Video has emerged showing a State Department official openly admitting that Hillary Clinton and other State Department officials used their Blackberries to send and receive information that “would never be on an unclassified system.”
Fox News’ Ed Henry reported Monday on a video from 2013 showing Wendy Sherman, who served as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs during the Obama administration, discussing how diplomats, including Clinton, used their Blackberries during negotiations with foreign officials.
“Now we have Blackberries, and it has changed the way diplomacy is done. Things appear on your Blackberries that would never be on an unclassified system, but you’re out traveling, you’re trying to negotiate something,” Sherman said during a 2013 conference for the American Foreign Service Association.
As an example of that, Sherman cited a Sept. 2011 meeting Clinton and other officials held at the UN General Assembly with Lady Catherine Margaret Ashton, then-vice president of the European Commission, to discuss Middle East peace negotiations.
“And so they sat there, as they were having the meeting, with their Blackberries, transferring language back and forth between them and between their aides to multitask in quite a new fashion, to have the meeting and at the same time be working on the quartet statement,” Sherman said in the video.
Clinton frequently emailed from her personal email account on that Blackberry, which was not issued to her by the State Department and was not equipped to properly handle classified information.
Fox News found emails contained in the trove of records that Clinton gave to the State Department in Dec. 2014 which appear to refer to the meeting Sherman referenced. And indeed, emails from Sept. 22, 2011 show traffic containing now-classified information that was forwarded to Clinton. In one message from that same email chain, Clinton’s foreign policy adviser, Jake Sullivan, sent her a message that is now classified.
Those emails came just weeks after a top State Department official suggested to Clinton’s top two aides, Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin, that Clinton begin using a government-issued Blackberry because her personal device was “malfunctioning.” (RELATED: Clinton Aides Resisted State Department Suggestion That Clinton Use State.gov Email Account)
The official, Stephen Mull, said that the Blackberry would mask Clinton’s identity but that the emails created on it would be responsive to Freedom of Information Act requests.
But Abdein, who now serves as vice chair of Clinton’s presidential campaign, rejected the idea, telling Mull that it “doesn’t make much sense.”
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