Hillary Clinton Email Mystery Man: What We Know About Eric Hoteham
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Scott Olson/Getty Images(WASHINGTON) — One of the biggest mysteries surrounding the discovery that Hillary Clinton used a personal email account and private server during her time as secretary of State was the fact that the system was registered to a man who no one had ever heard of.
Who was Eric Hoteham? And why did have at least three different email domains — clintonemail.com, wjcoffice.com and presidentclinton.com — registered in his name even though the domains apparently were based in the former first couple’s home in suburban New York?
Efforts to locate public records related to anyone named Eric Hoteham were unsuccessful, in a search that included donor records, birth records or property records.
There is, however, an Eric Hothem who is named as a Clinton aide in a Washington Post article from 2001. At the time, he reportedly dismissed concerns from the White House chief usher who believed that, when leaving the White House at the end of President Bill Clinton’s second term, the couple took pieces of furniture that should have remained in the White House.
Hothem was also mentioned in a House Government Reform Committee Report from 2002. In the report, he was identified as “an aide to first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton” who sent a wire transfer of $15,000 to Roger Clinton, Bill Clinton’s brother.
Hothem’s lawyer deferred to the first couple’s lawyer, David Kendall, who said that the account for which Hothem was the custodian was the personal Citibank account of the former president and his wife, then a U.S. senator. Kendall said the money was a loan to Roger Clinton to help him obtain legal counsel for the committee’s investigation.
On top of that, Hothem is thanked in Hillary Clinton’s 2003 memoir, Living History.
Hothem’s connection to the Clintons appears to drop off the public record shortly after the Clintons’ time in the White House ended.
But right around that time, in October 2002, a man named Eric Hothem began working at Citigroup, according to financial records database BrightScope. He moved to JP Morgan in May 2013.
Hothem did not answer requests for comment Wednesday and JP Morgan had “no comment” when asked about the story.
Although ABC News has not been able to definitively link them, The New York Times reported that the current JP Morgan employee is the same man as Hillary Clinton’s former aide.
One difficulty connecting the man who registered the Clinton domain names to the former first lady’s aide stemmed from the differences in the spelling of the names.
However, according to Jonathan Mayer, a computer science expert at Stanford University, there are often contradictions or typographical errors in server records, so it could be a spelling error.
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