computer-security specialist at
the SANS Institute, which provides cybersecurity training around the world.
The man
Clinton has said maintained and monitored her server was Bryan Pagliano, who
had worked as the technology chief for her political action committee and her
presidential campaign. It is not clear whether he had any help. Pagliano had
also provided computer services to the Clinton family. In 2008, he received
more than $5,000 for that work, according to financial disclosure statements he
filed with the government.
In
May 2009, with Kennedy’s help, Pagliano landed a job as a political
employee in the State Department’s IT division, documents and interviews show.
It was an unusual arrangement.
At the same
time, Pagliano apparently agreed to maintain the basement server. Officials in
the IT division have told investigators they could not recall previously hiring
a political appointee. Three of Pagliano’s supervisors also told investigators
they had no idea that Clinton used the basement server or that Pagliano was
moonlighting on it.
Through an
attorney, Pagliano declined a request from The Post for an interview. He also
refused a request from the Senate Judiciary and Homeland Security and Governmental
Affairs committees to discuss his role. On Sept. 1, 2015, his attorney
told the committees that he would invoke his Fifth Amendment rights if any
attempt was made to compel his testimony. He was later given immunity by the
Justice Department in exchange for his cooperation, according to articles in
the New York Times and The Post.
In a
statement, Clinton’s campaign said the server was protected but declined to
provide technical details. Clinton officials have said that server logs given
to authorities show no signs of hacking.
“The
security and integrity of her family’s electronic communications was taken
seriously from the onset when it was first set up for President Clinton’s
team,” the statement said. “Suffice it to say, robust protections were put in
place and additional upgrades and techniques employed over time as they became
available, including consulting and employing third party experts.”
The
statement added that “there is no evidence there was ever a breach.”
Rep. Susan Brooks (R-Ind.) speaks as piles
of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails about Libya are seen on the bench during a hearing
before the House Select Committee on Benghazi on Capitol Hill on Oct. 22. (Chip
Somodevilla/Getty Images)
The number
of emails moving through the basement system increased quickly as Hillary
Clinton dove into the endless details of her globetrotting job. There were
62,320 in all, an average of 296 a week, nearly 1,300 a month, according to
numbers Clinton later reported to the State Department. About half of them were
work-related.
Her most
frequent correspondent was Mills, her chief of staff, who sent thousands of
notes. Next came Abedin, the deputy chief of staff, and Jacob Sullivan, also a
deputy chief of staff, according to a tally by The Post.
The majority
went to two different addresses that Clinton sometimes used interchangeably on
a single chain of email, hdr22@clintonemail.com and hrod17@clintonemail.com,
making it immediately apparent that the emails were not coming from or going to
a government address.
Most of her
emails were routine, including those sent to friends. Some involved the
coordination of efforts to bring aid to Haiti by the State Department and her
husband’s New York-based Clinton Foundation — notes that mixed government and
family business, the emails show.
Others
involved classified matters. State Department and Intelligence Community
officials have determined that 2,093 email chains contained classified
information. Most of the classified emails have been labeled as “confidential,”
the lowest level of classification. Clinton herself authored 104 emails that
contained classified material, a Post analysis later found.
Before the
server received a digital certificate marking the use of standard encryption,
Clinton and her aides exchanged notes touching on North Korea, Mexico,
Afghanistan, military advisers, CIA operations and a briefing for Obama.
Clinton
adviser Philippe Reines wrote a note to her about Afghanistan President Hamid
Karzai. Reines started his note by reminding Clinton that Reines’s “close
friend Jeremy Bash is now [CIA Director Leon E.] Panetta’s Chief of Staff.” The
rest of the note was redacted before release, under grounds that it was
national-security-sensitive.
On Sunday,
March 29, 2009, just hours before standard encryption on the server began,
Sullivan emailed Clinton a draft of a confidential report she was to make to
Obama. “Attached is a draft of your Mexico trip report to POTUS,” Sullivan
wrote.
In the
high-pressure world of diplomacy, the sharing of such material had been a
discreet but common practice for many years. Officials who manage problems
around the clock require a never-ending flow of incisive information to make
timely decisions.
Not all
classified material is equally sensitive. Much of it involves discussions about
foreign countries or leaders, not intelligence sources and methods. Working
with classified materials can be cumbersome and, in the case of low-level
classification, annoying.
On
Feb. 10, 2010, in an exchange with Sullivan, Clinton vented her
frustration one day when she wanted to read a statement regarding José Miguel
Insulza, then secretary general of the Organization of American States.
Sullivan wrote that he could not send it to her immediately because the department
had put it on the classified network.
“It’s a
public statement! Just email it,” Clinton shot back, just moments later.
