The latest trove of Hillary Clinton emails released by Citizens United reveals that the former Secretary of State’s top aides were well aware her email practices were a security risk. There are also some new exchanges showing Clinton aide Huma Abedin dealing with Clinton Foundation issues while working from the State Department.
During Clinton’s trip to Russia in October 2009, Abedin emailed others at the State Department to let them know the Secretary and her staff would not be carrying their Blackberries, which were patched into the now-infamous ClintonEmail.com homebrew server. As Fox News reports:
“Want to make sure DC is aware that those of us in the Russia traveling party will be leaving blackberries on the airplane once we tough down in moscow tonite [sic],” Abedin wrote.
When an aide noted that her clintonemail.com address should work if Russian officials are taking their BlackBerrys away, Abedin responded: “Its for security reasons. I don’t want to use that one either.”
Politico adds that Abedin forwarded a similar heads-up to “top Clinton Foundation official Doug Band and others, including Hannah Richert, a director at the Clinton Presidential Center; Oscar Flores, manager of the Clintons’ Chappaqua, New York, home; Jon Davidson, Bill Clinton’s deputy chief of staff; and Justin Cooper, an aide to the former president whose name is registered as the owner of Clinton’s personal server.”
Fox News describes another email chain from September 2009, in which Abedin was forwarded a message about campaign donor Geri Shapiro, who was refusing to attend a Clinton Global Initiative event, because her husband couldn’t attend. Using her State Department email, Abedin asked, “Why was she invited in the first place?”
Abedin and another Clinton aide, Cheryl Mills, had an illuminating email conversation in April 2009 in which they expressed frustration with their boss’s email habits.
“Personally, I think it’s outrageous that staff go straight to her on this stuff,” said Abedin, referring to someone who emailed Clinton to ask about a job.
“This is unbelievable, and she also should not be giving her email to everyone – b/c she will get stuff like this,” said Mills.
Fox News reports Abedin went on to complain about messages being automatically forwarded from Clinton’s old Senate email account, and also about Clinton’s tendency to carry her unsecure Blackberry with her everywhere she went, even into the shower. Now that we know ClintonEmail.com was improperly handling sensitive classified documents, those are some hair-raising gripes from Abedin.
It’s also funny to hear aides describing Clinton as a BlackBerry junkie, when her efforts to spin the email scandal away have so often involved her acting like a technology neophyte — someone who thinks “wiping a server” refers to cleaning the cabinet down with a cloth, to cite one notorious example.
“These newly-disclosed Hillary Clinton emails — that are clearly work-related — give us a sense of what might be in the 15,000 emails the FBI discovered that will be released in September. The American people want to know how many of these emails are related to Clinton Foundation business,” Citizens United president David Bossie told the New York Post, following the latest disclosures.