Saturday, June 4, 2016

Cheryl Mills said 'I don't remember' 34 times in Clinton email deposition and Benghazi House testimony

Longtime Hillary Clinton aide, Cheryl D. Mills - who served as Counselor and Chief of Staff to the former Secretary of State from January 21, 2009 to February 1, 2013 - said "I don't remember" 34 times while testifying about two key scandals.

On May 27, 2016, Mills was deposed in regards to the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:13-cv-01363), concerning the use of non-government emails. According to the transcript, Mills said "I don't remember" nine times. She also said she didn't "recall" or "recollect" when questioned a number of times during the deposition.

"Cheryl Mills’ handling of a now-forgotten email scandal that unfolded during the Bill Clinton White House era was 'loathsome' and 'totally inadequate' a federal judge wrote in a scathing opinion in a 2008 lawsuit, Chuck Ross reported for Daily Caller on June 1, 2016.

Mills claimed she couldn't recollect even testifying during the 2008 trial based on an earlier lawsuit by Judicial Watch over 1.8 million emails that went missing during former President Bill Clinton's administration.

After being asked if she recalled speaking to the State Department in December of 2008 or January of 2009 about the usage of "devices to communicate via e-mail," Mills said she didn't remember, but "imagined it would have occurred close in time to when we were onboarding."

"Probably just weren't significant in my mind," Mills claimed.

Mills also testified that she couldn't remember if she had to request for a State Department email account to be created for herself and if there was an email "within the Secretary's office" regarding Clinton's switch from an AT&T account to the unsecured personal server.

Although Mills recalled that an assistant gave support for "six, seven, eight months" she apologized that she couldn't remember her name. "And not because she didn't do a great job," Mills added.

Dennis McDonough was appointed to the National Security Council after President Obama's election before becoming Deputy National Security Advisor on October 22, 2010, but Mills couldn't "remember if he came into the government first with the President and then left or if he came in later and then..." nor could she recall "what his title was or what his capacity was."

Mills also couldn't remember if Hillary Clinton's former Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin, who now serves as the vice chair for the 2016 presidential campaign ever discussed having email troubles during Hurricane Sandy, which occurred in late October of 2012, or even if the department's servers were down "during that time period or not."

Finally, Mills said it was "odd" that she couldn't recall sending a test email to Clinton due to "issues receiving" them. She said, "Obviously I sent her an e-mail that says Test, but I don't have a recollection of it."

During her September 3, 2015 testimony before the U.S. House of Representative Select Committee on Benghazi, Mills used the phrase "I don't remember" twenty-five times, according to the transcript.

In both testimonies, most of the things Mills says she didn't remember were common knowledge, reported widely by the media, or answers to questions she presumably would have been prepped by her lawyers upon.

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