Emails obtained from the State Department suggest Hillary Clinton was unsure of how her records would be handled by the agency, contradicting the former secretary of state’s claims that she assumed all emails exchanged with state officials would be automatically preserved in the government system.
“I just realized I have no idea how my papers are being treated at State,” Clinton wrote in a March 2009 email to her deputy chief of staff, Huma Abedin.
The message was included among 165 pages of records obtained and made public by conservative watchdog Judicial Watch Monday. It indicated Clinton was concerned about her communications in the early months of her tenure.
“I don’t know what’s happening [with] it all,” Clinton wrote in the email. “Are there personal files as well as official ones set up?”
Clinton has weathered intense criticism of her decision to use a private email account and server to shield her records from exposure to the public.
In recently released correspondence, Clinton expressed concerns that informing the State Department of her email address could allow her personal emails to become “accessible,” creating a situation Clinton hoped to avoid.
The latest email further erodes the justifications Clinton and her allies have made in defense of her private server use.
When pressed on whether the establishment of the personal email network was an attempt to skirt open records laws, Clinton has consistently answered that she believed, at the time, that any conversation between her private address and a “state.gov” account would be captured in the State Department’s servers and thus archived in accordance with record-keeping rules.
