WASHINGTON—Former aide Justin Cooper said in a Judicial Watchdeposition created on March 19 and made public on June 18 that he worked with Huma Abedin in 2009 to set up the unsecured private email account used by the former secretary of state to conduct official U.S. diplomatic business.
Cooper’s statement contradicts Abedin’s claim in a 2016 deposition by the non-profit government watchdog that she only learned about the private email setup 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, one of Hillary Clinton’s closest aides, was deputy chief of staff throughout Clinton’s tenure as the United States’ chief diplomat and continued with her during the Democratic candidate’s unsuccessful presidential campaign in 2016.
Asked if the Cooper deposition represents additional legal problems for Abedin, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton told The Epoch Times on June 18 that “the legal liabilities never went away, so it’s a matter of political will by the Justice Department. … The leadership is going to have to step up to move forward on any of this.”
Cooper, who was an adviser to President Bill Clinton, also said that a week before his deposition, he spoke with Cheryl Mills, the attorney who served as Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff at the State Department and represented her legally during the FBI’s investigation of the email server. Mills accompanied Hillary Clinton when she was interviewed by the FBI.
Mills is especially controversial because U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Royce Lamberth said in a related case that he “was actually dumbfounded when I found out, in reading that report, that Cheryl Mills had been given immunity because … I had myself found that Cheryl Mills had committed perjury and lied under oath in a published opinion I had issued in a Judicial Watch case, where I found her unworthy of belief, and I was quite shocked to find out she had been given immunity in, by the DOJ [Department of Justice] in the Hillary Clinton email case.”
