Clinton Email Scandal: Latest Batch Exposes Two Big New Problems For Hillary

Clinton Email Scandal: Latest Batch Exposes Two Big New Problems For Hillary

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Emails uncovered by Judicial Watch show that the State Department at one point turned off some of its own security features so Hillary Clinton's private emails would get delivered. (AP)

JOHN MERLIN7:00 AM ET

The latest batch of emails from Hillary Clinton's term as Secretary of State exposes two new troubling developments in the long-running scandal.

First, it turns out that Clinton managed to avoid turning over one key email, despite her repeated promises that she gave the State Department every single work-related email from her private email server. As the Associated Press reported, in the missing email, Clinton admits that her private setup was a problem.

"Let's get separate address or device but I don't want any risk of the personal being accessible," Clinton wrote to her deputy chief of staff, Huma Abedin. That was in response to an email from Abedin in November 2010, in which she advised Hillary that she should get on the state.gov email system or consider "releasing your email address to the department so you are not going to spam."

That exchange turned up only because it was in a batch of emails Abedin provided the government from her own private account. And it directly contradicts statements Clinton has made about the reason for her having a private setup, as well as her claim that she provided all her work-related emails.

Another email released this week reveals that State had set up an official government email account for Clinton to use, and then gives a clue as to why Clinton never used it.

"You should be aware," the email says, "that any email would go through the Department's infrastructure and subject to FOIA searches."

Meanwhile, other emails show that not only did Clinton's unsecured private email system risk exposing sensitive and at times highly classified information to outsiders, it forced the State Department to compromise its own security to accommodate her.

The new batch of emails was uncovered by Judicial Watch, which had asked for them to be released after a scathing inspector general report referenced them.

As the AP reports, "the emails ... show that the State Department technical staff disabled software on their systems intended to block phishing emails that could deliver dangerous viruses."

The staff members did so, the emails show, because "they were trying urgently to resolve delivery problems with emails sent from Clinton's private server."

In one email, a senior technical official, Ken LaVolpe, told IT employees that "this should trump all other activities." The emails also describe the IT staff's frustration at trying to figure out what is blocking Clinton's emails.

Other emails uncovered by Judicial Watch highlight how vulnerable Clinton's email setup was to outages and attacks.

Clinton's tech person twice had to report that he had to shut down Clinton's private server because it was being hacked. Another email notes that "clintonemail.com is down due to an outage with our ISP." Clinton chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, says in another that "hrc email coming back -- is server OK?"

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton summed it all up by saying that "the emails show the Obama State Department gave special accommodations to Clinton's email system, which the agency knew was unsecure, was likely hacked and was not transparent under FOIA."

The State Department not only made "special accommodations," they put the security of their own communication systems at risk to appease Clinton's recklessness.

http://www.investors.com/politics/co...odate-hillary/

None of this is going to matter. The additional voters we need to elect Trump don't care about the emails, the server, the Clinton Cash, the speech fees, the $150 million, the unearned wealth, the betrayal, Syria, Benghazi, Libya. They don't care. She's up 14 points on Reuters/Ipsos, the online survey that Trump would win hands down all the time during the primary.

The Republican Convention which Trump wanted to be a unifying event, a great sales pitch to General Election voters, is going to be ruined by all the stunts of the anti-Trump Republicans. I don't even think Cleveland and Ohio will even be friendly because of John Kasich.

So, it's Trump on his own with his Trump Supporters.

Top IT official: Disabling security for Clinton server laid out 'welcome mat' for hackers


By Catherine Herridge, Pamela K. Browne
Published June 25, 2016


video at link Clinton aide invokes 5th Amendment more than 125 times

A 2010 decision temporarily disabling State Department security features to accommodate Hillary Clinton’s private server effectively laid out a "welcome mat" for hackers and foreign intelligence services, a leading IT official who oversaw computer security at the Defense Intelligence Agency told Fox News.

"You're putting not just the Clinton server at risk but the entire Department of State emails at risk," said Bob Gourley, former chief technology officer (CTO) for the DIA. "When you turn off your defensive mechanisms and you're connected to the Internet, you're almost laying out the welcome mat for anyone to intrude and attack and steal your secrets."

He was referring to revelations from new court-released documents in a lawsuit by conservative watchdog Judicial Watch. They show the State Department temporarily turned off security features in 2010 so that emails from then-Secretary of State Clinton's personal server would stop going to the department's spam folders.

