Hillary - Email Server Scandal

(Politico) -- The State Department has told Senate investigators it cannot find backup copies of emails sent by Bryan Pagliano, the top Hillary Clinton IT staffer who maintained her email server but has asserted his Fifth Amendment right and refused to answer questions on the matter.

Clinton had personally paid Pagliano to maintain her home-made server, which is also currently in the FBI’s possession. The agency has been investigating whether classified material was ever put at risk because she used her own server instead of the standard State email system. The State Department has designated about 1,000 of her emails as classified documents, which would never have been allowed on such a private system. Clinton’s representatives maintain that the emails were not classified at the time they were sent.

State, like many federal agencies, did not have a systematic email archiving system for years. When the server issue first arose in the spring, State acknowledged that it did not automatically archive the email traffic of senior employees — relying on them to make their own backups, or “.pst,” if needed. Under current rules, federal employees are responsible for ensuring their official emails are saved.

(CBS News) -- Bryan Pagliano, a former Hillary Clinton staffer who installed and maintained the family's private email server, invoked the Fifth Amendment on Thursday during his appearance before the House Select Committee investigating Benghazi. Pagliano was subpoenaed in August to testify before the Republican-led panel for his role in Hillary Clinton's State Department as an IT professional.

(WaPo) -- Hillary Rodham Clinton and her family personally paid a State Department staffer to maintain the private e-mail server she used while heading the agency, according to an official from Clinton's presidential campaign.

The unusual arrangement helped Clinton retain personal control over the system that she used for her public and private duties and that has emerged as an issue for her campaign. But, according to the campaign official, it also ensured that taxpayer dollars were not spent on a private server that was shared by Clinton, her husband and their daughter as well as aides to the former president.

(Judicial Watch) -- During an interview this week with CNN, Hillary Clinton boldly claimed that her email scandal was no scandal at all. She flatly declared,

Everything I did was permitted. There was no law. There was no regulation. There was nothing that did not give me the full authority to decide how I was going to communicate.

Mrs. Clinton certainly operated at the State Department as if “there was no law,” but she surely knows better. In fact, there is a lot of law, including criminal provisions, which governed her conduct.

(Politico) -- The liberal writer and family confidant peppered the secretary of state with advice on everything from internal turf battles to climate change.

In her early months in office, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in contact with unofficial adviser Sidney Blumenthal more often and on a wider range of topics than was previously known, a set of about 3,000 Clinton emails released Tuesday night by the State Department revealed.

Besides Blumenthal, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Rahm Emanuel, Lanny Davis, a former special counsel to President Clinton, and David Axelrod had Clinton’s private email address.

(NYT) -- The State Department said on Thursday that 15 emails sent or received by Hillary Rodham Clinton were missing from records that she has turned over, raising new questions about whether she deleted work-related emails from the private account she used exclusively while in office.

Despite claims by Hillary Rodham Clinton that she provided the State Department with all of her work-related emails from the personal account she used exclusively when she was in office, the department has received several related to Libya that she had not handed over, according to officials at the agency.

(Washington Times) -- Congress released nearly 200 pages of newly uncovered emails involving former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, raising questions Monday about whether the Obama administration and the Democratic presidential candidate herself were truthful when they said they turned over all of her email communications on Benghazi.

He also said the emails show Mrs. Clinton soliciting help and wisdom from Mr. Blumenthal, who had no official position in the State Department. The former secretary has said his emails were unsolicited.

Mrs. Clinton has admitted she set up and used her own email server and account during her time at the State Department, which meant her communications weren’t able to be searched under open records or congressional information requests, as required by law.

Prodded by Mr. Gowdy’s committee last year, nearly two years after she left office, Mrs. Clinton turned over to the State Department about 30,000 messages she decided were related to official business. She said she withheld and expunged another 32,000 messages and says she has wiped the server clean to prevent anyone from recovering any of them.

(The Hill) -- The nearly 300 emails from Hillary Clinton released by the State Department last week are shedding new light on the administration's mission in Libya and its response to the deadly terrorist attacks in Benghazi. The emails include details on the work of Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya who died in the Benghazi siege, and offer a glimpse into Clinton’s concerns that she might have falsely attributed the 2012 assault to backlash against an anti-Muslim video.

