Story highlights
Abedin described how some Clinton emails were not getting through to State Dept. staffers
Clinton's long-time aide was deposed in a lawsuit by the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch
Hillary Clinton’s personal email set-up caused extensive troubles inside the State Department, including her own messages to top staffers getting lost in spam filters, according to a new deposition of top aide Huma Abedin.
“We should talk about putting you on State e-mail or releasing your e-mail address to the department so you are not going to spam,” Abedin wrote in a Nov. 13, 2010 email to Clinton that was discussed in a deposition Tuesday with Judicial Watch.
Abedin, who has become ensnared in ongoing Clinton email probes, explained in the deposition – a transcript of which was released Wednesday afternoon – that Clinton had missed an important call with a foreign minister because emails from her personal account were being filtered out.
“Her initial e-mail was about a phone call with a … foreign minister, which she missed and missed the call because she never got the – I never got her e-mail suggests – giving us the signoff to do it. So she wasn’t able to do her job, do what she needed to do,” Abedin said. “Just reading the exchange, she seems frustrated because she’s not able to do her job.”
The deposition, released as part of an ongoing lawsuit from the conservative watchdog group, also includes talk of other internal communication breakdowns spurred by Clinton’s use of a personal email server to send emails while she was secretary of state.
But Abedin, long one of Clinton’s closest confidants, defended repeatedly against arguments the former secretary of state had done anything wrong.
“Let’s get separate address or device but I don’t want any risk of the personal being accessible,” Clinton wrote in reply to Abedin’s Nov. 13, 2010 suggestion that she use a government email account.
Abedin was peppered with questions about Clinton’s, but she repeatedly said it was Clinton protecting her personal emails from being read – and not about hiding government communications.
“Just like you wouldn’t – I would imagine anybody who has personal e-mail doesn’t want that personal e-mail to be read by anybody else… I read it the same way as she has written it,” Abedin said.
A State Department spokeswoman declined comment on the problems raised in the deposition, citing ongoing litigation.
Throughout her deposition, Abedin defended Clinton’s decisions, describing them as normal and not suspect at all.
“She had requested a secure BlackBerry, but that did not come to fruition,” Abedin said, noting that her use of a personal BlackBerry was not surprising. “I experienced it as continuing the practice that she had had prior to arriving at the State Department, and continuing to use her personal device.”
