the FBI released the final batch of what amount to nearly 250 pages of interview notes and reports collected during the course of its investigation. Agents interviewed officials ranging from former Secretary of State Colin Powell to CIA officers to the IT staffer who first rented a minivan to drive the server from Washington to the Clintons’ home in New York. The files also include the FBI’s forensic investigative process and never-before-seen details of the staff decisions that led to the server, the mechanics of Clinton’s email system, and the confusing and balky State Department processes that led a technophobic Clinton to embrace her own BlackBerry.
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The interviews—taken together and reconstructed for this article into the first-ever comprehensive narrative of how her email server scandal unfolded—draw a picture of the controversy quite different from what either side has made it out to be. Together, the documents, technically known as Form 302s, depict less a sinister and carefully calculated effort to avoid transparency than a busy and uninterested executive who shows little comfort with even the basics of technology, working with a small, harried inner circle of aides inside a bureaucracy where the IT and classification systems haven’t caught up with how business is conducted in the digital age.
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Hillary Clinton, after all, didn’t know how to use a desktop computer. A BlackBerry was her lifeline. As Cheryl Mills told FBI agents later, “Clinton was not computer savvy and thus was not accustomed to using a computer, so efforts were made to try to figure out a system that would allow Clinton to operate as she did before DoS.”
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Lewis Lukens, the department’s deputy assistant secretary for the Executive Secretariat—the unit that oversaw the logistics for State’s leadership—sent an email asking about the possibility of setting up a “living room” outside the office’s secure area where the new secretary could check her email. There was a model for this; something similar had been done for Colin Powell.
Instead, after much back and forth and various proposals, the solution turned out to be a simple one. During her tenure as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton—who was known to her security detail by the code name Evergreen—would deposit her BlackBerry into a desk drawer at the Diplomatic Security station outside her office when she arrived on the seventh floor. The practice of leaving the BlackBerry at the guard station, known as Post-1, was technically a security violation—the desk was considered inside the Mahogany Row secure area—but it seemed to those involved an appropriate compromise. To use it, she’d leave her office and wander, often visiting State’s eighth-floor balcony.
In the days after she was sworn in, Hillary Clinton also contacted her predecessor, Colin Powell, to ask how he had managed his information flow as secretary of state from 2001 to 2005. In his early weeks, Powell recalled, he’d “received several security briefings that restricted his ability to communicate.” He’d questioned the NSA and CIA on “why PDAs were anymore of a risk than the television remote controls.” He never got a convincing answer. And so, he advised Hillary Clinton “to resist restrictions that would inhibit her ability to communicate.” But he told her to choose wisely and not to create an unnecessary paper trail. He said if it became “public” that Clinton had a BlackBerry and she used it to “do business,” her emails could become “official record and subject to the law.” As Powell said: “Be very careful. I got around it all by not saying much and not using systems that captured the data.”
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Meanwhile, State Department IT and security teams were busy installing secure rooms in her two homes for reading and receiving material and conducting telephone conversations. Each house had its own SCIF. At Whitehaven—her brick Georgian-style house in northwest Washington—a State Department worker removed one of the regular doors on a third-floor room of the house, replaced it with a metal door secured by a key code lock, and outfitted the room inside with secure communications. A similar room was created at Chappaqua; while she rarely used the secure room at Whitehaven —preferring to just go into the office if she had work to do—she relied heavily on the one in Chappaqua when she was in New York, in part because cellphone coverage in the area was so poor that she needed the use of the SCIF’s phone.
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By March of 2009, Bryan Pagliano—who ultimately joined the State Department himself, working on IT programs related to mobile computing, teleworking and Bluetooth security vulnerabilities—had assembled all the components for the Clinton email server.
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Hillary Clinton, for her part, proved remarkably uninterested and unfamiliar with new technology. By time she moved into Foggy Bottom, much of the world had jumped aboard the iPhone bandwagon, but Clinton would cling stubbornly to her BlackBerry, even as the once-ubiquitous Washington icon slid toward tech oblivion.
According to Abedin, “It was not uncommon for Clinton to use a new BlackBerry for a few days and then immediately switch it out for an older version with which she was more familiar.” She deemed one upgraded BlackBerry “too heavy.” That personal preference proved challenging because she churned through devices at a steady clip—all told, the FBI figured that she’d used around a dozen BlackBerrys during her tenure at the State Department. While she never reported losing a BlackBerry, Clinton replaced one after she spilled coffee on it, another because its trackball started to fail slowly over time, and another when its screen cracked.
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Her preference for a personal email account was not technically against the rules. At State, FBI agents later found, there was “no restriction on use of personal email accounts for official business,” but employees were cautioned about security and records retention concerns. The State Department told employees that they should forward such emails to their official accounts for recordkeeping purposes. “There were no rules in place that specifically denied Secretary Clinton the use of her private network,” but, according to the State Department IG Steve Linick, private email was “highly discouraged.”
Officially “discouraged,” sure, but according to many that the FBI interviewed, the State Department’s culture uniquely embraced—and its poor information systems actively seemed to encourage—employees turning to private emails to conduct business.
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As the FBI report concluded, “DoS does not have a restriction on the use of personal email accounts for official business. Personal email accounts are often used by individuals in the field who were not issued an official DoS mobile device, or who do not have the time or means to remotely log into the DoS system. Employees are not required to notify DoS that they are using a personal account for official business and there is no mechanism to track who is using a personal email.”
