How Far Up Does This Go?

The Judicial Watch Press Room posted an article on Monday about State Department efforts to set up a private computer for Secretary of State Clinton.

The article reports:

Judicial Watch announced today that it recently received records from the Department of State disclosing plans by senior State Department officials to set up a “stand-alone PC” so that Clinton could  check her emails in an office “across the hall” through a separate, non-State Department computer network system. Referencing the special Clinton computer system, Under Secretary for Management Patrick F. Kennedy, writes Clinton Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, “The stand-alone separate network PC is a great idea.”  The emails are from January 23-24, 2009, a few days after Clinton was sworn in as Secretary of State.

The new emails were obtained by Judicial Watch in response a court order in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit for State Department records about Hillary Clinton’s separate email system  (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:15-cv-00689)).

In the email chain, Lewis Lukens, former deputy assistant secretary of state and executive director of the secretariat, responds to a request from Mills by informing her, top Clinton aide Huma Abedin, and Kennedy that the new personal computer “in the secretary’s office” would be “connected to the internet (but not through our system).” Abedin responds, “We are hoping for that if possible.”

The email exchange discussing plans to provide Clinton a separate computer to skirt the internal State Department computer network begins with a message from Mills to Lukens in which she requests Clinton being able to access her emails through “a non-DOS computer.” The email discusses how the stand-alone computer can be set up and why it is “a great idea’ and “the best solution:”

The article includes copies of the emails involved. Please follow the link to the Judicial Watch article to read them.

So why is this important? What they were doing was illegal. There may be a totally innocent reason for doing this, but the obvious reason would be to avoid archiving requirements and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. It really is difficult to see this as an innocent action. If the major media covers this, the entire email scandal may well unravel as people attempt to defend themselves, legally and otherwise.