Tag Archives: Email

State Dept: 22 “top secret” e-mails on Hillary’s unsecure private e-mail server

Put an orange suit on her and ship her to Gitmo
Put an orange suit on her and ship her to Gitmo

This is from The Federalist.

Excerpt:

Hillary Clinton’s email woes just got a whole lot worse Friday after the State Department announced it considers 22 of her emails to be “top secret.”

Last week, Fox News reported that Clinton has shared extremely sensitive information, including intelligence obtained from human spying, which could have put lives at risk.

Some information contained in the email was classified as “HCS-O,” an intelligence agency code for human spy operations on the ground, or “HUMINT Control System Operations.” Additionally, several of her emails contained information for “special access programs” (SAP), which is a level of classification even higher than “top secret.”

State Department spokesman John Kirby has confirmed that the 22 emails containing SAP information were indeed top secret, though he maintained that the documents were not deemed classified at the time they were sent, according to Politico.

But I thought that Hillary said that there was only yoga routines and e-mails about her daughter’s wedding on her e-mail server?

Why did she do it?

This New York Post article explains why Hillary decided to create a parallel e-mail server system that was not under the control of the government:

The State Department is lying when it says it didn’t know until it was too late that Hillary Clinton was improperly using personal e-mails and a private server to conduct official business — because it never set up an agency e-mail address for her in the first place, the department’s former top watchdog says.

“This was all planned in advance” to skirt rules governing federal records management, said Howard J. Krongard, who served as the agency’s inspector general from 2005 to 2008.

The Harvard-educated lawyer points out that, from Day One, Clinton was never assigned and never used a state.gov e-mail address like previous secretaries.

“That’s a change in the standard. It tells me that this was premeditated. And this eliminates claims by the State Department that they were unaware of her private e-mail server until later,” Krongard said in an exclusive interview. “How else was she supposed to do business without e-mail?”

He also points to the unusual absence of a permanent inspector general during Clinton’s entire 2009-2013 term at the department. He said the 5¹/₂-year vacancy was unprecedented.

“This is a major gap. In fact, it’s without precedent,” he said. “It’s the longest period any department has gone without an IG.”

Inspectors general serve an essential and unique role in the federal government by independently investigating agency waste, fraud and abuse. Their oversight also covers violations of communications security procedures.

“It’s clear she did not want to be subject to internal investigations,” Krongard said. An e-mail audit would have easily uncovered the secret information flowing from classified government networks to the private unprotected system she set up in her New York home.

When Hillary created a private unprotected e-mail system, she was pushing away all of the security measures that are in place on government e-mail systems.

So was she hacked?

This Post and Courier article explains:

As for the Clinton camp’s attempts to dismiss this scandal as election-year politics, consider the bipartisan credentials — and expert perspective — of Robert Gates.

Mr. Gates has worked for presidents of both parties during a distinguished public service career, including tenures as Secretary of Defense under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Mr. Gates is not known for taking politically motivated shots at our nation’s leaders. He has praised Mrs. Clinton’s work as secretary of state in the past.

But last week, Mr. Gates said he agreed with former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morrell that Mrs. Clinton’s personal email account was probably hacked by Russia, China and Iran, among others.

So, Robert Gates and Mike Morell agree –  foreign governments were reading the mail of our Secretary of State. The Secretary of State!

I think that’s enough to indict her. Of course, when I ask my Democrat friends how much they know about the things I wrote about in this post, they have no idea. You don’t learn a lot about reality by watching MSNBC and laughing at Trevor Noah tweets.

Former Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli: Hillary broke the law

Hillary Clinton tweets support for jailing Christians
Hillary Clinton tweets support for jailing Christians who refuse to obey the law

Well, there were some more revelations on the weekend about Hillary’s use of a private, unsecure e-mail server. She used the private e-mail server to bypass the security regulations of her employer, so that she could communicate secretly without having her e-mails be the subject of inquiries.

Here’s the latest from leftist Reuters: (H/T JoeCoder)

The U.S. Defense Department has found an email chain that Hillary Clinton did not give to the State Department, the State Department said on Friday, despite her saying she had provided all work emails from her time as secretary of state.

The correspondence with General David Petraeus, who was commander of U.S. Central Command at the time, started shortly before she entered office and continued during her first days as the top U.S. diplomat in January and February of 2009.

You might remember that David Petraeus was critical of the administrations foreign policy decisions – at least until news of his affair with his biographer came to light, silencing him.

More:

News of the previously undisclosed email thread only adds to a steady stream of revelations about the emails in the past six months, which have forced Clinton to revise her account of the setup which she first gave in March.

[…]The email arrangement has drawn criticism from political opponents who accused the Democratic presidential front-runner of sidestepping transparency and record-keeping laws and of potentially exposing classified information to hackers.

Forget “potentially”. As I pointed out before, every single e-mail on her server is in the hands of foreign governments who don’t like us very much. That’s not my opinion, that’s the opinion of a former Deputy Director of the CIA.

Anyway, more from the original article:

[…]As recently as Sunday, she told CBS when asked about her emails that she provided “all of them.”

[…]The emails with Petraeus also appear to contradict the claim by Clinton’s campaign that she used a private BlackBerry email account for her first two months at the department before setting up her clintonemail.com account in March 2009. This was the reason her campaign gave for not handing over any emails from those two months to the State Department.

The Petraeus exchange shows she started using the clintonemail.com account by January 2009, according to the State Department.

Clinton’s spokesmen, who did not respond to questions, have acknowledged that other work emails from later in her tenure were also missing from the record Clinton handed over. They have declined to say why.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is now examining Clinton’s server as it looks into the possible mishandling of classified information between Clinton and her staff.

Now, let’s get a legal assessment of all of this from former attorney general of Virginia, Ken Kuccinelli.

He writes:

Clinton originally denied that any of her emails contained classified information, but soon abandoned that claim. So far, 150 emails containing classified information have been identified on her server, including two that included information determined to be Top Secret.

She then fell back on the claim that none of the emails in question was “marked classified” at the time she was dealing with them. The marking is not what makes the material classified; it’s the nature of the information itself. As secretary of state, Clinton knew this, and in fact she would have been re-briefed annually on this point as a condition of maintaining her clearance to access classified information.

Then there’s location. Clinton knowingly set up her email system to route 100 percent of her emails to and through her unsecured server (including keeping copies stored on the server). She knowingly removed such documents and materials from authorized locations (her authorized devices and secure government networks) to an unauthorized location (her server).

Two examples demonstrate this point.

When Clinton would draft an email based on classified information, she was drafting that email on an authorized Blackberry, iPad or computer. But when she hit “send,” that email was knowingly routed to her unsecured server — an unauthorized location — for both storage and transfer.

Additionally, when Clinton moved the server to Platte River Networks (a private company) in June 2013, and then again when she transferred the contents of the server to her private lawyers in 2014, the classified materials were in each instance again removed to another unsecured location.

Next we have the lack of proper authority to move or hold classified information somewhere, i.e., the “unauthorized location.”

While it’s possible for a private residence to be an “authorized” location, and it’s also possible for non-government servers and networks to be “authorized” to house and transfer classified materials, there are specific and stringent requirements to achieve such status. Simply being secretary of state didn’t allow Clinton to authorize herself to deviate from the requirements of retaining and transmitting classified documents, materials and information.

There is no known evidence that her arrangement to use the private email server in her home was undertaken with proper authority.

Finally, there’s the intent to “retain” the classified documents or materials at an unauthorized location.

The very purpose of Clinton’s server was to intentionally retain documents and materials — all emails and attachments — on the server in her house, including classified materials.

The intent required is only to undertake the action, i.e., to retain the classified documents and materials in the unauthorized fashion addressed in this statute. That’s it.

It borders on inconceivable that Clinton didn’t know that the emails she received, and more obviously, the emails that she created, stored and sent with the server, would contain classified information.

I have no doubt that Hillary Clinton would sell out the interests of her country in a heartbeat, if it meant improving her own political situation. We have to judge candidates by their past actions. That’s what she’s done, and that’s what she’d do. I have friends in the military and in law enforcement who are impacted by politicians with loose lips. I don’t want a traitor as commander-in-chief.

Hillary Clinton gives up her unsecure, home-brew server to the DOJ

What difference does national security make?
What difference does national security make? Rules do not apply to Queen Hillary!

This article from the leftist Associated Press was posted at The Stream, and it’s sure to be the big story today.

Excerpt:

Hillary Rodham Clinton relented Tuesday to months of demands she relinquish the personal email server she used while secretary of state, directing the device be given to the Justice Department.

The decision advances the investigation into the Democratic presidential front-runner’s use of a private email account as the nation’s top diplomat, and whether classified information was improperly sent via and stored on the home-brew email server she ran from her house in suburban New York City.

There were classified e-mails:

Republicans jumped on Tuesday’s decision to change course, as well as the additional disclosure that two emails that traversed Clinton’s personal system were subsequently given one of the government’s highest classification ratings.

[…]Word that Clinton had relented on giving up possession of the server came as Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa said two emails that traversed Clinton’s personal system were deemed “Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information” — a rating that is among the government’s highest classifications. Grassley said the inspector general of the nation’s intelligence community had reported the new details about the higher classification to Congress on Tuesday.

“Secretary Clinton’s previous statements that she possessed no classified information were patently untrue,” House Speaker John Boehner said in a statement. “Her mishandling of classified information must be fully investigated.”

[…]The inspector general for the intelligence community had told Congress that potentially hundreds of classified emails are among the cache that Clinton provided to the State Department.

No evidence that encryption was used:

There is no evidence she used encryption to shield the emails or her personal server from foreign intelligence services or other potentially prying eyes.

Previously, I blogged about how former deputy director of the CIA Mike Morrell said that everything on Hillary’s server was now in the possession of foreign governments.

More information about the classified e-mails:

The classified emails stored on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private server contained information from five U.S. intelligence agencies and included material related to the fatal 2012 Benghazi attacks, McClatchy has learned.

Of the five classified emails, the one known to be connected to Benghazi was among 296 emails made public in May by the State Department. Intelligence community officials have determined it was improperly released.

[…]While campaigning for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, Clinton has repeatedly denied she ever sent or received classified information.

I know she is running for the White House, but I actually expect to see her in the Big House (i.e. – PRISON) come January 2017.