Hillary Clinton is set to answer questions about her team’s destruction of roughly 30,000 emails when she submits testimony Thursday in a high-profile lawsuit over her State Department records.
Clinton will be forced to describe the creation and operation of the server system that was kept in the basement of her Chappaqua, N.Y. home during her time as secretary of state, as well as the steps her staff took to separate work-related emails from private ones in 2014.
Her responses to the 25 questions posed by Judicial Watch, the conservative-leaning group that brought the suit, will be considered sworn testimony by a federal judge.
Judicial Watch attorneys deposed six current and former Clinton aides in May and June — including Huma Abedin, vice chair of Clinton’s campaign, and Bryan Pagliano, the technology aide whose immunity deal with the Justice Department was the first to emerge publicly from the FBI investigation of Clinton’s emails.
One additional deposition — with John Bentel, former IT manager at the State Department who later received one of the five immunity agreements provided during the FBI probe — is scheduled for later this month.
But a judge stopped short of allowing the group to depose Clinton, opting instead to permit a written inquiry that Clinton would have 30 days to answer.
The court had originally asked Clinton to submit her testimony by Sept. 29, but her legal team successfully negotiatied a two-week extension due to the demands of “campaign business.” Clinton’s legal team has until midnight Thursday to hand over her responses.
Alternately, her lawyers could inform Judicial Watch and the court Thursday that they have submitted the answers through the U.S. mail, in which case the group must wait several days to review them.
The testimony comes after several days of document dumps from Wikileaks, which illegally obtained up to 50,000 emails from the inbox of John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chair. Podesta’s correspondence shows just how carefully the campaign managed what was said publicly about Clinton’s private emails as controversy over her private server use grew in the early months of her campaign.
Clinton has avoided discussing her private emails on the campaign trail. When confronted during the second presidential debate with the FBI’s conclusion that she was “extremely careless” in her handling of classified information, Clinton simply admitted that she had erred and declined to discuss specifics.
Her testimony Thursday will offer the most extensive insight into Clinton’s personal knowledge of the email controversy to date.
Since her last public discussion of the situation, House Republicans have revealed her team’s use of a digital deletion tool called BleachBit to erase emails and the existence of four previously-undisclosed immunity agreements. Clinton has not yet acknowledged either development.
The responses she submits to Judicial Watch will compel her to answer for inconsistencies in her past statements, such as the claim that she used a personal email address for “convenience” and her erroneous statement before the House Select Committee on Benghazi that the State Department was already in possession of the vast majority of her emails when she turned over 30,000 of them to the agency in 2014.
