Judicial Watch, a private, non-profit, extremely conservative organization may be well to right of many Progressives, but one thing is for sure: they are bipartisan in their exposure of corruption. As many may know, Judicial Watch which has filed dozens of Freedom of Information Acts (FOIA) against the state department and Hillary Clinton, has been granted the ability to conduct civil depositions under oath by top Clinton aides as well as Clinton herself. Two Federal judges, Lambeth and Sullivan, one a Republican appointee and the other a Democratic appointee, have both been totally disgusted with the conduct of the State Department and HRC in their collusion to obstruct FOIA inquiries.

Judicial Watch (JW) has published a schedule of email gate depositions.

First on the firing line Lewis A. Lukens, (LL), deputy assistant secretary of state and executive director of the State Department’s Executive Secretariat from 2008 to 2011, who emailed with Patrick Kennedy and Cheryl Mills about setting up a computer for Clinton to check her clintonemail.com email account..

The full deposition transcript can be obtained at the JW website. Lewis A. Lukens depo

This posting will be lengthy because most of us are ignorant of the State Departments bureaucracy. The following are excerpts of the deposition

Statement of inquiry's purpose:

questions surrounding the creation, purpose, and use of the Clintonemail.com system by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and one of her deputies, the Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin, a system they used to conduct official government business.

Page 10:

you were deputy executive secretary at the State Department, and executive director...
was between 2008 and 2011.

(pages 10-11): The Office of the executive Secretariat facilitates the functioning of the bureaucracy for the Secretary of State (SOS)

Page 12:

there are four deputy executive secretaries. Three of them focus mostly on policy and paperwork, and my role was logistics and management support. So I had the same sort of title, rank, as the other deputies, but my function was quite different

Different departments reported to Mr. Lukens: 1) bureau security, 2) human resources, 3) general services, 4) communications.

Pages 13-14:

a separate department within the executive secretariat was responsible for...correspondence and records unit, that was at the time headed by ...Clarence Finney.

Within Mr. Lukens purview was the Information Resource Management (IRM) whose director reported directly to Mr. Lukens.
The bureaucracy thickens:

The role of our IRM office was to liaise with the State Department's bigger IRM office to ensure that the State Department leadership and their staff had the communications tools that they needed to do their jobs.

This is confusing stuff here, reading which made me feel like a mouse running through a maze to find some sequestered cheese.

Once Hillary Clinton was sworn in on January 21, 2009, Mr. Lukens had

Discussions about office space, computer equipment, how they show up the first day, and do they need badges. Basic logistics...with Cheryl Mills.

Pages 19-20: there was no discussion with Cheryl Mills about computer equipment. Mr. Lukens did not know if there was any residual computer equipment left over from Condoleeza Rice's office when Clinton occupied Rice's office space.

Page 21: Mr Lukens Lukens states that during the Rice-Clinton transition, Cheryl Mills never discussed with him about Mrs. Clinton having a computer in her office.

Mr. Lukens' IRM people were

in charge of setting up e-mail accounts for incoming employees or incoming secretaries and employees within the Office of the Secretary

Q Do you know if Mrs. Clinton -- if the IRM office set up an e-mail address for Mrs. Clinton?
A I don't believe they did.
Q Do you know why they didn't?
A I don't think it was asked for.
Q Would Mrs. Clinton have -- was it required for Mrs. Clinton to ask for an e-mail address for one to be assigned to her?
A Yes.

Q Do you know if any other employees within the Office of the Secretary was not assigned an e-mail address?
A Not that I'm aware of.

Mr. Lukens neither sent nor received emails from secretary Clinton during the two years he as at the executive secretariat.
Referring to a conversation Mr. Lukens had with Cheryl Mills:

A Yeah. So the crux of the issue was that BlackBerrys and iPhones are not allowed in the Secretary's office suite, so the question was, how is the Secretary going to be able to check her e-mails if she's not able to have the BlackBerry at her desk with her.
Q And so what did you -- did you propose a solution at that point?
A So my proposal was to set up a computer on her desk, a standalone computer, for her to be able to access the Internet to check her e-mails.

