Huma Abedin backed up copies of her emails with Hillary Clinton onto her husband’s laptop, contrary to what she told the FBI and other officials investigating the email scandal, according to a new report.
Abedin, Clinton’s top aide, backed up many of her work-related emails to Anthony Weiner’s laptop after Clinton left the State Department in early 2013, the Daily Mail writes after a examination of her emails.
But Abedin told the FBI that she “lost most of her old emails as a result of the transition” from the State Department.
“She had only accessed clintonemail.com through a web portal and did not have a method for archiving her old emails prior to the transition,” according to notes taken during an FBI interview with Abedin on April 5, 2016.
Abedin compounded that statement in June 2016 by telling lawyers from a watchdog group under oath that she didn’t back up emails.
“With respect to those State Department work-related emails on the Clintonemail.com accounts, what did you do, if anything, to preserve those emails?” asked an attorney with Judicial Watch, according to a transcript of the deposition.
Abedin said she “did not do anything to preserve those emails.”
“The instances where it was Clintonemail to Clintonemail, there were instances where the content of those emails had personal matters in there, and there may have also been State Department matters in there, too. It was a – a combination. But I did not – I did not preserve those e-mails,” Abedin said.
Clinton kept a secret email server in her New York home and used it to correspond with several top aides throughout her time as Secretary of State. Dozens of classified emails were found to have been forwarded through unsecured mail servers.
Last week, Judicial Watch revealed “that there are at least 18 classified emails in the 798 documents recently produced by the State Department from the FBI’s investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s elicit email system.”
Among those, 13 contained classified information, including discussions about Saudi Arabia, The Hague, Egypt, South Africa, Zimbabwe, the identity of a CIA official, Malawi, the war in Syria, Lebanon, Hamas, and the PLO, Judicial Watch reported.
The Daily Mail reported:
The emails, released at the end of December, show that they had been put on Weiner’s laptop by a BlackBerry archiving program.
A tech expert told Dailymail.com that Abedin would have to have activated the backup program and may well have plugged her device into the laptop – raising further questions over her testimony to the FBI.
Abedin was Clinton’s deputy chief of staff at the State Department and remains her closest aide.
Like Clinton, she was cleared by then FBI director James Comey in the wake of the investigation into the former Secretary of State and her staff’s handling of classified material.
Last Thursday it was revealed that the Department of Justice is looking again at the Clinton email investigation, after President Donald Trump’s provocative tweet calling for ‘jail’ for Abedin. It is also being examined by the FBI’s Inspector General.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said last week that the FBI knew about the classified emails.
“These are classified records that [Former FBI Director] James Comey and his colleagues … knew were on the Weiner laptop, but didn’t take seriously enough to pursue criminal charges against Abedin or Clinton for allowing this egregious abuse of trust that the American people placed in them,” he said.
“It wasn’t just low-level classified materials that were found in the Clinton email server,” Fitton said. “But there were highly top secret documents of the most secure type and it would have resulted in a criminal prosecution, I guarantee you, if you were anyone else but the Democratic nominee for president.”
Meanwhile, Trump is calling for Abedin to go to prison.
As they say in the news business, more TK.