Trump: US enemies may have 'blackmail' file on Clinton

By Julian Hattem - 06/22/16 01:05 PM EDT



Donald Trump on Wednesday warned that foreign countries have “probably” gained access to Hillary Clinton’s private email messages and can use the information to "blackmail" her.

“While we may not know what is in those deleted emails, our enemies probably do,” the presumptive Republican presidential nominee said of his likely general election opponent during a highly publicized speech on Wednesday.

“So they probably now have a blackmail file over someone who wants to be president of the United States," he continued.“This fact alone disqualifies her from the presidency.”

More than 2,000 of the roughly 30,000 emails that Clinton has handed over to the State Department from her private email system have been classified at some level. Of those, 22 were labeled as top secret — the highest tier of classification — and deemed too dangerous to release even in a highly redacted form.

In addition to those emails, Clinton has also acknowledged deleting another 30,000 or so messages, which she has claimed were purely personal and not subject to government preservation requirements.

The deletion stunned Clinton’s critics and raised serious questions for the Obama administration about its record-keeping requirements and whether rules might have been broken. It remains unclear whether backups were made of those deleted emails or if they can be recovered from the server, which is now the hands of the FBI, but a conservative watchdog group has pledged to reveal them all.

Clinton’s email setup has dogged her throughout her Democratic presidential run and has become an easy foil for her GOP critics.

Among other points, Republicans note that Clinton’s camp has never fully explained what security measures the former secretary of State used to protect the machine from digital intrusion. That could have made it an easy target for foreign spies, they warn.

“We can’t hand over our government to someone whose deepest, darkest secrets may be in the hands of our enemies,” Trump said on Wednesday.

National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers has acknowledged on Capitol Hill that the server “would represent opportunity” for foreign intelligence services.

Romanian hacker Guccifer, who first exposed Clinton’s use of a private email account, has boasted about having hacked into her server, but there is little evidence to back up the claim.

However, the State Department’s inspector general reported in a harshly critical analysis last month that IT expert Bryan Pagliano had twice shut down her personal server over security fears.

Pagaliano believed “someone was trying to hack us and while they did not get in i didnt [sic] want to let them have the chance to,” he told an aide to Clinton in January 2011.

http://thehill.com/policy/national-s...clinton-emails