(Weekly Standard) -- To help break down the most important information, America Rising compiled the “by the numbers” rundown below:

24 – Number Of Emails From Sidney Blumenthal To Secretary Clinton

29 – Number Of Times Clinton Forwarded Blumenthal’s Emails To A State Department Staffer:

  “Get This Around”
  “Please Print”
  “FYI”
  “Please Circulate”
  “Very Insightful”/ “Very Interesting”

7 – Number Of Times State Department Staff Doubted Sidney Blumenthal

2 – Number Of Emails That Were “Sensitive, But Unclassified”

1 – Number Of Emails In Which Clinton Suggested “Should Consider Passing To Israelis”

(ProPublica) -- Emails disclosed by a hacker show a close family friend was funneling intelligence about the crisis in Libya directly to the Secretary of State’s private account starting before the Benghazi attack.

(Gawker) -- A hacker calling himself (or herself) "Guccifer" claims to have compromised the email account of former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal, revealing memos that Blumenthal purportedly wrote to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about Benghazi and other matters.

Staffers in the Bush White House famously used private email accounts to conduct government business as a way to circumvent the Presidential Records Act, which mandates that all official communications be archived. Republicans are suspicious that the Obama White House is continuing the practice. Clinton's emails are also subject to the Freedom of Information Act.

*While it's not strictly a violation of the PRA and FOIA for Clinton to conduct official business on a non-government account, the law requires that those emails be archived along with her @state.gov communications. *

(Bloomberg) -- Hillary Clinton didn't take a basic precaution with her personal e-mail system to prevent hackers from impersonating or "spoofing" her identity in messages to close associates, according to former U.S. officials familiar with her e-mail system and other cyber-security experts.

This vulnerability put anyone who was in communication with her clintonemail.com account while she was secretary of state at risk of being hacked. Clinton said at the United Nations last week that there were no security breaches of her personal e-mail server, which she used to send and receive more than 60,000 professional and personal e-mails. But former cyber-security officials and experts told us that there were gaps in the system.

According to publicly available information, whoever administrated the system didn't enable what’s called a Sender Policy Framework, or SPF, a simple setting that would prevent hackers sending e-mails that appear to be from clintonemail.com. SPF is a basic and highly recommended security precaution for people who set up their own servers.

Experts told us that oversight was just one flaw of a security system that would have been relatively easy for foreign intelligence services and others to exploit. "I have no doubt in my mind that this thing was penetrated by multiple foreign powers, to assume otherwise is to put blinders on,” said Bob Gourley, the chief technology officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency from 2005 to 2008 and the founder of Cognitio, a cybersecurity consultancy.

Spoofing a senior official’s e-mail identity is also an easy way to conduct "spear phishing" attacks, where an attacker sends a personally crafted e-mail that appears to come from a trusted source. Once the target opens it, his own system can be compromised. Clinton said she e-mailed with dozens of State Department and White House officials using her server, including President Barack Obama.

Spear phishing has caused problems for the government in the past. In October 2012, the White House confirmed that hackers linked to the Chinese government had penetrated sensitive but unclassified computer systems using the technique. Just last week, the State Department shut down its entire e-mail system after attacks by hackers suspected to be Russian.

2.24.15 Watermark Silicon Valley Conference for Women Clinton Remarks

(WSJ) -- If Hillary Clinton 's emails are eventually cracked open, don't expect to see any juicy correspondence with her husband-or any correspondence at all. Bill Clinton doesn't use email. The former president, who does regularly use Twitter, has sent a grand total of two emails during his entire life, both as president, says Matt McKenna, his spokesman.

After leaving office, Mr. Clinton established his own domain that staff use–@presidentclinton.com. But Mr. Clinton still doesn’t use email himself, Mr. McKenna said.

(The Federalist) -- Although Hillary Clinton and her allies may be claiming that her private e-mail system is no big deal, Hillary's State Department actually forced the 2012 resignation of the U.S. ambassador to Kenya in part for setting up an unsanctioned private e-mail system. According to a 2012 report from the State Department's inspector general, former U.S.

The inspector general’s report offered a scathing assessment of Gration’s information security practices — practices that are eerily similar to those undertaken by Clinton while she served as Secretary of State: