[Townhall] As Guy has been writing about all week, Hillary Clinton has been forced by the FBI to turn over the personal email server she used during her time at Secretary of State to conduct official government business. Earlier this week we learned from the Inspector General that Clinton had at least two classified, top secret emails hosted on her server. Keep in mind the server was a) not secure b) it's illegal to send or receive classified information on a private email account or server.
Yesterday the FBI got their hands on Clinton's server and to no one's surprise, it is blank. From Fox News (bolding is mine):
The FBI has taken possession of the personal e-mail server used by Hillary Clinton during her tenure as secretary of state, according to a published report.
Barbara Wells, an attorney for Denver-based computer services firm Platte River Networks, told The Washington Post that federal agents picked up the server from a private data center in New Jersey Wednesday afternoon. The attorney told the paper that the server "was blank" and no longer contained useful information.
"The information had been migrated over to a different server for purposes of transition," Wells told the paper. "To my knowledge the data on the old server is not available now on any servers or devices in Platte River Network's control." Wells added that the company had cooperated with the FBI and had been told it was not a target of the investigation.
The Justice Department is looking into whether classified information was improperly stored on or passed through the server, which Clinton used for all her correspondence during her time as secretary of state.
Imagine that. The woman who deleted tens-of-thousands of emails she deemed "personal" before leaving the State Department has wiped her server clean before the FBI was able to get their hands on it. Not a smidgen of corruption, I'm sure.
In March, a defiant Clinton declared the private server would never be turned over because it contained personal emails between herself and her husband Bill Clinton, in addition to details about her daughter's wedding.
Excerpt from the Platte River site Case Study: "Today, Platte River's cloud portfolio includes cloud data storage, backup and recovery; email and security, archiving and encryption; web monitoring and security; cloud and dedicated servers, colocation and replication, virtual desktops; and business continuity and disaster recover." Link
#1
When I worked on a project for the NSA they demanded that every NVRAM chip in the board be overwritten with X and Os in a pattern they would specify and could confirm with a before and after before any of the server boards could leave their facilities in case some sneaky bastard tried to hide data on the NVRAM chips and recover it outside the facilities.
Does any commercially available erase software do that sort of thing?
[Politico] Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton's most trusted confidante, is increasingly becoming a central figure in the email scandal that's haunting her boss on the campaign trail, as Republicans and federal judges seek information about Clinton's communications while she was running the State Department.
The 2016 Democratic front-runner on Monday told a federal judge that Abedin -- long considered her boss's keeper and even dubbed her "shadow" -- had her own email account on Clinton's now infamous home-brewed server, "which was used at times for government business," Clinton acknowledged. That's an unusual arrangement, even for top brass at the State Department.
Abedin has hired a team of lawyers, one of whom is a former Clinton aide, who are responding to information requests from the courts and State. They've denied any wrongdoing on the part of their client and said Abedin is cooperating with requests for official emails in her possession, aiming to turn over all her correspondence by the end of August.
But her lawyers -- Karen Dunn and Miguel Rodriguez -- didn't respond to questions about emails on Clinton's separate server. Dunn is a partner at Boies, Schiller & Flexner, and she served as a senior advisor to Clinton when she was in the Senate.
[Wash Times] The revelation that Hillary Rodham Clinton's private emails contained sensitive information derived from spy satellites and signal intelligence undercuts her defense that she had no reason to believe she was dealing with classified information, security experts say.
"If she is so ignorant that she doesn't recognize that this type of information in the email as being classified, it just calls into question her overall competence," Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst trained in the rules of handling government secrets, told The Washington Times.
As details emerge about the extent of Mrs. Clinton's use of personal email to exclusively conduct business as secretary of state, her defense has shifted.
A federal judge ordered Hillary Clinton and two of her top aides not to delete any potentially work-related emails after Clinton's former chief of staff vowed to discard all electronic copies of her records by Monday.
Judge Emmet Sullivan of the U.S. District Court also demanded Clinton, Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin provide assurances by Wednesday that they would not delete any federal records in their possession.
The order came Friday evening in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch seeking documentation of a controversial employment status bestowed on Abedin, Clinton's deputy chief of staff, that allowed her to work simultaneously for the State Department, the Clinton Foundation and a consulting firm called Teneo Strategies.
After Sullivan asked Clinton, Mills and Abedin to certify under penalty of perjury that they had each submitted all work-related emails, only Clinton reportedly responded.
Mills and Abedin seemingly ignored requests that they had handed over all their emails as each continued to prepare emails for the State Department.
"The destruction of federal documents in the face of a court order is par for the course for a Clinton-related scandal," said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch. "If not for the swift action of Judicial Watch's legal team and an alert federal judge, there is no telling what important public information would have been lost forever."
The conservative watchdog group filed an "urgent response" Friday evening after learning of Mills' plans, laid out in a letter from her attorney to the State Department, to delete all remaining electronic copies of her work-related emails.
Mills, Clinton's former chief of staff, was asked by the State Department Thursday to submit all copies of records related to her government service in the wake of growing inquiries about her boss' unusual email arrangement. She plans to hand over another batch of documents Monday.
"Following our production on Aug. 10, 2015, we have instructed her to delete any and all electronic copies in her possession," Mills' attorney wrote in a letter to the State Department Thursday.
Her attorney also told the agency that Mills never had an email account on Clinton's private server, contrary to numerous reports that asserted Mills hosted her communications on the same "clintonemail.com" domain that Clinton used for her own emails.
