WASHINGTON — New emails reveal that Hillary Clinton’s closest aides had concerns about her email setup and how she was wedded to her BlackBerry — even taking it to the shower.
Both Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills expressed outrage that a political appointee was contacting Clinton directly on her BlackBerry for help in getting placed in the State Department, shortly after Clinton became secretary of state.
“Personally, i think it’s outrageous that staff go straight to her on this stuff,” Abedin wrote Mills on April 3, 2009.
“This is unbelievable,” Mills replied in an email obtained by Citizens United, a conservative group, and shared with The Post, “and she also should not be giving her email to everyone — b/c she will get stuff like this.”
“Its a long story,” Abedin answered. “She’s not giving her new email to people. People who email her old senate address are still being forwarded to new address. Most of her senate staff had access to that address.”
Abedin said she was hoping “Justin” could fix the problem — presumably Justin Cooper, the Bill Clinton aide who is the registered administrator of Clinton’s private home email server.
But Abedin had trouble prying the BlackBerry away from Clinton.
“I need her berry and she takes that thing to every bilat [bilateral meeting], to the shower, so hard to get my hands on that thing,” Abedin told Mills.
“This made me laugh out loud — especially the shower part,” Mills replied.
The email exchange is part of hundreds of new Clinton Foundation and State Department emails produced to Citizens United from a public records lawsuit.
The “berry” exchange was first reported by the Daily Caller.
Another email exchange showed Abedin was concerned about cybersecurity when Clinton arrived in Russia in October 2009.
“Want to make sure DC is aware that those of us in the Russia traveling party will be leaving blackberries on the airplane once we touch down in moscow tonite,” Abedin emailed State Department staffers on Oct. 12, 2009. “Lew is getting us local cell phones and ops will have numbers.”
Jack Lew was then a deputy secretary of state.
‘I need her berry and she takes that thing to every bilat [bilateral meeting], to the shower, so hard to get my hands on that thing.’
- Huma Abedin wrote in an email about Clinton's BlackBerry
Minutes after emailing the official staff, Adedin forwarded the note to the Clintons’ personal addresses and foundation staff in another example of how Abedin was often the middleman between Clinton-affiliated entities.
“FYI for tues and wed. We won’t have berries in russia,” Abedin wrote to top Clinton Foundation official Doug Band; Oscar Flores, operations manager of the Clintons’ Chappaqua home; Jon Davidson, Bill Clinton’s deputy chief of staff; Hannah Richert, a director at the Clinton Presidential Center; and Cooper, a close aide to Bill Clinton who registered the private server that has been the source of Clinton’s email controversy.
“Are they taking them from u. Bc ur clintonemail.com shld work,” Cooper replied.
“Its for security reasons,” Abedin said. “I don’t want to use that one either.”
Clinton said she turned over printouts of all her work-related emails to the State Department — some 30,000 in total.
She said she deleted another 30,000 or so deemed personal.
But during the course of the FBI investigation into classified material on her private server, some 15,000 work emails were discovered that will begin to be made public next month.
News outlets and conservative groups, such as Judicial Watch and Citizens United, have also gained access to Clinton public records through federal records lawsuits.
“These newly disclosed Hillary Clinton emails — that are clearly work-related — give us a sense of what might be in the 15,000 emails the FBI discovered that will be released in September,” Citizens United president David Bossie told The Post. “The American people want to know how many of these emails are related to Clinton Foundation business.”