You remember Bryan Pagliano, pictured above, the guy who ran Hillary’s IT during her 2008 presidential campaign. After Obama tossed Hillary the job of secretary of state, Hillary had Pagliano hired by the State Department. She also had him continue to administer her private server, supposedly paying him on the side for the help.
Taking the Fifth
In addition to everything else swirling in the cesspool of that email server, there are also questions about whether or not whether the State Department spent taxpayer money to manage Hillary’s email server. See, Pagliano was working for both State as a government employee and Hillary as a private employee at the same time. One wonders if he always kept the two tasks fully separate, and of course what a government employee was doing working privately for the Clintons at the same time.
When asked back in September to provide testimony to Congress, Pagliano refused, asserting his Fifth Amendment rights.
Now things have changed.
Getting Immunity
The Justice Department has granted immunity to the former State Department staffer, who worked on Hillary Clinton’s private email server, as part of a criminal investigation into the possible mishandling of classified information, according to a senior law enforcement official.
The official said the FBI had secured the cooperation of Bryan Pagliano, who worked on Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign before setting up the server in her New York home in 2009.
What Pagliano Likely Knows
Bryan Pagliano can shed light on several issues:
- Pagliano’s dual role as government employee and Clinton employee opens a whole new arena for investigation against Clinton, similar to the one already ongoing with aide Huma Abedin, who at one point worked simultaneously for the State Department, the Clinton Foundation, Hillary herself and a private company closely tied to the Clintons.
- While at State, what was Pagliano’s day-to-day job? What did he really do, not just his job description, but is actual work accomplishments? Is there a paper trail showing he did any actual work at all, or was the State “job” just a make-work position to get him on the payroll as a gift in return for his service to Clinton?
- He listed on LinkedIn his political-appointee position as “Serve as strategic advisor and special projects manager to the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) / Deputy Chief Information Officer (DCIO) overseeing the operations of the Information Resource Management (IRM) bureau.” Employed at such a high level inside State’s IT structure assures that State’s most senior information officers knew about Clinton’s email setup, and apparently did not or were not able to stop it. Unless Brian never told his supervisor about his other job.
- What was going on inside the State Department vis-a-vis the email server. Who knew about it? When did they know? Was it ever vetted/approved, and if so, by whom? Were objections raised by security personnel and how were those objections dealt with? Who is on the complete list of people who had email addresses on the server? What discussions took place inside State regarding the presence of classified information on the server? Were objections ever raised from outside State, say from the White House or the intelligence community?
- Pagliano can also speak to what security measures if any were in place on Clinton’s server, and when were they instituted. He had visibility into server logs, showing any attacks or penetrations into the server.
- Pagliano, as a State Department employee, had access to the State Department computer systems. He currently works as a computer contractor for State, and still has access to State Department computer systems. Has he ever been asked by Clinton to use his positions to gain information she would ordinarily not have access to, or to which she did not want her name attached?
- Pagliano may have knowledge of where any backups of the server are, shedding light on what emails were deleted by Clinton before her “full disclosure” of what was in fact a highly curated batch of documents.
There is a lot to learn from Bryan Pagliano. His testimony could be like when the Feds turn a Mafia accountant, a low-level guy with access to the family jewels.
BONUS: The State Department’s Chief Information Officer, who should have stopped the Clinton email server? Well, well, she retired from State a few months before Hillary left, into a nice job at the IMF. It pays to be a winner!
Peter Van Buren blew the whistle on State Department waste and mismanagement during Iraqi reconstruction in his first book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. His latest book is Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99 Percent. Reprinted from the his blog with permission.