Hillary Clinton State Department Aides Both Used Private Emails

At the State Department, two aides to Clinton reportedly used illegal, secret accounts.

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It wasn’t just Hillary Clinton who used a private email account while she was Secretary of State. Gawker reports, “Source: Top Clinton Aides Used Secret Email Accounts at State Dept.”


This would mean that email between them would be especially lacking any record, thus breaking the law.

The two aides who the source names were Philippe Reines and Huma Abedin—the wife of Anthony Weiner and a longtime aide to Hillary Clinton. But the source seemed to think that other staffers had used private emails as well.

[See also, “Weiner’s a Problem but Huma Abedin is a Bigger Problem.”]

We were able to independently verify that Abedin used a ClintonEmail.com address at some point in time. There are several email addresses associated with Abedin’s name in records maintained by Lexis-Nexis; one of them is [email protected] An email sent to that address today went through without bouncing.

In an email to Gawker, Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill denied that Reines was ever given, or ever used, a ClintonEmail.com address. “He has never had one, not for communicating with anyone about anything,” he wrote. Merrill did not respond, however, to questions about whether Reines used a private account at a different provider, such as Yahoo! or Gmail, to conduct official agency business. He also refused to address multiple questions regarding how Abedin used her ClintonEmail.com address.

How important is this?

Gawker had filed a FOIA request with the State Department in 2012, seeking some of Reines’ correspondence with a journalist. That FOIA request was denied by the State Department on the grounds that they possessed no emails of Reines’ sent to that journalist. Well, no. When you allow a State Department staffer to use a private email in order to conduct State Department business, then you can correctly claim that you don’t have the emails. But the point is: You are supposed to have them!

Again, we see a bold-faced attack on open government by Liberals and a clear signal that they believe they are beyond accountability. This is as bad as the IRS making up transparent lies about broken hard drives to refuse information to Congress.