Both an Apple laptop and a thumb drive containing a 2013 archive of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails was lost after being put in the mail and never provided to the FBI according to the agency’s documentation of it’s investigation into Clinton’s mishandling of classified information.
Justin Cooper, longtime aide to former President Bill Clinton, provided the laptop from the Clinton Foundation to former Clinton aide Monica Hanley for archiving Clinton’s emails according to the FBI documentation. Cooper assisted Hanley in archiving the emails from the Magliano Server to the laptop and a thumb drive in spring 2013. The two devices were supposed to go to Clinton’s Chappaqua and Whitehaven residences, but Hanley forgot to give them to Clinton’s staff.
Hanley had made the transfer of emails to the two devices from her home and that is where they remained until she found the laptop again in early 2014. She worked with an undisclosed person to get the laptop to PRN (Platte River Networks), shipping the laptop in February 2014 after an attempt to transfer them remotely failed. FBI documents redact the identity of the person whose residence the laptop was sent to.
This time the laptop made it to its destination and the entirety of the Clinton email archive was transferred first to a “personal Google e-mail (Gmail) address he created.” The email content was then downloaded to the mailbox “MRC Archive” on the PRN server according to the FBI.
A person whose name was redacted in the FBI documentation told the agency that after the email archive was transferred, the emails were deleted, but he “did not wipe the laptop.” The person further told the FBI that, on Hanley’s instruction, he shipped the laptop using either the “United States Postal Service or United Parcel Service to [redacted] who was Clinton’s [redacted] at the time.”
FBI documentation then states, “[redacted] told the FBI that she never received the laptop from [redacted] however, she advised that 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. Neither Hanley nor [redacted] could identify the current whereabouts of the Archive Laptop or thumb drive containing the archive, and the FBI does not have either item in its possession.”
Of the 13 mobile devices determined by the FBI to be associated with the clinton.com email address and requested by the Department of Justice (DOJ), none were provided. DOJ made the request to Clinton legal counsel Williams & Connolly on February 9,2016 and received a reply back on February 22 that they could not locate any of the devices. The FBI was thus unable to investigate the contents of them.
Of five iPads the FBI identified as associated with Clinton, just three were obtained by the agency according to the FBI documentation.
Follow Michelle Moons on Twitter @MichelleDiana
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