Thursday, Judicial Watch released the deposition transcript of a former State Department official whose testimony further damages former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s version of the story regarding her private email server.
Karin Lang is the director of executive secretariat staff and testified as a State Department-designated witness. She testified that State Department recordkeeping officials did not know that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her top aide Huma Abedin were using non-government email to conduct government business.
Lang also testified the department could not say whether they turned over all emails in their possession that may be potentially responsive to Judicial Watch’s FOIA request. She said that it would not be reasonable to search all 70,000 State Department email accounts in order to retrieve Clinton’s emails.
“The practice—the way the State Department stores email records is by custodian, by the employee who sent or received those emails,” she said. “So in order to search, for example, for Secretary Clinton’s emails, if they were stored in other custodians’ electronic archives, it would not be possible to do that except by searching individual custodian by individual custodian, which would not be reasonably possible.”
This flies in the face of Clinton’s statements the department would have many of her emails because she sent most of them to State Department employees on their government accounts.
Lang also revealed that Clarence Finney, who oversees State Department FOIA requests, asked about Clinton’s email practices in 2011 after seeing the press photo of her wearing sunglasses while using her BlackBerry. She testified that Finney had been informed in late 2008 or early 2009, when Clinton was transitioning into her role, that she would not be using a government email account.
She also said Finney could not recall who told him Clinton wasn’t using a government email account. TheDailyCaller is reporting John Bentel, a retired State Department official, who was identified in the department’s inspector general report last month, is one possibility.
Bentel reportedly told two information technology staffers not to ask questions about Clinton’s email server. The report also stated he falsely told the staffers that the State Department’s office of the legal adviser had approved Clinton’s server, but that division was never told about Clinton’s server.
Lang said in her deposition that Bentel is not cooperating with the State Department. She said she had “reached out” to the former department official, but he declined to speak. TheDailyCaller reported Bentel has also refused to talk to Congress about the server:
He reportedly told the House Select Committee on Benghazi last year that he did not know about the server. But since then he has declined invitations from two Senate committees to discuss the setup.