“Trust me, I
share your exasperation,” Sullivan wrote. “But until ops converts it to the
unclassified email system, there is no physical way for me to email it. I can’t
even access it.”
Early on
June 17, 2011, Clinton grew impatient as she waited for “talking points”
about a sensitive matter that had to be delivered via a secure line.
“They say
they’ve had issues sending secure fax. They’re working on it,” Sullivan wrote
his boss.
Clinton told
him to take a shortcut.
“If they
can’t, turn into nonpaper w no identifying heading and send nonsecure,” she
said.
Clinton
spokesman Fallon said she was not trying to circumvent the classification system.
“What she
was asking was that any information that could be transmitted on the
unclassified system be transmitted,” he said. “It is wrong to suggest that she
was requesting otherwise. The State Department looked into this and confirmed
that no classified material was sent through a non-secure fax or email.”
Security
remained a constant concern. On June 28, 2011, in response to reports that
Gmail accounts of government workers had been targeted by “online adversaries,”
a note went out over Clinton’s name urging department employees to “avoid
conducting official Department business from your personal email accounts.”
But she
herself ignored the warning and continued using her BlackBerry and the basement
server.
Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) and members of
the House Select Committee on Benghazi address the findings of former secretary
of state Hillary Clinton’s personal emails during a news conference at the U.S.
Capitol in March 2015. (Gabriella Demczuk/Getty Images)
In December
2012, near the end of Clinton’s tenure, a nonprofit group called Citizens for
Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, filed a FOIA request seeking
records about her email. CREW received a response in May 2013: “no records
responsive to your request were located.”
Other
requests for Clinton records met the same fate — until the State Department
received a demand from the newly formed House Select Committee on Benghazi in
July 2014. The committee wanted Clinton’s email, among other things, to see
what she and others knew about the deadly attack in Libya and the response by
the U.S. government.
Officials in
the department’s congressional affairs office found some Clinton email and saw
that she had relied on the private domain, not the department’s system.
Secretary of
State John F. Kerry resolved to round up the Clinton emails and deliver them to
Congress as quickly as possible. Department officials reached out to Clinton
informally in the summer of 2014. On Oct. 28, 2014, the department
contacted Clinton and the offices of three other former secretaries — Madeleine
K. Albright, Condoleezza Rice and Colin L. Powell — asking if they had any
email or other federal records in their possession.
Albright and
Rice said they did not use email while at State. Powell, secretary of state
from 2001 to 2005, had a private email account through America Online but did
not retain copies of his emails. The inspector general for the State Department
found that Powell’s personal email account had received two emails from staff
that contained “national security information classified at the Secret or
Confidential levels.”
Clinton
lawyer David Kendall later told the State Department that her “use of personal
email was consistent with the practices of other Secretaries of State,” citing
Powell in particular, according to a letter he wrote in August.
But Powell’s
circumstances also differed from Clinton’s in notable ways. Powell had a phone
line installed in his office solely to link to his private account, which he
generally used for personal or non-classified communication. At the time, he
was pushing the department to embrace the Internet era and wanted to set an
example.
“I performed
a little test whenever I visited an embassy: I’d dive into the first open office
I could find (sometimes it was the ambassador’s office). If the computer was
on, I’d try to get into my private email account,” Powell wrote in “It Worked for Me: In Life and Leadership.” “If
I could, they passed.”
Powell
conducted virtually all of his classified communications on paper or over a
State Department computer installed on his desk that was reserved for
classified information, according to interviews. Clinton never had such a
desktop or a classified email account, according to the State Department.
On
Dec. 5, 2014, Clinton lawyers delivered 12 file boxes filled with printed
paper containing more than 30,000 emails. Clinton withheld almost 32,000 emails
deemed to be of a personal nature.
The
department began releasing the emails last May, starting with some 296 emails
requested by the Benghazi committee. In reviewing those emails, intelligence
officials realized that some contained classified material.
Clinton and
her campaign have offered various responses to questions about the
classifications. At first, she flat-out denied that her server ever held any.
“There is no classified material,” she said at a March 10, 2015, news
conference.
Her campaign
later released a statement saying she could not have known whether material was
classified, because it was not labeled as such. “No information in Clinton’s
emails was marked classified at the time she sent or received them,” the
statement said.
Clinton has
also suggested that many of the emails were classified as a formality only
because they were being prepared for release under a FOIA request. Her campaign
has said that much of the classified material — in emails sent by more than 300
individuals — came from newspaper accounts and other public sources.
“What you
are talking about is retroactive classification,” she said during a recent
debate. “And I think what we have got here is a case of overclassification.”
