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Clinton regularly pumped those around her for help with her devices-even those, as her long-time aide Philippe Reines joked to the FBI, whose job had “zero percent” of their responsibilities focused on IT.
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She has, according to multiple aides, never even learned how to use a desktop computer. Whereas President Barack Obama has long publicly cultivated his geek persona, embracing new technologies, trying new tools and generally trying to prove his tech savvy, Hillary Clinton comes across in the FBI interviews as a disengaged tech user who sees the communication tools as little more than a means to an end.
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There’s scant oversight of the way Clinton communicated, and little thought given to how her files might be preserved for posterity-MacBook laptops with outdated archives are FedExed across the country, cutting-edge iPads are discarded quickly and BlackBerry devices are rejected for being “too heavy” as staff scrambled to cater to Clinton’s whims. Reading the FBI’s interviews, Clinton’s team hardly seems organized enough to mount any sort of sinister cover-up. 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. 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. They may be as close to the actual truth as we may ever get.
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While the interviews were not technically conducted “under oath” - lying to federal agents is itself a crime, as is obstruction of justice - they do open a uniquely candid window into how the decisions around Hillary Clinton’s email server unfolded. The FBI interviewed both those who supported her and those who questioned her decisions, as well as plenty of disinterested public servants who had no allegiance or beef with her either way.
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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. 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. Then, last Friday, 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.
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