A conservative watchdog group has discovered yet another email from the early days of Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state that she failed to turn over to the State Department.
On Thursday, Judicial Watch published a Feb. 13, 2009 email that Clinton sent her State Department chief of staff Cheryl Mills in response to news about obtaining a special BlackBerry that Clinton wanted to use at the State Department’s executive offices, which are designated as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF).
Mills was slated to meet that day with the National Security Agency’s (NSA) State Department representative to discuss the issue, she said. She also forwarded an email from another official suggesting that NSA was likely to approve the request.
“That’s good news,” Clinton wrote.
Days later, however, NSA decided against providing Clinton with a super-secure BlackBerry. But she continued to use a personal device anyway — a decision that likely made her more vulnerable to being hacked.
The new Judicial Watch email raises questions over just how many other records Clinton failed to provide the State Department. She gave the agency around 55,000 work-related emails in Dec. 2014 and has said she deleted about the same number that were allegedly personal in nature.
After the email story broke last March, Clinton’s campaign released a fact sheet defending the Democratic presidential candidate’s actions. The fact sheet stated:
Before March 18, 2009, Secretary Clinton continued using the email account she had used during her Senate service. Given her practice from the beginning of emailing Department officials on their state.gov accounts, her work-related emails during these initial weeks would have been captured and preserved in the Department’s record-keeping system. She, however, no longer had access to these emails once she transitioned from this account.
But that claim was falsified in September when the Department of Defense and the State Department’s inspector general gave the State Department emails that Clinton exchanged with Gen. David Petraeus, who then served as commander of United States Central Command.
The emails, which did not contain classified information, were sent between Jan. 10, 2009 and Feb. 1, 2009, The News York Times reported last year.
CNN reported that the emails were on a different server than the one she began using in March 2009. That device, which was housed at Clinton’s New York residence, was managed by State Department IT specialist Bryan Pagliano. He was hired at the State Department in May 2009.
In August, Clinton issued a statement under oath in a federal court filing claiming that she had turned over all of the work-related emails. She qualified her statements, though, by noting that she handed over those emails that were in her custody.
“I have directed that all my emails on clintonemail.com in my custody that were or potentially were federal records be provided to the Department of State, and on information and belief, this has been done,” Clinton said.
The Democratic presidential candidate has not explained — and has not been asked — how frequently she used her clintonemail.com account before March 19, 2009. She has also not been asked if she deleted emails from her account after that date.
Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said that the new email shows why Clinton “falsely suggests” that she did not use a clintonemail.com account before March 19, 2009.
“She didn’t want Americans to know about her February 13, 2009, email that shows that she knew her Blackberry and email use was not secure,” Fitton said in a statement.
Emails contained in the new Judicial Watch records also show that Patrick Donovan, who then served as deputy assistant secretary for countermeasures at State, had commissioned a memo outlining “the vulnerabilities and risks of [BlackBerry] use inside and outside a SCIF.”
Other emails released by Judicial Watch last week show that Eric Boswell, who served as head of the State Department’s bureau of diplomatic security at the time, cautioned Clinton and her top aides against using BlackBerries in sensitive areas.
The Daily Caller recently published an article laying out everything known so far about Clinton’s BlackBerry use. (RELATED: Here’s Everything We Know So Far About Hillary’s Shady BlackBerry Use)
