FBI Report: Clinton Staffer Put Emails in Someone’s Gmail Account, Lost Backups

Laptop, Other Backups, 'Lost in the Mail'

A newly released, heavily-redacted report on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email mishandling reveals not just the comedy of errors by which Clinton used a private email server for classified data, and kept few to know proper records, but also of the period after her tenure, in which they were trying to back things up.

This centered around former Clinton aide Monica Hanley being given an Apple MacBook from the Clinton Foundation, and talked through the process of backing up the contents of the private email server both to the laptop and to a thumb drive.

The laptop and thumb drive were to be stored at Clinton’s residence, but Hanley “forgot” to hand them over. In 2014, she was contacted about it, and tried to transfer the email archive by way of an IT company. After that failed the emails were “transferred to an unnamed person’s personal Gmail account.”

This “unnamed person” then deleted the emails from the laptop, and put it in the mail. It was never seen again, and neither Hanley nor this person, whose name is repeatedly redacted, have any idea where either the laptop or the thumb drive ended up.

Clinton generally accessed the email server through a Blackberry, though the FBI report also makes mention of possible use of an iPad. She went through at least 13 Blackberries over the course of the period, with Hanley reportedly buying most of them at DC-area AT&T stores. Justin Cooper, a former aide of Bill Clinton was charged with destroying the ones she was done with, at least a couple of times by way of a hammer, though the report suggested that the Blackberries routinely went missing.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.