6 Things We Learned in the F.B.I. Clinton Email Investigation
By ADAM GOLDMAN and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT
SEPT. 2, 2016
WASHINGTON — Documents released by the F.B.I. on Friday revealed new details about the Justice Department’s yearlong investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server and whether she and her aides mishandled classified information. Among the documents was an 11-page summary of an interview F.B.I. agents conducted with Mrs. Clinton on July 2. Two days later, the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, said the bureau had recommended to the Justice Department that neither Mrs. Clinton nor her aides should be charged with a crime. Here are six highlights from the documents:
New details about the deletion of Mrs. Clinton’s emails
According to the F.B.I., in December 2014 a top aide to Mrs. Clinton told the company that housed her server to delete an archive of emails from her account. The company, Platte River Networks, apparently never followed those instructions. On March 2, 2015, The New York Times reported that Mrs. Clinton had exclusively used a personal email account when she was secretary of state. Two days later, the congressional committee investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, and Mrs. Clinton’s response to them, told the technology firms associated with the email account that they had to retain “all relevant documents” related to its investigation.
Three weeks later, a Platte River employee had what the F.B.I. documents described as an “oh shit” moment and realized he had not deleted the emails as instructed. The employee said that he then used a special program called BleachBit to delete the files. The F.B.I. said Mrs. Clinton was unaware of the deletions.
The F.B.I. said that it was later able to find some of the emails. The F.B.I. did not say how many emails were deleted, or whether they included some of the 60,000 emails that Mrs. Clinton said she sent and received while secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.
Mrs. Clinton relied on her staff’s judgment to know what was classifiedIn Mrs. Clinton’s interview with the F.B.I., she said she did not recall receiving any emails “she thought should not be on an unclassified system.” She said she had relied on State Department officials to use their judgment when emailing her sensitive information, adding that she “could not recall anyone raising concerns with her regarding the sensitivity of the information she received at her email address.”
Document: The F.B.I.’s Summary of Its Investigation of Hillary Clinton’s Email
Colin Powell told Mrs. Clinton to be careful
In a summary of the investigation, the F.B.I. said that Mrs. Clinton had emailed Colin Powell, a former secretary of state, a day after she was sworn into office about Mr. Powell’s use of a personal email account when he was the country’s top diplomat. Mr. Powell warned Mrs. Clinton that if she used her BlackBerry for official business, those emails could become “official record[s] and subject to the law.”
Mr. Powell, apparently implying that he was cautious in his use of his personal email account, added: “Be very careful. I got around it all by not saying much and not using systems that captured the data.” According to a summary of her interview, Mrs. Clinton said that she did not know exactly what Mr. Powell was saying in that email and that his message “did not factor into her decision to use a personal email account.”
Some of Mrs. Clinton’s closest aides did not know about her private server
Mrs. Clinton said in her interview that it was “common knowledge” that she had a private email address because it was “displayed to anyone with whom she exchanged emails.” But the F.B.I. said in a summary of its findings that “some State Department employees interviewed by the F.B.I. explained that emails by Clinton only contained the letter ‘H’ in the sender field and did not display her email address.” The F.B.I. said that some of Mrs. Clinton’s closest aides were aware that she used a private email address but did not know that she had set up a private server. The aides told the F.B.I. they were “unaware of the existence of the private server until after Clinton’s tenure at State or when it became public knowledge.”
Mrs. Clinton kept her BlackBerry in a State Department secure area, where it was prohibited
According to the summary of the investigation, Mrs. Clinton brought her BlackBerry into a secure area on the seventh floor of the State Department, where such electronics are prohibited. The F.B.I. interviewed three former State Department diplomatic security agents who said that Mrs. Clinton kept her BlackBerry in her desk drawer in the secure area, a so-called Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF. But Huma Abedin, a top aide to Mrs. Clinton, told the F.B.I. that Mrs. Clinton left the secure area to check her BlackBerry, often going to the State Department’s eighth-floor balcony to do so.
Mrs. Clinton had a lot of electronic devices
The F.B.I. said that it had identified 13 mobile devices that Mrs. Clinton potentially used to send emails. Mrs. Clinton’s aides were in charge of buying replacement BlackBerry devices when she was in office, often obtaining them from AT&T stores in the Washington area. Ms. Abedin told the F.B.I. that “it was not uncommon for Clinton to use a new BlackBerry for a few days and then immediately switch it out for an older version with which she was more familiar.” Ms. Abedin and another aide told the F.B.I. that “the whereabouts of Clinton’s devices would frequently become unknown once she transitioned to a new device.” An aide to Bill Clinton, Justin Cooper, who helped set up the server, told the F.B.I. that he recalled “two instances where he destroyed Clinton’s old mobile devices by breaking them in half or hitting them with a hammer.”
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