Two archives containing Hillary Clinton’s emails from her tenure as secretary of state were misplaced shortly after it was revealed that the Democratic presidential nominee used a personal account for official government business, according to notes from the FBI’s investigation into the matter.
The archives were created in spring 2013 by Monica Hanley, a former aide, and were stored on an Apple MacBook laptop and a USB stick for the purpose of having a collection of the emails on file at Mrs. Clinton’s residences in both New York and Washington, D.C.
Ms. Hanley was provided with the laptop by the Clinton Foundation — the organization founded by the White House hopeful and her husband, former president Bill Clinton — and was instructed over the phone how to make the archives by one of Mr. Clinton’s aides.
“Hanley completed this task from her personal residence,” federal investigators wrote in newly released notes published by the FBI on Friday.
Neither the MacBook nor the USB stick ever arrived in its intended location, however. The FBI’s notes reveal Ms. Hanley “forgot” to provide either device after creating the archive, and didn’t work out a way to get the copy to the Mrs. Clinton’s staff until early 2014 when she located the laptop inside her personal residence.
Ms. Hanley tried to remotely transfer the files to no avail, and eventually shipped the MacBook in February 2014 to someone else who was able to back up the emails and transfer them to a server on behalf of the Clinton camp. After the emails were uploaded, the unidentified person who assisted in the matter said they deleted the emails from the laptop and shipped it to someone else on the Clinton team using either the U.S. Postal Service or United Parcel Service, according to the FBI.
But the intended recipient “told the FBI that she never received the laptop,” the notes reveal. Neither Ms. Hanley nor another unidentified person implicated in the matter were ever able to identify the whereabouts of the laptop or thumb drive, “and the FBI does not have either item in its possession.”
“Clinton’s staff was moving offices at the time, and it would have been easy for the package to get lost during the transition period,” a Clinton staffer told the FBI.
The notes released Friday pertain to the FBI investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s use of a personal email account for government business while secretary of state under President Obama. In July, FBI Director James Comey announced that the Justice Department would not be pursuing charges against Mrs. Clinton after considering whether she had intentionally mishandled classified information.
The FBI opened its investigation after correspondence leaked to the press in 2013 revealed that Mrs. Clinton used the personal account to correspond with a confidant, Sidney Blumenthal, whose own account had been compromised by a Romanian computer hacker. In a footnote to the documents released Friday, the FBI acknowledged receiving at least two explanations with respect to why Ms. Hanley was instructed to create an archive of Mrs. Clinton’s emails: according to her own account, the archives were created in response to Mrs. Clinton’s personal address being released to the public as a result of the email hack in March 2013. Another Clinton aide, Huma Abedin, told the FBI the archives were created as a reference for a future book.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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