Almost 200 additional pages released late Friday from the FBI’s now-closed investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server show an often-haphazard handling of sensitive information and devices by top aides who scrambled to keep their boss in the loop on important digital information.
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The FBI said in its notes from an Abedin interview that the address on a Clinton email chain “is believed to be a pseudonym used by the President”.
The FBI has released almost 200 pages of documents in Hillary Clinton’s ongoing email investigation. If accurate, though, it contradicts what Clinton and government officials have said.
Clinton’s campaign spokesman, Brian Fallon, accused House Republicans of “trying to make something out of nothing by rummaging through the files of a Justice Department investigation that was closed months ago without any charges whatsoever, and leaking selective details three days before the first presidential debate”.
The most transparent president in history used a fake name to communicate with one of his key advisers.
The White House was apparently aware that Hillary Clinton was using a private email account because her staff said so.
Bryan Pagliano, a tech expert who set up Clinton’s email server at her home in NY, and Paul Combetta, a computer specialist for a private firm that later maintained Clinton’s email setup, had also been granted immunity by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the probe.
Like most Obama statements, this one came with an expiration date.
In her interview, Abedin talked about the phasing out of Clinton’s personal @clintonemail.com address after she stepped down as secretary of state in early 2013. Previously, the President has said he never knew about the server until it was brought to the public’s attention.
The State Department denies assertions that requests regarding classification were made to help protect Clinton for political purposes.
In 2014, Clinton’s office released some 55,000 emails to State Department investigators, while admitting that she erased another 33,000.
Beth Wilkinson, the lawyer representing Mills and Samuelson, said the text of the immunity agreements show investigators considered her clients “to be witnesses and nothing more”. A worker later said the term was a joke.
Mills was Clinton’s chief of staff during her tenure at Foggy Bottom and has become one focus of the committee’s probe into whether Clinton ordered the deletion of emails that were under congressional subpoena.
The Trump camp said through advisor Jason Miller, the reference to a cover-up “suggests there was a concerted effort to systematically destroy potentially incriminating information”.
With only 44 days left until the general election, Clinton’s campaign looks to be in direct free fall.
“This is beyond explanation”, he later said in a statement to Politico.
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FBI Director James Comey in July took the unprecedented step of announcing in a press conference the FBI’s conclusion that there was not enough evidence to merit a criminal prosecution, before handing over his findings to the Justice Department.