Her statement appears to conflict with a report to Congress last year by
inspectors general from the State Department and the group of spy agencies
known as the Intelligence Community. They made their report after the discovery
that four emails, from a sample of 40 that went through her server, contained
classified information.
“These
emails were not retroactively classified by the State Department,” the report
said. “Rather these emails contained classified information when they were
generated and, according to IC classification officials, that information
remains classified today. This classified information should never have been
transmitted via an unclassified personal system.”
One of those
four emails has since been declassified and released publicly by the State
Department. The department has questioned the classification of another of
those emails.
Twenty-two
emails discovered later were deemed so highly classified that they were
withheld in their entirety from public release. “They are on their face
sensitive and obviously classified,” Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah), a member of
the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told The Post. “This
information should have been maintained in the most secure, classified,
top-secret servers.”
Fallon
pointed out that none of those emails originated with Clinton, something that
he said Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the Senate Select Intelligence Committee
vice chairman, has noted. “We strongly disagree with the decision to withhold
these emails in full,” he said.
Under Title
18, Section 1924, of federal law, it is a misdemeanor punishable by fines and
imprisonment for a federal employee to knowingly remove classified information
“without authority and with the intent to retain such documents or materials at
an unauthorized location.”
Previous
cases brought under the law have required proof of an intent to mishandle
classified information, a high hurdle in the Clinton case.
The basement
server also put Clinton at risk of violating laws and regulations aimed at
protecting and preserving government records.
In a
statement, Clinton’s campaign said she had received “guidance regarding the
need to preserve federal records” and followed those rules. “It was her
practice to email government employees on their ‘.gov’ email address. That way,
work emails would be immediately captured and preserved in government record-keeping
systems,” the statement said.
Fallon said
that “over 90 percent” of the more than 30,000 work-related emails “were
to or from government email accounts.”
Specialists
interviewed by The Post said her practices fell short of what laws and
regulations mandated. Some of those obligations were spelled out a few months
before Clinton took office in National Archives and Records Administration
Bulletin 2008-05, which said every email system was supposed to “permit easy
and timely retrieval” of the records.
The
secretary of state’s work emails are supposed to be preserved permanently. In
addition, rules also mandated that permanent records are to be sent to the
department’s Records Service Center “at the end of the Secretary’s tenure or
sooner if necessary” for safekeeping.
Under Title
18, Section 2071, it is a misdemeanor to take federal records without
authorization, something that is sometimes referred to as the “alienation” of
records. The law is rarely enforced, but a conviction can carry a fine or
imprisonment.
Jason R.
Baron, a former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records
Administration, told the Senate Judiciary Committee last year he believed that
Clinton’s server ran afoul of the rules. In a memo to the committee, Baron
wrote that “the setting up of and maintaining a private email network as the
sole means to conduct official business by email, coupled with the failure to
timely return email records into government custody, amounts to actions plainly
inconsistent with the federal recordkeeping laws.”
On
May 19, 2015, in response to a FOIA lawsuit from the media organization
Vice News, U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras ordered all the email to be
released in stages, with redactions.
One notable
email was sent in August 2011. Stephen Mull, then serving as the department’s
executive secretary, emailed Abedin, Mills and Kennedy about getting
a government-issued BlackBerry linked to a government server for Clinton.
“We are
working to provide the Secretary per her request a Department issued Blackberry
to replace personal unit, which is malfunctioning (possibly because of her
personal email server is down.) We will prepare two version for her to use —
one with an operating State Department email account (which would mask her
identity, but which would also be subject to FOIA requests).”
Huma Abedin, a top aide to Hillary Clinton,
reacts to testimony at an October hearing of the House Select Committee on
Benghazi. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
Abedin
responded decisively.
“Steve —
let’s discuss the state blackberry. doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”
Fallon said
the email showed that the secretary’s staff “opposed the idea of her identity
being masked.”
Last month,
in a hearing about a Judicial Watch lawsuit, U.S. District Judge Sullivan cited
that email as part of the reason he ordered the State Department produce
records related to its initial failures in the FOIA searches for Clinton’s
records.
Speaking in
open court, Sullivan said legitimate questions have been raised about whether
Clinton’s staff was trying to help her to sidestep FOIA.
“We’re
talking about a Cabinet-level official who was accommodated by the government
for reasons unknown to the public. And I think that’s a fair statement: For
reasons heretofore unknown to the public. And all the public can do is
speculate,” he said, adding: “This is all about the public’s right to know.”
Alice Crites
contributed to this report.
Robert O’Harrow Jr. is a
reporter on the investigative unit of The Washington Post. He writes about law
enforcement, national security, federal contracting and the financial world.
