A government watchdog group is asking two lawmakers to investigate whether State Department employees violated federal law by using email accounts from Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign to conduct official government business.
The request, which the Cause of Action Institute sent to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley and House Oversight Chairman [crscore]Jason Chaffetz[/crscore], was prompted by the discovery that Bryan Pagliano, the State Department staffer who managed Clinton’s private email server, communicated with Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, from his campaign email address, bpagliano@hillaryclinton.com.
Before being hired as deputy chief information officer at the State Department in May 2009, Pagliano managed IT for Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. He invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination during a brief interview in front of the House Select Committee on Benghazi in September.
A March 20, 2010 email that the State Department turned over to The Daily Caller shows that Mills emailed Pagliano on his campaign address after she lost the Blackberry she was provided by the 2008 Clinton campaign. That email and other records were part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Cause of Action on behalf of TheDC.
Ten other emails that have been published on the State Department’s website show that both Mills and Huma Abedin, who served as Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, maintained email accounts from the hillaryclinton.com domain. Those accounts are in addition to other personal email accounts that the Clinton aides used. Mills used a Gmail account in addition to her state.gov account. Abedin — like Clinton — used an account hosted on the clintonemail.com domain — the one which Pagliano managed.
But it is the use of the presidential campaign email domain that is Cause of Action’s cause for concern.
“The use of campaign-funded email accounts for government business raises a host of potential compliance issues,” Cause of Action Institute executive director Daniel Epstein said in a statement. “The American taxpayers deserve to know how Washington uses their money — vigilant oversight is necessary to determine why federal officials had access to and control over campaign email accounts and whether these records should be recovered.”
In the letters to Grassley and Chaffetz, both Republicans, Cause of Action asks what other former Clinton campaign staffers continued to use their campaign email addresses. The group also questions whether the use of the accounts violates the Hatch Act, which prohibits government employees from using government time and resources to engage in political activities.
Cause of Action cites a January 2011 investigation by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel which found that employees at the George W. Bush White House violated the Hatch Act by using campaign email accounts to coordinate government policy and travel.
That investigation was spurred by an investigation undertaken in 2007 by then-California Rep. Henry Waxman, a Democrat who chaired the House Oversight Committee at the time.
In the letters to Grassley and Chaffetz, Cause of Action also questions whether the Clinton campaign violated the Federal Campaign Election Act by providing Mills the Blackberry she later lost. A Daily Caller investigation showed that the lost Blackberry likely contained emails that have been retroactively classified. (RELATED: Clinton Chief Of Staff Lost Her Blackberry, Which Contained Classified Emails)
The letter asserts that the campaign may be in violation if it provided the device or any other communication devices free of charge.
While Grassley has made numerous inquiries into the Clinton email saga — Chaffetz was reportedly warned by House Speaker [crscore]Paul Ryan[/crscore] to avoid launching an investigation that in any way touches on Clinton’s email system.