[Breitbart] A former senior investigator with the State Department's criminal investigative unit has turned whistleblower and alleged to both the media and Congress that senior staff within State Department covered up investigations into appalling behavior committed by members of Hillary Clinton's security staff and our ambassador to Belgium. One of those alleged to have interfered was Cheryl Mills, Hillary's chief of staff.
The case in which Clinton enforcer Mills allegedly intervened centered upon Brett McGurk, Obama's nominee to be US ambassador to Iraq.
McGurk's expected nomination fell apart after a computer hack exposed his racy e-mails and an extramarital affair with Wall Street Journal reporter Gina Chon.
According to the memo, the SID "never interviewed McGurk, allegedly because Cheryl Mills from the Secretary's office interceded."
"Without that interview, SID has been unable to close the case," the memo concludes.
Mills is a longtime associate of the Clintons, going back to 1992, and was also at the center of the first scandal to hit Hillary's State Department: Benghazi. Gregory Hicks, the former Deputy Chief of Mission in Libya, testified before Congress that Mills instructed him not to cooperate with the Congressional investigation into the September 11 terror attacks.
Mills isn't the only high-ranking official being named. Patrick Kennedy, the Undersecretary of State for Management, is directly accused of killing an investigation into our Ambassador to Belgium, Howard Gutman, who is accused of slipping away from his security detail to solicit sex from minor children. Appears a rift exists, or has existed between the Clinton inner circle and Foggy Bottom career DoS, Foreign Service types. The gloves are off, the 'cheese eating' has begun. Make no mistake, a Federal investigation is now officially underway and people are diving for cover. As has been said here previously, the Beest did not act alone. We may be seeing more of Joe Biden very, very soon.
#5
If they've have suspect emails, the server is not needed. It should be easy enough to construct the elements of a criminal conspiracy without the server. This sanitizing and retransmission of classified email traffic was a 24x7 TEAM effort. Several people would have had to be involved. Even more would have been knowledgeable.
If the Beest used nothing but an UNCLAS system, how did she communicate with the Champ while she was at State. Someone needs to subpoena members of the White House Communications Detachment and the U.S. State Department Information Management Officer (IMO) ask some probing questions.
What if anything did the WH know? How could the Foggy Bottom IMO or WH Coms Det NOT know ?
#6
...and then the Chinese wait in the wings, with materials in hand. How can the Clintistas claim they're not authentic as they have no evidence to say otherwise having destroyed it?
This could be a fascinating year of (literally) Chinese water torture, drop after drop after drop....
[U.S. House of Representatives - The Senate Committee on Benghazi] August 11, 2015
Press Release
Washington, DC-- Select Committee on Benghazi Chairman Trey Gowdy issued the following statement after former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton turned over the personal home server she used to conduct official United States foreign policy and several thumb drives reportedly containing emails with compartmented classified intelligence that she had turned over to her personal attorney:
"For months the Select Committee on Benghazi has called on Secretary Clinton to turn over her server to a neutral, detached third party for independent forensic examination. She refused every entreat. Secretary Clinton said she created this unusual email arrangement with herself for "convenience." It may have been convenient for her, but it has been troubling at multiple levels for the rest of the country. Congress, the media, the public, private litigants and FOIA requestors were denied access to public documents, and recently the Inspectors General for two separate Executive Branch entities expressed concern about the possible exposure of classified material as a direct result of her decision to eschew the email rules applicable to everyone else and create her own.
"The IC Inspector General revealed Secretary Clinton's emails and server contained not just 'top secret' classified information, but 'compartmented' classified intelligence not releasable to foreigners, which must be noted in the timing of this announcement.
"Both the ICIG and the State Department IG were nominated by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the Senate when it was controlled by Democrats. Secretary Clinton's decision to prioritize her own convenience - and desire for control - over the security of our country's intelligence should concern all people of good conscience. This is a serious national security issue, and the seriousness of it should transcend normal, partisan politics.
"The revelation that Secretary Clinton exclusively used private email for official public business, and the multitude of issues that emanated from her decision, including this most recent one, demonstrates what can happen when Congress and those equally committed to exposing the truth, doggedly pursue facts and follow them."
#5
I concur Iblis. I would also add that the software firm [Denver-based computer services firm Platte River Networks] should be fully and aggressively investigated, and possibly indicated as a co-conspirator under The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act.
[Jpost] ... and demanded to know where the explosives were
In an interview with Army Radio, the prime minister describes his role in the daring operation to free passengers from a hijacked Sabena plane four years before Entebbe.
Bibi is made of entirely different stuff than our own beloved president (a statement with which both men would no doubt agree with equal satisfaction).
One does not need to soil one's hands, miss out on step increases, annual bonuses, or promotions....if an Affirmative Action puppet is available. It's the ultimate Source Operation challenge. Who wants to live in D.C. anyway ?
[WAPO] Army Chief of Staff Gen. Raymond T. Odierno said Wednesday that he disagrees with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's idea that the United States should go into Iraq and seize oil being used to fund the Islamic State militant group, saying that there are limits on what military power can do.
Odierno's comments came in a wide-ranging briefing with reporters at the Pentagon as he prepares to retire as the Army's top officer after 39 years of service. Trump, the Republican front-runner in the 2016 presidential election, said Tuesday in a television interview that he "would go in and take the oil" and put troops in place to protect the oilfields. Faithful until the end. What new regime post awaits him ?
#1
Let's see where this toady goes next. Brookings? George Washington U? Tufts? the Bill and Hillary Foundation? The Obama Library? Planned Parenthood?
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
A federal judge ordered Hillary Clinton and two of her top aides not to delete any potentially work-related emails after Clinton's former chief of staff vowed to discard all electronic copies of her records by Monday.
