Pagliano’s lawyers also asked the court to block Judicial Watch from recording the proceedings where Pagliano will refuse to answer questions, after their request that Judicial Watch drop their subpeona was refused.
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This was a pattern repeated throughout the deposition by the seven lawyers for Mills – including four attorneys representing the State and Justice departments, as well as her personal representatives. Mills and her attorneys reportedly walked out of an interview last month with FBI investigators and Department of Justice attorneys, after her lawyers argued that some questions were supposed to be off limits. She represented Clinton when the former secretary of state was ordered to turn over official emails to the State Department in 2014.
Hillary Clinton’s ex-chief of staff partially blames the Benghazi terror attack for distracting the former secretary of state from turning over her private emails in 2013 as she was legally required to do.
In fact, the record’s clear that she “went home-brew” precisely to frustrate Freedom of Information Act requests. “We are working to provide the secretary, per her request, a Department-issued Blackberry to replace her personal unit, which is malfunctioning”, wrote Mull, stating that the device was malfunctioning “possibly because her personal email server is down”.
“So Secretary Clinton used – always used one email account when she was using an email account”, Ms. Mills testified.
“I recall that there was a point at which she had to transition her email address and told everyone that she had a new email address”, Mills said. “So I don’t know that this was something that I focused on, and certainly I wish I had”. Mills’ attorney also instructed her to not answer several questions that her attorney felt were outside the admissible scope of discovery.
Mills testimony covered Clinton’s use of emails; whether FOIA searches were done of Clinton emails, information about the set-up of the Clinton email server; Mills’ communication with Clinton email witness Bryan Pagliano; Mills’ involvement in prior Clinton email controversies; and the handling of politically sensitive FOIA responses. “It was my impression that when she emailed, because it was her practice to email people on their State accounts when she was doing State business, that any of those communications would be captured and maintained by the State Department system”, Mills said. Many of those questions were objected to by Mills’ lawyer as not being within the scope of Judge Sullivan’s order as to what topics were or were not allowed to be discussed.
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According to the Washington Post, Mills’s lawyers and the Department of Justice had agreed to limit the questions to specific subjects, “and [DOJ] prosecutors were somewhat taken aback that their Federal Bureau of Investigation colleague had ventured beyond what was anticipated”.
