The State Department said Monday that it still cannot locate emails to or from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s senior information technology staffer.
Bryan Pagliano set up Mrs. Clinton’s “home brew” email server in 2009, but a Freedom of Information Act request for documents linked to his tenure at the agency have turned up nothing since last year.
“The Department has searched for Mr. Pagliano’s email PST file and has not located one that covers the time period of Secretary Clinton’s tenure,” State Department spokesman Elizabeth Trudeau said Monday, ABC News reported.
FBI agents are expected to wrap up within weeks their investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s server, which may have violated a subsection of the Espionage Act related to “gross negligence” in handling government documents.
The Justice Department granted Mr. Pagliano immunity for participating in its investigation, but a FOIA request-turned lawsuit by the Republican National Committee should have produced documents.
“It’s hard to believe that an IT staffer who set up Hillary Clinton’s reckless email server never sent or received a single work-related email in the four years he worked at the State Department,” RNC Deputy Communications Director, Raj Shah, said in a statement to the network.
“Such records might shed light on his role in setting up Clinton’s server, and why he was granted immunity by the FBI. But it seems that his emails were either destroyed or never turned over, adding yet another layer to the secrecy surrounding his role,” Mr. Shah said.
The RNC is seeking all work-related documents sent or received by Mr. Pagliano, between 2009 and 2013. The State Department said it only has “recent” documents from Mr. Pagliano’s work as a contractor since Mrs. Clinton’s departure.
Roughly 30,000 emails have been reviewed by the State Department since last summer. The only email available email by Pagliano is a “Happy Birthday Madam Secretary” from 2012, the Associated Press reported.
Mrs. Clinton, the likely 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, maintains she did nothing wrong, though she admitted it was a mistake, by hosting a private email server from her home in Chappaqua, New York.
When news of the server first broke, Mrs. Clinton emphatically said that no classified information was ever on the server, a claim she has since amended to “classified at the time.”
The former secretary of state signed a Sensitive Compartmented Information Nondisclosure Agreement before taking the job, which put the onus on her to correctly identify sensitive intelligence.
“I understand that it is my responsibility to consult with appropriate management authorities in the Department … in order to ensure that I know whether information or material within my knowledge or control that I have reason to believe might be SCI,” the agreement said, the Washington Free Beacon reported last November.
• Douglas Ernst can be reached at dernst@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.