A watchdog group has asked the chairmen of two congressional committees to look into whether Hillary Clinton’s State Department staff used campaign email addresses from her 2008 presidential bid to evade the Freedom of Information Act.
In a letter to Sen. Chuck Grassley and Rep. Jason Chaffetz last week that was made public Wednesday, Cause of Action noted that several of Clinton’s State Department aides used their campaign email accounts to discuss government business.
The group said an email involving Bryan Pagliano, Clinton’s former technology aide, prompted its interest in the use of campaign-funded accounts. Pagliano worked on Clinton’s 2008 primary campaign before following her to the State Department, where he was privately employed by Clinton but was also employed publicly by the agency in a controversial role that allowed him to manage the private server network Clinton kept in her home.
In the email, which Cause of Action obtained through a FOIA lawsuit, Pagliano assists Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, as she struggles with the loss of her personal Blackberry phone.
Given recent revelations that Mills was among the Clinton aides who transmitted classified material through a network of unsecured email accounts, the mere fact that Mills misplaced her Blackberry could raise further alarms.
Mills and Huma Abedin, another Clinton aide, also used email accounts that were paid for by the Clinton campaign, Cause of Action noted. Several of those emails were released last year by the State Department through a separate FOIA lawsuit.
The group noted the use of campaign email accounts to shield federal records could warrant an entirely separate investigation from the one already underway into Clinton’s personal server, as those inboxes could contain another undisclosed trove of official emails.
“If Mr. Pagliano, Ms. Mills, Ms. Abedin, or any other State Department employee used a hilliaryclinton.com email account for official government business, the resulting emails constitute federal records under the Federal Records Act and must be recovered and preserved by the State Department to fulfill its recordkeeping obligations,” Cause of Action wrote. “If Ms. Mills’ Blackberry, or any other communication devices purchased by the Friends of Hillary campaign committee, were transferred free-of-charge to ex-campaign staffers, that conduct would implicate a violation of the Federal Campaign Election Act.”
“To date, the reporting and investigations into this matter have focused on the clintonemail.com emails stored on Mrs. Clinton’s private server,” the group continued. “The evidence now demonstrates that there exist an entirely separate domain and associated email accounts owned by The Friends of Hillary political campaign committee.”
A spokesman for Cause of Action said Chaffetz, who chairs the House Oversight Committee, and Grassley who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, had not yet responded to the letter.
Chaffetz recently announced his intention to look into record-keeping practices across the federal government, a probe that would include the Clinton email network.
