Huma Abedin -- a close aide to Hillary Clinton at the State Department and now a top campaign official -- is facing more questions about her activities at the agency, causing potential problems for Clinton’s presidential bid.
A federal judge ordered the State Department to have Clinton, Abedin and Cheryl Mills, another Clinton aide when she was secretary of state, confirm they have turned over all government records and describe how they used Clinton’s private server to conduct official business.
They had until Friday to turn over the information “under penalty of perjury.”
Clinton is already facing questions about using the server and private email accounts while she was the country’s top diplomat from 2009 to 2013.
The former secretary of state has turned over about 55,000 pages of private emails but deleted those she deemed personal, resulting in voters increasingly doubting her trustworthiness, according to recent polls.
Some emails show the extent to which Clinton's closest aides managed the details of her image. Abedin, for example, sent her an early-morning message in August 2009 advising Clinton to "wear a dark color today. Maybe the new dark green suit. Or blue."
Clinton later held a joint news conference with the Jordanian foreign minister. She wore the green suit, according to The Associated Press.
Abedin has for months been facing scrutiny about being part of a controversial State Department program that allowed her to work part time at the agency and have a private sector job.
She went from full-time deputy chief of staff for Clinton to a part-timer, then started working for Teneo, a consulting firm led by former President Clinton aide Douglas Band.
The agency’s inspector general’s office this spring confirmed an investigation on the matter and on email exchanges between Abedin and Clinton.
Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has since 2013 led the effort to learn more about Abedin’s time at the State Department.
Last week, he sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry and others asking about an investigation into possible “criminal” conduct by Abedin over her pay and her possibly violating rules that govern vacation and sick time.
The purported State Department inspector general report found Abedin was overpaid by nearly $10,000 because she violated such rules while at the agency.
The 39-year-old Abedin, vice chairwoman of the Clinton campaign, is contesting the findings and has requested an administrative review of them, while her lawyer calls the report “fundamentally flawed.”
The Clinton campaign did not respond to a request Saturday for comment.
Abedin is married to former New York Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner, who resigned from Congress in 2011 over a sexting scandal.
Larry J. Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, told The Washington Times that only political insiders will even know Abedin's name.
“But she's another building block in the image of Clinton being conveyed to voters," he said. "More and more, the current Clinton campaign is starting to remind me of the Clintons in the 1990s. At times, their controversies came in waves and filled news pages. It's happening all over again for Hillary in this campaign."
Abedin made roughly $69,000 in the first quarter of 2015, which would put her on pace to make $276,000 this year, according to news outlets’ analysis of federal reports.
The inspector general’s office has declined to respond to a request by FoxNews.com to verify the existence of the Abedin report and its finding.
Grassley and his staffers are also having problems getting information from the office.
And on Wednesday, he vowed to try to block -- or “place a hold” -- on the nomination of David Malcolm Robinson to become the State Department’s assistant secretary for conflict and stabilization operations until the agency complies with inquiries from the Republican-controlled Congress.
“The nominee is an innocent victim of the State Department’s contemptuous failures to respond to congressional inquiries,” Grassley said.
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http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/08/09/clinton-campaign-abedin-history-at-state-department-poses-liability-for-clinton/
