Clinton Aide Huma Abedin’s Classified Emails Released by U.S. State Department

The U.S. State Department has released 2,800 work-related emails from Huma Abedin, a South Asian American Hillary Clinton aide, found on the laptop of her estranged husband, former Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner.

Among the emails that were released, five were classified while many others were heavily redacted. The emails are from the period when Abedin was the Deputy Chief of Staff to Clinton in the State Department.

The emails were released under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group.

The emails on Weiner’s laptop were found during an investigation of an unrelated case. The disgraced former Congressman was convicted of sending lewd messages to a minor, which the Federal Bureau of Investigation was investigating at the time. During the search of the laptop, emails forwarded by Abedin to Weiner, which were classified, were found.

Weiner was given a 21-month jail term for the crime. Abedin filed for divorce in early 2017.

Abedin, who is of Indian and Pakistani descent, was born in 1976 in Kalamazoo, Michigan, to Syed Zainul Abedin and Saleha Mahmood Abedin. Her father was born in New Delhi and her mother in pre-Partition India in what now lies in Pakistan.

The State Department said it “carefully reviews the content of records requested through FOIA to determine whether any information is sensitive or classified…Today’s production will have documents with classified information that has been redacted.”

“This is a major victory,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement on Dec. 29. “After years of hard work in federal court, Judicial Watch has forced the State Department to finally allow Americans to see these public documents. It will be in keeping with our past experience that Abedin’s emails on Weiner’s laptop will include classified and other sensitive materials. That these government docs were on Anthony Weiner’s laptop dramatically illustrates the need for the Justice Department to finally do a serious investigation of Hillary Clinton’s and Huma Abedin’s obvious violations of law.”

Among the classified ones were emails about talks between Hamas, the Palestinian militant movement, and the Palestine Liberation Organization; a call to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; and conversations with the United Arab Emirates’ foreign minister.