Hillary Clinton often asked her maid to print out sensitive government emails and documents, including ones that contained classified material, at her Washington, D.C. residence during her tenure as secretary of state.
Marina Santos was not only entrusted with taking care of Clinton's residence, known as Whitehaven, but the Filipino immigrant was also expected to handle state secrets, adding fuel to the fire of those skeptical of Clinton's handling of classified information with her private email server, the New York Post reported Sunday.
Clinton would first receive highly sensitive emails from top aides at the State Department and then request that they, in turn, forward the messages and any attached documents to Santos to print out for her at the home.
Among other things, Clinton requested that Santos print out drafts of her speeches, confidential memos, and "call sheets"–background information and talking points prepared for the secretary of state in advance of a phone call with a foreign head of state.
"Pls ask Marina to print for me in am," Clinton emailed top aide Huma Abedin regarding a redacted 2011 message marked sensitive but unclassified.
Two classified emails from 2012 that were marked "confidential," the classification level below "secret," referenced Santos printing them out.
In a classified 2012 email dealing with the new president of Malawi, another Clinton aide, Monica Hanley, advised Clinton, "We can ask Marina to print this."
"Revisions to the Iran points" was the subject line of a classified April 2012 email to Clinton from Hanley. In it, the text reads, "Marina is trying to print for you."
Santos also had access to a highly secure room at Clinton's residence called an SCIF, or sensitive compartmented information facility, which was set up by diplomatic security agents. FBI notes revealed that Santos, who had no security clearance, collected documents from Clinton's secure facsimile machine. Santos had access to Clinton's Presidential Daily Brief, which was a top-secret document prepared by U.S. intelligence agencies including the CIA, the FBI noted.
According to the Post, the FBI never asked Clinton to turn over the iMac that Santos used during its year-long investigation into Clinton's private email server, nor did the bureau request access to her printer or the printouts themselves. The Post also reported that the FBI did not appear to formally interview Santos as a key witness in the investigation.
This is a major oversight: Santos may know the whereabouts of a missing Apple MacBook laptop and USB flash drive that contain all of Clinton's emails archived over her four years in office.
In 2013, Hanley downloaded Clinton's emails from her private server to the MacBook and flash drive.
"The two copies of the Clinton email archive (one on the archive laptop and one on the thumb drive) were intended to be stored in Clinton's Chappaqua and Whitehaven residences," the FBI said in its case summary.
But Hanley says the devices were "lost," and the FBI says it "does not have either item in its possession."
In addition to Abedin, Santos worked closely with Hanley at Whitehaven and could shed light on the mystery–if only she were asked about it.
A Post reporter confronted Santos on Friday at her D.C. apartment, but she refused to discuss her involvement with Clinton, only saying, "I don't speak to reporters."
Bill Clinton gave a speech in Manila for the Clinton Foundation during his wife's tenure as secretary of state, praising Santos as a "wonderful woman."
He was quoted as describing Santos as the "wonderful woman who runs our home in Washington, without whom Hillary will not be able to serve as secretary of state." The article [2010 profile in The Philippine Star] ended remarking, without a hint of irony: "Marina now runs his house so that he and his wife can better serve interests higher than their own."
The Clinton campaign and State Department did not respond to requests for comment from the Post.