A State Department official produced to answer questions in a civil lawsuit probing Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email server said no officials responsible for handling public records requests knew of her private email account while she was secretary, but was instructed not to answer whether the department’s top legal office knew, according to a transcript released Thursday.

In a six-hour deposition Wednesday, answers provided by Karin M. Lang seemed to corroborate several defenses raised by Clinton and her aides in the handling of the controversy, while challenging other explanations given in a lawsuit by the conservative group Judicial Watch examining whether Clinton’s email setup thwarted the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Judicial Watch’s lawsuit concerns a 2013 request for public records information about Clinton aide Huma C. Abedin’s employment arrangement.

Lang, a career employee who in July 2015 became director of the Executive Secretariat staff, which is responsible for records management, said that while a unit responsible for FOIA requests was told that Clinton had no government email account when she took office in January 2009, no one in the unit ever asked whether she used a personal account to conduct business before she stepped down in 2013.

“Prior to Secretary Kerry, no secretary of state used a State.gov email address,” said Lang, supporting an explanation given by aides to the presumptive Democratic nominee for president that her email setup while at State was not unusual.

Lang said that the director of the FOIA unit once grew curious about the email arrangement “when Mrs. Clinton’s photo appeared in the media with her using, appearing to use some sort of a mobile device.”

By Lang’s account in her deposition, the unit head, Charles Finney, told Lang in a recent three-hour debriefing that, at the time the photo appeared, he had checked with the secretary’s information technology office, which confirmed that Clinton still did not have a department email account.

Lang said she was not aware of any follow-up, did not know when the conversation took place and also that the unit head could not recall, at the time he shared the recollection with Lang, with whom he had originally spoken.

In other areas, Lang’s sworn statements at deposition added context to findings in a sharply critical report by the State Department’s inspector general, who concluded Clinton’s use of a personal server while secretary was “not an appropriate method” for preserving official emails.

The inspector general reported that two staffers in the secretary’s IT office raised concerns in 2010 that the system might not properly preserve records but were told to remain silent and that the system had been reviewed by attorneys. The IG’s office said it could not find evidence of such a legal review.

The IG’s office also said that in recent years, the secretary’s office did not routinely look for emails in responding to FOIA requests, a process it has overhauled.

Lang, accompanied by four lawyers for the State and Justice departments, was instructed not to answer whether the State Department’s Office of the Legal Adviser was aware of Clinton’s server, or whether its FOIA process or searches in the Judicial Watch case were adequate.

Such queries violated attorney-client privilege or were a legal judgment, the lawyers with Lang said in objecting.

Lang said that the FOIA office did not begin to search for records in response to Judicial Watch’s 2013 request for information concerning Abedin’s employment until after the group sued, and that at the unit chief’s direction, the FOIA office searched only human-resources records, not emails.

After the existence of Clinton’s personal server was reported in March 2015 and the lawsuit was reopened, the search expanded to cover official email accounts used by four senior officials.

Lang said it was only over the summer of 2014 that department officials responsible for record keeping learned of and began to inquire about the use of personal email accounts for government business. That was when they first noticed such addresses in documents being reviewed, she said in the deposition.

In her deposition last month, Clinton’s chief of staff at the State Department said there had “absolutely not” been an effort to thwart FOIA by using a private email account. Cheryl D. Mills, the former chief of staff, also said she did not recall any discussion about the availability of Clinton’s emails under FOIA before leaving office.

Mills said she was aware that Clinton was continuing a practice she began as a senator by using a personal email account and that Mills thought Clinton’s emails would be subject to the public records law because they would be retained by recipients who used official government addresses. Mills said she regretted that she “didn’t think” about the public-records implications of emails that were sent to non-government addresses.

In her deposition, Lang, who defended the searches in Judicial Watch’s Abedin request as having been sufficient, said Mills’s belief that scouring recipients emails – rather than a sender’s – to reply to a FOIA request was unfounded and unworkable in practice.

“It would not be possible to do that [search for emails from Clinton] except by searching individual . . . by individual, which would not be reasonably possible,” Lang said, explaining: “The department has 70,000 employees worldwide.”

(c) 2016, The Washington Post · Spencer S. Hsu