Hillary Clinton's email scandal, 'the greatest wild card' of the election, just got even more unpredictable
Pagliano has remained a shadowy figure, even though he is perhaps one of the people most familiar with Clinton's setup and her motivations behind wanting to use a private email server while she served in Obama's administration.
A group of lawmakers led by Sen. Chuck Grassley, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, had sought emails belonging to Pagliano in Clinton's inbox while she served as Secretary of State, saying in December that it was the committee's "highest-priority request." But the State Department said it could not find any emails belonging to Pagliano sent before Clinton left office in 2013.
Significantly, Clinton deleted about 30,000 emails that she says were "personal" in nature and wiped her server clean before handing it over to the FBI, which has been looking into whether Clinton or her aides mishandled classified material by using a private email account.
Investigators also are attempting to find out whether any sensitive information was stored on the server after it was handed it over from Pagliano's oversight to Platte River, which is "not cleared" to have access to classified material.
In August, Platte River's attorney said the server was "blank" when it was transferred to federal agents, according to The Washington Post, but did not clarify how that process took place. Now that he has been granted immunity, Pagliano may be more willing to explain the rationale behind wiping the server clean.
The broader question of whether Clinton skirted the rules governing federal-records management - which require that anything relating to agency activity be captured on the department's server - remains unanswered.
News of Pagliano's deal with the Justice Department comes just over a week after a federal judge ruled that State Department officials should be questioned about whether Clinton's use of a private email server while she served as secretary of state undermined public access to official government records, as required under the Freedom of Information Act.
"There has been a constant drip, drip, drip of declarations. When does it stop?" US District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan said in decision last Tuesday, according to The Washington Post. "This case is about the public's right to know."
Clinton, for her part, doesn't seem too worried.
"Look, I'm well aware of the drip, drip, drip," she told CNN's Chris Cuomo last week at a town hall event.
"I've been in the public arena for 25 years, and have been the subject of a lot of ongoing attacks, and misinformation and all the rest of it. ... The facts are that every single time somebody has hurled these charges against me, which they have done, it's proved to be nothing. And this is no different than that."