As for Mrs. Clinton’s excuse that other State Department officials have used private email, the IG, reviewing agency policy and practice under five Secretaries of State, found only two other instances of the persistent use of a personal email system for doing public business. No one at the State Department told her to use a government email address, and she never asked permission to use a private account or the email server at her private home.
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“I used my personal email”.
Democratic presidential candidate and former secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Tuesday that President Barack Obama called her when negotiators had reached a deal on Iran’s nuclear program. “It’s been clearly public and my email use was widely known throughout the department, throughout the government, and I have provided all of my work related emails, and I’ve asked that they be made public”.
Clinton told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Thursday that “personal email use was the practice under other secretaries of state, and the rules were not clarified until after I had left”.
U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks during a visit to the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, California, U.S. May 5, 2016.
According to the report, two Clinton’s immediate staff discussed via email in May, 2011, that Clinton was concerned that someone was “hacking into her email” after she received an email with a suspicious link.
In an email released by Judicial Watch earlier this year, Lukens initially suggested a computer that could be “connected to the internet (but not through our system) to enable her to check emails from her desk”. It feeds into the narrative that Clinton is untrustworthy and basically does whatever she wants to do.
Clinton’s team has long defended the former secretary’s decision to forego use of a State Department email address by arguing others in her position had done the same – particularly Colin Powell.
The report criticized the State Department for being “slow to recognize and to manage effectively the legal requirements and cybersecurity risks” of official email use. One possibility is that the State Department was granted access to the correspondences by the officials and aides who were on the email chains with Clinton.
“The crux of the issue was that BlackBerrys and iPhones are not allowed in the secretary’s office suite, so the question was: How is the secretary going to be able to check her e-mails if she’s not able to have the BlackBerry at her desk with her?” the official, Lewis Lukens, said in a deposition released Thursday by the conservative government transparency group Judicial Watch.
The FBI investigation of her email is an ever-growing thunderhead looming on the edge of her campaign, and it all keeps alive every overblown suspicion about her conduct, from Whitewater to Benghazi.
THE REPORT: Clinton declined through her lawyer to be interviewed for the report.
I thought it was allowed.
“I have absolute confidence that everything that could be in any way connected to work is now in the possession of the State Department”.
Clinton and her aides have played down the inquiries, saying that she would cooperate with investigators to put the email issue behind her.
In response to his proposal, Lukens said Mills told him that Clinton was “very comfortable checking her emails on a BlackBerry but she’s not adept or not used to checking her emails on a desktop”.
The report said Clinton should have discussed the arrangement with the department’s security and technology officials.
A spokesman for the Clinton campaign did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment Thursday. In November 2010, her deputy chief of staff for operations prodded her about “putting you on State email”.
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But after 14 months of public scrutiny and the release of tens of thousands of emails, an agency watchdog’s discovery of at least three previously undisclosed emails has renewed concerns that Clinton was not completely forthcoming when she turned over a trove of 55,000 pages of emails.
