State Dept: Hillary Never Given Official Gov’t Blackberry

hillary clinton sunglasses blackberry Kevin Lamarque AP
Kevin Lamarque AP
The State Department never issued Hillary Clinton an official and more secure government blackberry when she was Secretary of State, according to department spokesperson Jen Psaki.
“Secretary Clinton… was not issued a State Department BlackBerry,” Psaki reportedly said at Thursday’s media briefing.
As Politico noted, that means the blackberry Clinton is seen using in the viral photo of her on a U.S. military aircraft en route to Libya was not a government device.
Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), who chairs the House Select Benghazi committee, said there were more questions concerning that Libya trip. Saying there were “huge gaps” in the Clinton emails, Gowdy said the committee had not received any Clinton emails from that day even though Clinton was photographed on her blackberry.
“There are gaps of months and months and months. And if you think to that iconic picture of her on a C-17 flying to Libya, she has sunglasses on and she has her handheld device in her hand, we have no e-mails from that day. In fact, we have no e-mails from that trip, Gowdy said on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. “So, it’s strange credibility to believe that if you’re on your way to Libya to discuss Libyan policy that there’s not a single document that has been turned over to Congress. So, there are huge gaps. And with respect to the president, it’s not up to Secretary Clinton to decide what is a public record and what’s not.”
Clinton has come under fire after she admitted on Tuesday that she deleted nearly 30,000 emails that she alone deemed to be “personal” and vowed that her email server would remain private.  She reportedly deleted more than 30,000 of her “personal” emails from her time as Secretary of State without having read any of them.
In fact, the emails were deemed “personal” without anyone having first reviewed them.
According to a Time report, the email review that Clinton’s team conducted after being asked by the State Department to do so “did not involve opening and reading each email; instead, Clinton’s lawyers created a list of names and keywords related to her work and searched for those.”
At her United Nations press conference when she first addressed the scandal this week, Clinton claimed she deleted “emails about planning Chelsea’s wedding or my mother’s funeral arrangements, condolence notes to friends as well as yoga routines, family vacations, the other things you typically find in inboxes.”
But Clinton’s staff reportedly “disclosed that no one actually read through” the emails before Clinton deleted them.
The 31,830 emails that “did not contain any of the search terms” were, as Time noted, considered “private, personal records” and deleted en masse.

COMMENTS

Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.