A State Department official tasked with providing the agency’s side of the story in a lawsuit over Hillary Clinton’s private emails said Wednesday that the government initially assumed Clinton did not use email for any of her official communications when agents could not locate her records in 2013.
Karin Lang, director of executive secretariat staff at the State Department, said Clinton’s staff informed the agency she would not be needing a “state.gov” email account as she was transitioning into her post as secretary of state, according to a deposition transcript made public Thursday.
Lang said Clinton’s team reaffirmed the former secretary’s rejection of an official email account after State Department officials saw media photographs of Clinton reading messages on a cell phone and asked about her email use.
Lang was questioned by attorneys for conservative watchdog Judicial Watch as part of a high-profile Freedom of Information Act lawsuit over Clinton’s records. Judicial Watch lawyers pressed Lang as to why, when the group’s original FOIA request for Clinton-related emails turned up nothing, officials with the State Department did not question the complete absence of any emails authored by the former secretary of state.
Lang said officials were “not aware that there was email that would be responsive to FOIA requests” located outside of the State Department’s reach.
Clinton did not turn over copies of a select number of emails until December 2014.
The testimony was given during one of seven scheduled depositions in the Clinton email case. Bryan Pagliano, Clinton’s former information technology specialist, was slated to testify Monday, but his attorneys told the court he intended to invoke his Fifth Amendment rights and refuse all questions.
In response, a judge asked Paglinao’s legal team to submit the details of an immunity deal he struck with the Justice Department. The court is presently weighing whether to allow Pagliano to keep the immunity deal sealed.
While the deposition made public Thursday did not specify which photograph sparked the State Department’s inquirty, many have since speculated it was an image of Clinton looking at her BlackBerry on a plane to Tripoli, Libya while wearing sunglasses that drew the agency’s interest.
That image, which was taken in 2011, went viral in 2012 and prompted the creation of the popular blog, “Texts from Hillary.”
