Hillary Clinton’s Lawyer Changes Story on When She Learned About Email Abuse
Attorney gave the FBI and Judicial Watch conflicting stories
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Hillary Clinton’s personal attorney had given conflicting reports on when she learned about the former secretary of state using a private email system to conduct official U.S. diplomatic business.
Heather Samuelson gave the FBI and Judicial Watch stories which did not match up, as timelines conflicted with each other.
During a June 13, 2019, deposition, Samuelson told Judicial Watch lawyers:
“I believe I first became aware when either she e-mailed me on personal matters, such as wishing me happy birthday, or when I infrequently would receive e-mails forwarded to me from others at the department that had that e-mail address listed elsewhere in the document,” she said.
At the time, Samuelson worked in the Department of State’s liaison office to Obama’s White House, Judicial Watch reported.
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In 2016, Samuelson told the FBI that she didn't learn about Hillary's email system until she became her personal attorney in 2014, after serving as the White House counsel’s office for a year.
The conversation from 2016 was a crucial part of the bureau’s highly controversial investigation into Hillary's private email system, which ended in hen-FBI Director James Comey announcing he would not recommend prosecution of the former chief diplomat.
Clinton had used the private email system which was on a server located in the New York mansion throughout her tenure as the top U.S. diplomat, from 2009 to 2013.
Judicial Watch then released a transcript on June 28.
The Samuelson deposition is the latest in a slew of depositions by Judicial Watch of senior Clinton aides that were ordered Dec. 6, 2018, by U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth.
Lamberth said of Clinton’s private email system as “one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency."
He then ordered Samuelson other former Clinton aides to answer Judicial Watch’s questions.
“After Clinton left office, Samuelson worked for a year in the office of the White House Counsel before becoming Clinton’s personal attorney” Judicial Watch said.
“She was primarily responsible for conducting the review of Clinton emails and sorting out ‘personal’ emails from government emails, which were returned to the State Department under the direction of [former Clinton Chief of Staff] Cheryl Mills and [another] Clinton lawyer, David Kendall,” the Judicial Watch statement said.
“After the emails were returned to State, Clinton deleted the rest of the ‘personal’ emails from her server, wiping it clean. Samuelson conducted the review of emails on her laptop, using Clinton server files downloaded from Platte River Networks, which housed the Clinton email server,” the statement continued.
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According to The Epoch times: Samuelson’s contradiction of her prior statement to the FBI is significant because she also told Judicial Watch that she had been granted by the Department of Justice (DOJ) what she described as “limited production immunity” in June 2016.
It isn’t known whether the DOJ’s grant of immunity insulated Samuelson against whatever legal obligation she may have had while working in the White House or the State Department to disclose to law enforcement officials her knowledge that Clinton wasn’t using a secured U.S. government communications system to conduct official diplomatic business.
Gohmert said the Chinese “actually hacked Hillary Clinton’s personal server—as our intel community established without any question—even though the FBI refused to ever examine the evidence.”
A forensic analysis of Clinton’s emails conducted by the intelligence community inspector general (ICIG) had determined that a copy of virtually every email from Clinton’s server was sent to an unauthorized source, Gohmert said.
Dozens of highly classified documents were sent to and from Clinton on her private email system when she was secretary of state.
Samuelson is the second former Clinton associate to be found in the Judicial Watch depositions to have told the FBI one thing in 2016, only to have it contradicted in 2019.
Former Clinton State Department aide Justin Cooper told Judicial Watch in a deposition released earlier this year that he worked with the secretary’s then-deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin in setting up the private email system.
Cooper’s claim contradicted Abedin’s previous claim in a 2016 deposition by Judicial Watch that she only discovered the private email system in 2015 by “reading in some news articles about a year, a year-and-a-half ago, when it was—it was being publicly discussed.”
Abedin was deputy chief of staff throughout Clinton’s tenure at the State Department and then worked for her throughout her primary and general election campaign for president in 2016.
“The news that the Obama DOJ gave immunity to Heather Samuelson, Hillary Clinton’s lawyer responsible for the infamous deletion of 33,000 emails, further confirms the sham FBI/DOJ investigation of the Clinton email scandal,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said.
“And it is curious that Ms. Samuelson changed her story about what she knew and when about the Clinton email system. Attorney General William Barr can’t reopen the Clinton email investigation fast enough,” Fitton added.