An email sent to Dan Smith, Lukens' predecessor at the Secretariat,

was the first e-mail concerning setting up a computer in the counselor office

The counselor in question was Cheryl Mills.

Q After your conversation with Ms. Mills, Ms. Mills e-mailed you, and it talks about -- I'm sorry, the quality of the e-mail is a little difficult to read, but it says: "Let's set up the office across the hall for her to use. It needs a phone, et cetera, so she can go across the hall to check her BB," her BlackBerry. You mentioned that you talked about setting up a computer in her office. Do you know why Ms. Mills seemed to prefer having the computer set up in the office across the hall?
A This wasn't for a computer setup, this was to create a space for her to go check her BlackBerry.... The Secretary's office is in a SCIF, which encompasses a lot more of the seventh floor.
Q Okay. And the office that's across the hall is outside that area?
A Correct...SCIF stands for...Secure compartmentalized information facility.

Lukens goes on to explain that SCIFs exist for security reasons, in which various wireless devices are prohibited. Under Secretary for Management, Patrick Kennedy was responsible for ALL (emphasis mine) management operations at Dept. of State (DOS).
Referring to an email between Lukens and Kennedy

In this e-mail you [Lukens] wrote: "Also think we should go ahead, but will await your green light, and set up a standalone PC in the Secretary's office connected to the Internet, but not through our system, to enable her to check her e-mails from her desk."

In response to which question, Mr. Lukens replied in the affirmative. He adds that at that time it was possible for a computer to be connected to the internet without going through DOS security system by using a hard-wired telephone line.

Page 32:

Q Do you know how other computers within the office of the -- for employees within the Office of the Secretary were set up?
A Not specifically, no.
Q Do you know if this setup would have been any different from the setup of other employees?
A Yes, this would have been different.
Q How would it have been different?
A My understanding is that most of the employees' computers in the State Department are connected through the State Department's OpenNet e-mail system, Internet system.
Q So this one would have been separate from the OpenNet system?
A Correct.

The reason Mr. Lukens proposed a standalone PC was that it "would be easier" for her to log onto the internet because fewer passwords would be required. A State.gov email address would have been needed to access the OpenNet system. The full internet was available by using the OpenNet-using computers, although firewalls to certain sites were probably in place. Mr. Lukens used OpenNet in his daily work. There was only one password which needed to be changed frequently.

Page 36: The standalone PC which Mr. Lukens proposed for HRC's use would have required no password and be usable without any security features. The computer which Mr. Lukens proposed was never set up, though he didn't know why. In an email from Mr. Lukens to Patrick Kennedy, Lukens noted that:

"I talked to Cheryl about this. She says the problem is HRC does not know how to use a computer to do e-mail, only BB. But I said would not take much training to get her up to speed."

Talk about computer illiteracy! Is this the person we want in charge of our country during this age of speed-of-light information transfer? Evidently she never got up "to speed".

Pages 38-39: at no time did Mr. Lukens believe that HRC was using a state.gov email account.

Mr. Lukens was unaware of Clinton's email address in the two years of his service there, only discovering this in the press in 2015. However Huma Abedin (HA) was set up with a state.gov email address, although Mr. Lukens was unaware that HA used a non-state.gov email account to conduct official business. LL was aware that HA did send him emails from a non-state.gov email account.

Initially in the deposition LL stated that during his 27 years at State, was never instructed on the FOIA or the Federal Records Act, however at the conclusion of the deposition he admits to having a single FOIA briefing when he first joined DOS in 1989. LL routinely deleted emails from his inbox "to make space" on the assumption that DOS preserved records independent of whether an employee deletes or not. He doesn't recall what information led him to that belief. He was also unaware the HRC was using email to conduct official government business. LL had very infrequent contact with HRC.

