Three months into her term as secretary of state, two of Hillary Clinton’s top aides complained to each other that someone had emailed her directly about a job at the State Department, according to an April 2009 email chain obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation.
One aide worried that Clinton was giving her private email address “to everyone,” but the other aide assured her that Clinton was not widely distributing her address, but that she was receiving forwarded email from her prior Senate email address.
“Personally, I think it’s outrageous that staff go straight to her on this stuff,” Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin told Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills in an April 3, 2009, email exchange.
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“This is unbelievable, and she also should not be giving her email to everyone – b/c she will get stuff like this,” a frustrated Mills replied.
“It’s a long story,” Abedin answered. “She’s not giving her new email to people. People who email her old senate address are still being forwarded to new address. Most of her senate staff had access to that address.”
Clinton’s presidential campaign has been plagued for more than a year by revelations of official Department of State meetings Clinton held with wealthy donors to the Clinton Foundation. Use of the private email system linked to the foundation server at her New York residence to facilitate the meetings is now fueling calls among some Democrats and influential liberal media outlets for the foundation to be shuttered if she becomes president.
Republicans, including Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, favor appointment of a special prosecutor.
Abedin also complained in the April email exchange that Clinton took her unsecured Blackberry everywhere. Abedin wanted an IT staffer to “fix” the automatic forwarding of her old Senate emails to her boss, but it would require the staff to get their hands on the “berry,” as it was known to Clinton’s inner circle.
The emails were obtained by the conservative group Citizens United in an Aug. 15 court-ordered release of Clinton’s communications with her staff, which were captured on her personal email server.
Clinton’s insistence on using a Blackberry caused a near rebellion by the National Security Agency and the Bureau of Diplomatic Security. They objected to her use of the unsecured cell phone within the confines of her highly secured office and within the State Department headquarters in Washington, D.C.
NSA and FBI officials demanded a meeting in a February 2009 email chain released earlier this year by Judicial Watch.
“Why doesn’t she use her desktop when in the office,” asked Donald R. Reid, who is the State Department’s senior coordinator for security infrastructure for the Bureau of Diplomatic Security.
He noted Clinton’s displeasure with the current “No Blackberry in the SCIF” rule. SCIF refers to the secretary of state’s secured office.
A May 18, 2016, TheDCNF report on a deposition of a top Department of State official by Judicial Watch noted that Mills had said the problem “is HRC does not know how to use a computer to do emails — only Blackberry.” HRC refers to Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Her aides also challenged Clinton’s judgment about appointing unqualified people to sensitive security posts. The trigger was an email sent to Clinton by an unnamed Department of State appointee she had sponsored for a security position. The appointee apparently failed the security tests and he directly appealed to the secretary of state for assistance.
Clinton asked Abedin and Mills, “Could you follow up on this?”
Abedin did not believe the staffer could be appointed to any vacant post. “HRC shared email with me the other day and asked if there was any way he could be steered to something else,” Abedin told Mills. “However, I still don’t know where you put him.”
Former U.S. Attorney Joseph DiGenova told TheDCNF that the aides’ comments show “she started her carelessness early on … shows the reaction of her staff. They can’t believe she’s conducting herself this way.”
David N. Bossie, president of Citizens United, told TheDCNF, “This new email brings many troubling questions to mind. Just how easy was it to get access to Hillary Clinton’s email address.”
He also questioned the propriety of trying to place her person into the department’s security bureau, which has traditionally been staffed entirely with non-political career employees.
“Why was Secretary Clinton taking a personal interest in placing someone in the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security?” Bossie asked.
A spokesman for the Clinton campaign did not respond to a request for comment by TheDCNF.
This report, by Richard Pollock, was cross-posted by arrangement with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
