Despite receiving emails from Clinton, Kennedy also testified that it never occurred to him that she might have a significant amount of State Department records in her possession until reading the March 2015 New York Times story about her private email server.
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Once investigators began looking into the Clinton email affair, she and some of her aides – and quite possibly, some officials still working in the State Department -began trying to cover up the electronic trail of her misdeeds.
“I wasn’t involved in the setting up of the server”, Abedin said.
Abedin was the latest of a half-dozen current and former Clinton and department aides to appear for questions in the lawsuit, and by some measures was more forthcoming than some others deposed, at times answering questions even after her or the government’s lawyers objected.
Abedin was Clinton’s deputy chief of staff at the State Department, now works with Clinton’s presidential campaign and often travels with the candidate.
Abedin’s testimony came amid a stream of other revelations regarding Clinton’s emails that have continued to dog the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee as she tries to put to rest the months-long controversy. Clinton claimed she only used her personal email address because she did not want to carry more than one device.
State Department Freedom of Information officer Eric Stein said the agency initially only searched the “to” and “from” lines in its email database to determine how many emails might be relevant to the Citizens United case.
“Judicial Watch represents everything that is wrong with our political system”, said Nick Merrill, a Clinton campaign spokesman.
Abedin also told lawyers for the conservative group Judicial Watch in a deposition this week that she could not recall whether she or Clinton discussed with any State Department officials Clinton’s exclusive use of private email for government business.
“I would imagine anybody who has personal email doesn’t want that personal email to be read by anybody else”, Abedin explained.
Asked about Clinton’s response to her recommendation, Abedin said she could not remember any. 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”.
The State Department has, in turn, been releasing those records to Judicial Watch as part of the litigation in batches over time. It might have also just been my… being frustrated back at the fact that I wasn’t getting her messages.
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.
Clinton has said she turned over all work-related emails in her possession. Kennedy said when he received the emails, “I was focused on responding to the query that I had received”, which included urgent matters such as the evacuation of a US embassy in Tripoli or the deaths of Americans overseas.
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Citizens United has sued for emails between a handful of State Department officials and people at the Clinton Foundation and a consulting firm, Teneo Consulting, which has ties to the Clintons.