Principal Officers Electronic Messaging System (POEMS)

is the classified computer system that operates in support of the Secretary and under secretaries and the other folks that we took care of in this office

An email from Christopher Butzgy, IT specialist in the IRM, sent to "H" stated:

"I work as a help desk analyst and it has come to my attention that one of our customers has been receiving permanent fatal errors from this address. Can you please confirm if you receive this

Further questions to LL:

Q We can start with this job, this position. Do you recall if you ever used a non-state.gov e-mail account to conduct official government business while you were executive director?
A Yes.
Q Under what circumstances?
A Most often if I had to print something and we were overseas on a trip, I would send it to my personal e-mail address... You couldn't print from a BlackBerry overseas.

LL, and others, could set up desktop computers away from the State Dept but couldn't print from them:

there is a way to access state.gov through the Internet through a more rigorous logon system that requires a token and password that changes frequently, et cetera. But typically the computers -- when you log on that way, you're unable to print.

But LL and others at DOS could print from personal email accounts; however the bulk of the emails were done on the state.gov account. LL was unaware of any of his co-workers having a clintonemail.com email address. LL left the executive director's position June, 2011, after which he reported to Stephen Mull.

Quoting from an email sent by Mr. Mull, the deposed reads from an email:

Mr. Mull stated: "Separately, we are working to provide the Secretary, per her request, a department-issued BlackBerry to replace her personal unit which is malfunctioning, possibly because of her personal e-mail server is down. We will prepare two versions for her to use, one with an operating State Department e-mail account which would mask her identity but which would also be subject to FOIA requests, and another which would just have phone and Internet capability. We're working with Monica [Hanley] to hammer out the details of what will best meet the Secretary's needs."

LL never processed or received FOIA requests; those would have been the responsibility of Clarence Finney of the correspondence and records unit.

LL went on to be ambassador to Senegal.

LL never knew Bryan Pagliano but learned years later though the press that he was a Schedule C IT consultant. When traveling with HRC--only internationally--amounting to several times monthly, LL would observe HRC holding a Blackberry. The person who would have given HRC a DOS BlackBerry would have been from the executive secretary's IRM. If that BlackBerry was DOS-issued, HRC would not have been able to use it from her office and he never saw her use a BlackBerry in her office.

Q If she were to be authorized to use her BlackBerry in the office, where would that authorization come from, or approval come from?
A It would have come from Diplomatic Security.
Q And do you recall who the head of that office was at that time?
A The Assistant Secretary For Diplomatic Security at that time was Eric Boswell.
Q And who would Mr. Boswell have reported to?
A He would have reported to Pat Kennedy, to the under secretary for management.

LL did have a DOS-issued Blackberry. Emails between LL and HA would have involved his BlackBerry or desktop. DOS employees could access state.gov accounts on board planes via laptop. LL knew that HA had two BlackBerrys, one of which was DOS-issued. LL also observed HA using two BlackBerrys simultaneously. LL's main contact at DOS was HA.

Page 80: LL observed HRC standing just outside the SCIF using her BlackBerry about 6 times. (Don't you just love all these acronyms?)

Questioning by DOS counsel:

Q So can I direct your attention to later on in the e-mail chain, page 1, the very last e-mail that's fully on the page is from Patrick Kennedy to you. And it looks -- oh, you and Cheryl Mills. And it says: "Cheryl, the standalone separate network PC is on on [sic] great idea. Regards, Pat."...
Q And so the standalone computer that you were proposing to allow her to check e-mail, was that for her to stay in touch with family and friends or for work purposes?
A My understanding was family and friends.

After explaining to JW counsel that LL's understanding regarding HRC's stand alone computer was to be used for family and friends, the interchange continues:

Q At any point did Mr. Kennedy, Ms. Mills, Ms. Abedin ask you to provide Mrs. Clinton with a computer to conduct official government business?
A Not that I recall, no....
Q Did you ever have a conversation with anyone about whether she was going to use that equipment to conduct official government business?
A Not that I recall.