Judicial Watch: State Department Did Not Provide Secure BlackBerry to Hillary

Blackberrys belonging to top Hillary Clinton aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills were returned to the State Department, but likely have been destroyed, The Hill reports. Because Clinton made the decision not to use a State.gov account for her official email, and instead relied on a private email server, similar requests for her records can’t be handled so cleanly.

News of the close Clinton aides’ devices adds to the growing scrutiny on the Democratic presidential front-runner and two of her top advisors, both of whom have been drawn into the fire surrounding Clinton’s email behavior.

The filing was part of a lawsuit by Judicial Watch seeking information about Abedin’s employment.

Earlier this month, Sullivan ordered the State Department to ask Clinton, Mills and Abedin to preserve all official records they had responsive to Judicial Watch’s request and to execute a declaration under penalty of perjury about their use of private email or devices to store such records. [The State Department] has not located any such device at the Department …

Mills and Abedin “were each issued BlackBerry devices”, department Executive Secretary Joseph Macmanus wrote in the filing.

“The Department does not believe that any personal computing device was issued by the Department to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and has not located any such device at the Department”, Macmanus stated.

“Due to the Court’s calendar, the status hearing will take place at 1:00 p.m. on August 20, 2014 in Courtroom 24A, rather than 12:00 p.m.as originally scheduled”, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, a Bill Clinton appointee, wrote Tuesday afternoon.

Judicial Watch was quick to jump on the issue.

The group’s president, Tom Fitton, argued that the State Department obviously knew all along about the server-and its failure to disclose this information when JW brought its initial FOIA suit is clear evidence of misrepresentation and misconduct. We’re talking about the highly secure device Hillary Clinton thought it would be too hard and inconvenient for her imperial self to use. “Best Buy? Target? Mrs. Clinton clearly did whatever she wanted, without regard to national security or federal records keeping laws”.

All three used email accounts not issued by the State Department to conduct government business, and all three are now under court orders to return those documents to the department to belatedly comply with open-records laws.

During a press conference on Wednesday, State Department spokesman John Kirby confirmed that the devices were reset and that no information from them was kept or backed up.

The server on which the emails were stored was under Clinton’s personal control, not the State Department’s, creating what amounts to a break in the chain of custody.