Yesterday, Hillary Clinton submitted a sworn declaration under penalty of perjury in a case involving Judicial Watch and their FOIA request to the State Department. At issue was whether the former Secretary of State had provided all of the work product e-mails during her time at State to the archivists, a point under contention in Judge Emmet Sullivan’s federal court. Sullivan had wanted a much broader explanation from Hillary as well as Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin in his July 31st order, but all he got back was this:
I, Hillary Rodham Clinton, declare under penalty of perjury that the following is true and correct:
- While I do not know what information may be “responsive” for purposes of this law suit, I have directed that all my e-mails on clintonemail.com in my custody that were or potentially were federal records to be provided to the Department of State, and on information and belief, this has been done.
- As a result of my directive, approximately 55,000 pages of these emails were produced to the Department on December 5, 2014.
- Cheryl Mills did not have an account on clintonemail.com. Huma Abedin did have such an account which was used at times for government business.
Not only is this not fully responsive to Judge Sullivan’s order, it’s basically a tautology. She provided what she provided, and that’s all she will provide. All Hillary says is that she believes that everything that was on her server — after, it should be noted although not stated in the declaration, that more than 30,000 supposedly private e-mails were expunged — was handed over to State. It says nothing about whether Hillary has certified that nothing responsive to Judicial Watch’s FOIA demand was left out; Hillary dodges this by claiming not to know what is “responsive,” even though (a) the Judicial Watch FOIA demand and the court’s rulings are easily accessed, and (b) she’s supposedly a lawyer of some repute.
But is this the truth? Until a court seizes the server, we probably can’t know for sure. “We” refers to American citizens who are expected to choose the next leader of the free world. But perhaps there is another entity with more power to determine whether Hillary is hiding something.
Help us, Xi Jinping, you’re our only hope ….
China’s cyber spies have accessed the private emails of “many” top Obama administration officials, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official and a top secret document obtained by NBC News, and have been doing so since at least April 2010.
The email grab — first codenamed “Dancing Panda” by U.S. officials, and then “Legion Amethyst” — was detected in April 2010, according to a top secret NSA briefing from 2014. The intrusion into personal emails was still active at the time of the briefing and, according to the senior official, is still going on.
In 2011, Google disclosed that the private gmail accounts of some U.S. officials had been compromised, but the briefing shows that private email accounts from other providers were compromised as well.
The senior official says the private emails of “all top national security and trade officials” were targeted.
Did I say “only hope”? Naaaaaaah. China penetrated the White House and the Obama administration for five years, according to NBC News. Hillary Clinton’s e-mail system was so vulnerable that practically anyone could have penetrated it — and did. Gawker got e-mails between Hillary and Sidney Blumenthal from a separate, private hack that took place a couple of years ago, which is how Hillary’s personal back-channel intel operation got exposed in the first place.
With such a cavalier attitude at the highest levels of the Obama administration to data security, it’s no wonder that China has been so successful at gaining intel on our government. That puts all of these officials in highly tenuous positions, too. Undoubtedly, China’s intelligence services have catalogued any number of personal peccadilloes to use as leverage, either to cultivate human-intelligence sources — spies — or to blackmail US officials into favorable terms on US policies. They wouldn’t have waited five years to put those into effect, either.
This, added to the OPM hack, is a national catastrophe. It demonstrates incompetence on a staggering scale, and highlights once again the corrupt incompetence of Hillary Clinton in setting up an even less secure e-mail system as a means of avoiding legitimate Congressional oversight. That’s what made this pushback from Team Hillary flack Jennifer Palmieri so hilarious:
Ahem, @JebBush. Three Months Later, State Department Hasn’t Rooted Out Hackers – WSJ http://t.co/Oeb6XHs2Wc
— Jennifer Palmieri (@jmpalmieri) August 10, 2015
Golly, if only your boss had run the State Department, this all would have been fixed. Oh, wait … https://t.co/ya1AdWvgEQ
— Ed Morrissey (@EdMorrissey) August 10, 2015
The WSJ article notes that the intrusions are only into the unclassified system:
Three months after the State Department confirmed hackers breached its unclassified email system, the government still hasn’t been able to evict them from the department’s network, according to three people familiar with the investigation.
Government officials, assisted by outside contractors and the National Security Agency, have repeatedly scanned the network and taken some systems offline. But investigators still see signs of the hackers on State Department computers, the people familiar with the matter said. Each time investigators find a hacker tool and block it, these people said, the intruders tweak it slightly to attempt to sneak past defenses.
It isn’t clear how much data the hackers have taken, the people said. They reaffirmed what the State Department said in November: that the hackers appear to have access only to unclassified email. Still, unclassified material can contain sensitive intelligence.
What we know about the Clintonemail system is that classified material from intelligence agencies got transmitted through it — and that it had one confirmed hack already, one that seized sensitive material, at the very least. Not only that, but it had none of the safeguards and oversight that State Department systems had at the time. On top of all that, the NBC report shows that these hacks have been going on since Hillary’s second year as SecState, and yet she never took action to enhance security and bolster safeguards around these systems. Instead, she bypassed them for her own personal reasons.
That’s an indictment of Hillary’s leadership, not an excuse for it.
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