Gourley, who has more than two decades of cybersecurity experience and is now a partner with strategic consulting and engineering firm Cognitio, noted the Russians did breach the State Department system at some point – though it’s unclear when, and whether disabling the security functions in 2010 played a role.

He said, though, that when the Russian presence was detected in 2014, there were indications “they had been there for quite a while … [and] also hacked into unclassified systems in the White House.” He said the Russians would have tried “everything possible to get in.”

Gourley said: "A professionally run system is going to keep their defenses up all the time to at least make it hard on them.”

ils show State Department IT staffers struggled to resolve the issue in December 2010, and it was considered an urgent matter. "This should trump all other activities," Ken LaVolpe, a senior technical officer, wrote on Dec. 17, 2010.
The disabled software was designed to block so-called phishing emails that could insert viruses into the system. Another senior State Department official, Thomas W. Lawrence, wrote that Clinton aide Huma Abedin was personally checking in for status reports on the progress.

The State Department inspector general's report released in May found Clinton's personal server used exclusively for official State Department business violated government rules. It also reported that in early January 2011 -- a month after the security feature shut-down -- an IT worker shut down the server because he believed "someone was trying to hack us." The individual, who was not identified by name in emails released by the IG, reported a second incident only hours later, writing, "We were attacked again so I shut (the server) down for a few min."

An email also from this time period documented Clinton's concern about getting a government email account. In November 2010, Clinton wrote to Abedin: "Let's get separate address or device but I don't want any risk of the personal being accessible.” Though Clinton said all her work-related emails were turned over, this document was provided not by Clinton but by Abedin.

While Clinton swore under oath last fall all records had been provided, campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said in a statement that Clinton did not have all the emails.

"We understand Secretary Clinton had some emails with Huma that Huma did not have, and Huma had some emails with Secretary Clinton that Secretary Clinton did not have," he said. He asserted the November 2010 email shows that “contrary to the allegations of some, Secretary Clinton was not seeking to avoid any use of government email. As indicated in this email, she was open to using a state.gov account but she simply wanted her personal emails to remain private, as anyone would want."

The FBI is investigating Clinton's emails practices. Agents are looking into whether classified information was taken outside secure government channels, and whether the server was compromised by a third party. Fox News first reported in January the FBI investigation had expanded to public corruption and whether the possible “intersection” of Clinton Foundation work and State Department business may have violated public corruption laws, according to three intelligence sources.

This week, the head of WikiLeaks Julian Assange told a British television network that he was in possession of Clinton emails that have not yet been released, indicating the system was compromised.

In an interview with British Television Network ITV, Assange said he has Clinton emails that are not public, and there is "enough evidence" for criminal charges, including regarding the Clinton Foundation, though he claimed she was too protected by the Obama administration for an indictment to go forward.

"There's very strong material, both in the emails and in relation to the Clinton Foundation," Assange said.

The Clinton campaign has dismissed claims the server was compromised by a third party, including those of Romanian hacker "Guccifer." Fox News was first to report his claims that he accessed the server with ease in March 2012. The Justice Department extradited the hacker to Northern Virginia where he recently agreed in a plea deal to cooperate in future investigations and testify before a grand jury.

An NSA whistleblower said the Assange claim should be taken seriously, given WikiLeaks’ track record of releasing authentic documents.

"It just says that she put all this material on a server that was insecure, that anyone in the world could access it and break in," said Bill Binney, a former National Security Agency specialist who spoke out against the agency's broad surveillance programs. Binney was investigated by the FBI, though there was no evidence he mishandled classified information.

Binney said there is a double-standard at play in the Clinton case, given more than 2,100 emails on her server containing classified information have been identified. He called her files “vulnerable [to] attack [from] all people in the world -- hackers, governments, everybody."

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016...r-hackers.html

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Clinton’s State Dept. calendar missing scores of entries
BySTEPHENBRAUN June 24, 2016 4:01 pm
FILE - In this Sept. 21, 2009 file photo, then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, rings the New York Stock opening bell, accompanied by then-NYSE CEO Duncan L. Niederauer, in New York. Television cameras rolled when...
WASHINGTON (AP) — An Associated Press review of the official calendar Hillary Clinton kept as secretary of state identified at least 75 meetings with longtime political donors, Clinton Foundation contributors and corporate and other outside interests that were not recorded or omitted the names of those she met.

The fuller details of those meetings were included in files the State Department turned over to the AP after it sued the government in federal court.

The missing entries raise new questions about how Clinton and her inner circle handled government records documenting her State Department tenure — in this case, why the official chronology of her four-year term does not closely mirror the other, more detailed records of her daily meetings.

At a time when Clinton’s private email system is under scrutiny by an FBI criminal investigation, the calendar omissions reinforce concerns that she sought to eliminate the “risk of the personal being accessible” — as she wrote in an email exchange that she failed to turn over to the government but was subsequently uncovered in a top aide’s inbox.

The AP found the omissions by comparing the 1,500-page calendar with separate planning schedules supplied to Clinton by aides in advance of each day’s events. The names of at least 114 outsiders who met with Clinton were missing from her calendar, the records show.

No known federal laws were violated and some omissions could be blamed on Clinton’s highly fluid schedule, which sometimes forced late cancellations. But only seven meetings in Clinton’s planning schedules were replaced by substitute events on her official calendar. More than 60 other events listed in Clinton’s planners were omitted entirely in her calendar, tersely noted or described only as “private meetings” — all without naming those who met with her.

Clinton campaign spokesman Nick Merrill said Thursday night that the multiple discrepancies between her State Department calendar and her planning schedules “simply reflect a more detailed version in one version as compared to another, all maintained by her staff.”

Merrill said that Clinton “has always made an effort to be transparent since entering public life, whether it be the release of over 30 years of tax returns, years of financial disclosure forms, or asking that 55,000 pages of work emails from her time of secretary of state be turned over to the public.”

In one key omission, Clinton’s State Department calendar dropped the identities of a dozen major Wall Street and business leaders who met with her during a private breakfast discussion at the New York Stock Exchange in September 2009, The meeting occurred minutes before Clinton appeared in public at the exchange to ring the market’s ceremonial opening bell.

Despite the omission, Clinton’s State Department planning schedules from the same day listed the names of all Clinton’s breakfast guests — most of whose firms had lobbied the government and donated to her family’s global charity. The event was closed to the press and merited only a brief mention in her calendar, which omitted all her guests’ names — among them Blackstone Group Chairman Steven Schwarzman, PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi and then-New York Bank of Mellon CEO Robert Kelly.

Clinton’s calendar also repeatedly omitted private dinners and meetings with political donors, policy sessions with groups of corporate leaders and “drop-bys” with old Clinton campaign hands and advisers. Among those whose names were omitted from her calendar were longtime adviser Sidney Blumenthal, consultant and former Clinton White House chief of staff Thomas “Mack” McLarty, former energy lobbyist Joseph Wilson and entertainment magnate and Clinton campaign bundler Haim Saban.

The AP first sought Clinton’s calendar and schedules from the State Department in August 2013, but the agency would not acknowledge even that it had the material. After nearly two years of delay, the AP sued the State Department in March 2015. The department agreed in a court filing last August to turn over Clinton’s calendar, and provided the documents in November. After noticing discrepancies between Clinton’s calendar and some schedules, the AP pressed in court for all of Clinton’s planning material. The U.S. has released about one-third of those planners to the AP, so far.

The State Department censored both sets of documents for national security and other reasons, but those changes were made after the documents were turned over to the State Department at the end of Clinton’s tenure.

The documents obtained by the AP do not show who specifically logged entries in Clinton’s calendar or who edited the material. Clinton’s emails and other records show that she and two close aides, deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin and scheduling assistant Lona J. Valmoro, held weekly meetings and emailed almost every day about Clinton’s plans. According to the recent inspector general’s audit and a court declaration made last December by the State Department’s acting executive secretary, Clinton’s aides had access to her calendar through a government Microsoft Outlook account. Both Abedin and Valmoro were political appointees at the State Department and are now aides in her presidential campaign.

Unlike Clinton’s planning schedules, which were sent to Clinton each morning, her calendar was edited after each event, the AP’s review showed. Some calendar entries were accompanied by Valmoro emails — indicating she may have added those entries. Every meeting entry also included both the planned time of the event and the actual time — showing that Clinton’s calendar was being used to document each meeting after it ended.

The State Department said Friday that “extensive records” from Clinton’s calendars were preserved. Spokesman John Kirby said he couldn’t speak in more detail about practices during Clinton’s tenure because of the AP’s ongoing lawsuit.

Kirby said the department was confident it was properly preserving Secretary John Kerry’s calendars and other historic documents, but he noted that Kerry was not required to include details of private, non-work-related meetings. Kirby declined to specify the agency’s definition of those private sessions, saying only that “there are obviously some moments of his life that have no bearing on his work as secretary of state.”

Kirby would not comment on how Clinton and other former secretaries handled their calendars. Five former State Department logistics officials told the AP that some of Clinton’s predecessors also omitted some private meetings from their calendars. The former officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss sensitive agency practices, said omitted meetings typically were for medical or other personal reasons as opposed to the meetings Clinton attended with political and charity donors and with corporate executives.

P.J. Crowley, a State Department spokesman for Clinton at the time, told the AP that Clinton’s vision of “21st century statecraft” included exchanging views with corporate leaders and promoting public-private partnerships. “That was certainly reflected in her day-to-day schedule, her travel and her global outreach,” Crowley said.

The former department officials as well as government records experts said that secretaries of state have wide latitude in keeping their schedules — despite federal laws and agency rules overseeing the archiving of calendars and warning against altering or deleting records. Omissions in Clinton’s calendar could undermine the document’s historical accuracy, particularly its depictions of Clinton’s access to political, corporate and other influences, experts said.

“It’s clear that any outside influence needs to be clearly identified in some way to at least guarantee transparency. That didn’t happen,” said Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan government reform group. “These discrepancies are striking because of her possible interest at the time in running for the presidency.”

Clinton’s terse calendar entry on her 2009 private breakfast on Wall Street contains no details on what she and her 12 guests discussed.

Besides Schwarzman, Nooyi and Kelly, Clinton’s other guests were Fabrizio Freda, CEO of the Estee Lauder Companies Inc.; Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks Corp.; Lewis Frankfort, chairman of Coach Inc.; Ellen Kullman, then-CEO of DuPont; David M. Cote, CEO of Honeywell International Inc.; James Tisch, president of Loews Corp.; John D. Wren, CEO of Omnicom Group; then-McGraw Hill Companies chairman Harold McGraw III; and James Taiclet, chairman of the American Tower Corp. Also attending was then-NYSE CEO Duncan Niederauer, who later accompanied Clinton when she rang the stock exchange bell.

Four of the attendees — Schwarzman, Nooyi, Cote and Kullman — headed companies that later donated to Clinton’s pet diplomatic project of that period, the U.S. pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai Expo.

All the firms represented except Coach lobbied the government in 2009; Blackstone, Honeywell, Omnicom and DuPont lobbied the State Department that year. Schwarzman and Frankfort have personally donated to the Clinton Foundation, and the other firms — except for American Tower and New York Bank of Mellon — also contributed to the Clinton charity.
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Associated Press writer Bradley Klapper contributed to this report.

http://wtop.com/elections/2016/06/cl...ries/?AID=7236

Hacked Hillary Email Reveals This Illegal, Secret $100 Million “Project” … Arrest Her Now

It’s easy to get bored hearing about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails and what server she used when she sent them, but a conversation discovered about future election strategy has uncovered shocking illegal activity no one has been talking about — and it’s hard not to wonder why.

A computer hacker calling himself Guccifer 2.0 has released emails that showed a $100 million voter registration effort funded entirely by a foreign entity.

A Swiss billionaire named Hansjorg Wyss used his foreign Wyss Foundation to spend the money on a voter registration and get-out-the-vote strategy to deliver wins for Democrat Party.

The problem is that a foreign entity is not allowed by law to participate, contribute or impact any U.S. election in any way, according to the Washington Free Beacon. Neither is a non-profit that doesn’t fall within the ‘political action committee’ status.

The Wyss Foundation used 501(c)(3) tax-deductible non-profit status to claim the project was something other than political, but unearthed commentary proves it was nothing but.

“If we don’t invest heavily in the Democracy strategies now, there is a risk that our ability to drive our issue agenda will be severely curtailed,” read a memo on the subject. “These investments lay the groundwork for robust, transformative issue campaigns.”

The effort was likely to capitalize on the ongoing amnesty effort by which Democrats have used their influence to create new voters from illegals, then rely on the Wyss project to register them and get them out to vote Democrat in elections.

Wyss has donated to U.S. political candidates before, even though he is personally barred from doing so by federal law, so it’s easy to see this project moving forward with no reservation.

http://conservativetribune.com/hacke...email-reveals/