Aide: Clinton opposed private emails accessible to ‘anybody’

Clinton switched to the private server when she got a new device, and Abedin was given an account on the server after she lost access to her Senate e-mail account.

Abedin testified that she was never asked to respond to a public records request during her time at the State Department and did not consider how emails sent on a private account might be searched in response to requests.

The deposition is part of an open records lawsuit filed by the political watchdog Judicial Watch, which claims the State Department wiggled around federal transparency laws by way of Clinton’s exclusive use of a personal server.

Abedin was Clinton’s deputy chief of staff at the State Department, now works with Clinton’s president campaign and often travels with the candidate. (The server would later be managed by Platte River Networks, a managed IT services firm, with security provided by Datto.) Clinton had been using a BlackBerry mail account through AT&T during the 2008 presidential campaign, and she had been having “technical issues” with the account, according to Abedin.

Department of Justice officials filed a motion in federal court late Wednesday seeking a 27-month delay in producing correspondence between former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s four top aides and officials with the Clinton Foundation and Teneo Holdings, a closely allied public relations firm that Bill Clinton helped launch.

“My response would have been, here are some suggestions”, Abedin continued.

In a November 13, 2010, exchange, Abedin wrote Clinton after the secretary complained that some of her BlackBerry messages to staffers were getting blocked by the department’s spam filter. “I read it the same way as she has written it”.

Pressed on this advice in her deposition, Abedin recounted a specific instance in which an email that would have set up a phone call with a foreign minister apparently ended up in a spam folder, because it came from the ClintonEmail.com server. “I never got her e-mail giving us the sign-off to do it”, Abedin recounted. “When she used e-mail off-hours and when we were on the road, she did use Clintonemail.com”. Although admitting that she had never approached anyone at the State Department to specifically know if it was permitted, Abedin said that she made it a practice to use the secure server on most – but not all – occasions. (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:13-cv-01363)).

In the same e-mail thread, Clinton agreed to getting a State department account or mobile device, “but I don’t want any risk of the personal being accessible”. Mrs. Clinton has previously said that using a single, private email address on a private server was simply a matter of convenience. “I seem frustrated back”, Abedin said.

A representative for Citizens United told Politico the two-year request was too much time, given the presidential election taking place in November.

It was not immediately clear how the State Department could have complied with such legal requests for Abedin’s emails without asking Abedin to search her messages. “So she wasn’t able to do her job, do what she needed to do”.