Did Huma Commit Perjury?

Today’s bombshell news, of course, is that the FBI has found a substantial number of emails from Hillary Clinton to Huma Abedin on the computer (desktop, I assume) that Huma shared with her husband, Anthony Weiner. The FBI was examining the computer’s hard drive to investigate whether Weiner had conducted a crime by sexting with an underage girl. Imagine the astonishment of a tech guy at the FBI who found, not only Weiner’s illicit texts, but a trove of emails from Hillary Clinton.

I don’t believe the email address that Abedin used on her home computer has been revealed, although Drudge says it is [email protected]. I was curious to know whether Abedin had disclosed this email account in her deposition in the Judicial Watch case that I wrote about here, so I looked it up.

The relevant testimony is on page 29 of the transcript:

Q. Okay. When you were working at the State Department, other than your Clintonemail.com account and your State.gov account, did you have any other e-mail accounts that you used at any point for work-related matters at the State Department?

A. I had a Yahoo e-mail, a Yahoo.com e-mail account that was purely a — a personal account where — that I rarely used. But there were occasions when I forwarded State Department press clips to that account to be printed.

The next question was, “And any other e-mail accounts that you used when you were at the State Department?” To which Abedin answered No. So the newly-discovered account presumably is the yahoo.com account that she briefly described in her deposition.

If it is correct, as a federal official reportedly has said, that the Hillary emails “numbered in the thousands,” Huma’s description of her Yahoo account was misleading at best.

She testified that it was “purely a personal account,” which appears not to be true if she got a large number of emails from her boss there. She claimed it was “rarely used,” which seems inconsistent with exchanging “thousands” of emails with Hillary Clinton.

It is noteworthy that Huma left herself an escape hatch by testifying that on occasion, she would forward a State Department press clip to her Yahoo account to be printed. She left the door slightly ajar by acknowledging that there could be some State Department emails in that account, but made them sound innocuous. Presumably the emails now of concern to the FBI were not merely “press clips.”

In short, while it is certainly premature to charge Huma Abedin with perjury, it does appear that the testimony she gave about her personal account was seriously misleading. She described it in a manner that successfully deflected any serious questioning. Why? Did she merely forget that she had exchanged “thousands” of emails with Hillary on that account, or was there something about those emails that she especially wanted to hide from investigators?

Answers to these questions will come out someday, but it is hard to imagine that we will know them prior to the election.

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