The Hillary Clinton email controversy is a major public controversy arising from the use by Hillary Clinton of her family's personal email server for official communications during her tenure as US Secretary of State rather than an official State Department email account maintained on the server federal safe. Those official communications include more than 100 emails containing confidential information (but no classification marks) when they are shipped, as well as 2,093 unclassified emails classified but will subtract into "secret" ratings by the Department of Foreign Affairs. The post-election analysis of media coverage during the 2016 presidential campaign showed that the Clinton email controversy received the most extensive coverage of any topic.
The controversy took place against the background of Clinton 2016 presidential election campaign and a hearing held by the US House Select Committee in Benghazi. Some experts, officials, and members of Congress are of the opinion that its use of private messaging software and private server software violates the protocols and procedures of the Department of Foreign Affairs, as well as federal laws and regulations governing the listing. In response, Clinton said that his personal email usage is in accordance with federal and state statute laws and that the former secretary of state has also maintained a personal email account, even though it is not their own personal email server.
After allegations were raised that some of the emails contained confidential information, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began an investigation into the origin and handling of confidential emails on Clinton servers. FBI director James Comey identified 110 emails as containing classified information at the time it was shipped, including 65 emails deemed "Confidential" and 22 considered "Top Secrets". None of these have any classification marks. However, as noted in Clinton's non-disclosure agreement, unmarked confidential information should be treated similarly to the marked confidential information. An additional three email chains containing "portion marks", simply "(C)" indicate "Confidential" in front of one or more paragraphs. This was not included in Comey's list of 110 because the State Department failed to confirm that they were classified as they were sent. Clinton told the FBI that he did not know the meaning of "(C)". Nearly 2,100 emails on the server are retroactively marked as being classified by the Department of Foreign Affairs. In April 2018, Comey said that it was possible that his decision to announce the reopening of the inquiry was influenced by the fact that he thought it highly likely that Clinton would be the next President.
News reports show that while some emails contain information that the government considers classified to the highest level, the information is "harmless" and not "very sensitive" because email addresses things simultaneously available in the public domain - like in newspapers - but the government "have an agent" that obtains the same information in a secret way of maintaining and enforcing such fixed classification status. The Los Angeles Times was reported in October 2015, "Critics, including many current and former officials, have been arguing over the years that governments classify too much information, often for reasons unrelated to threats real security. "
In May 2016, the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Foreign Affairs released a 83-page report on the State Department's email practices, including Clinton's. In July 2016, Comey announced that the FBI investigation had concluded that Clinton was "very careless" in handling his email system but recommended that there be no charges against him. On 6 July 2016, Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced that no charges would be filed. US presidential candidate Donald Trump used the nickname Crooked Hillary to criticize Clinton especially in relation to the email controversy.
On October 28, 2016, just days before the 2016 election day, Comey told Congress that the FBI had begun searching for newly discovered emails that might be related to the case. On November 6, Comey told Congress that the FBI did not change its conclusions, reached in July, about Clinton's emails. Comey's decision to hold a speech concluded that Clinton was "very reckless" in the summer of 2016 and then just days before the 2016 general election announced the reopening of the investigation were both highly controversial, with critics saying that Comey violated the Justice Department's guidelines and precedents, he harms the public against Clinton. Clinton himself, as well as other observers like Nate Silver, argues that Comey's decision to reopen the days of the investigation before the election date is a factor in his 2016 presidential election. On 14 June 2018, the Office of the Inspectorate General of the Department of Justice released his report into the FBI investigation and DOJ for Clinton's investigation.
Video Hillary Clinton email controversy
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Clinton's BlackBerry Usage
Prior to being appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs in 2009, Clinton and his circle of friends and colleagues communicated via BlackBerry phones. State Department security personnel stated this would pose a security risk during his tenure. The email account used on BlackBerry Clinton is then hosted on a private server in the basement of his home in Chappaqua, New York, but the information is not disclosed to State Department security personnel or senior State Department personnel. It proved impractical to find a solution, even after consulting with the National Security Agency, which would not allow Clinton to use his BlackBerry, or any unsafe device, associated with his personal server at home.
Setting up a secure desktop computer in his office is advisable, but Clinton is unfamiliar with its use and opts for the convenience of his BlackBerry, not the State Department, the government protocol of a secure desktop computer. Attempts to find a safe solution were abandoned by Clinton, and he was warned by State Department security personnel about an unsafe BlackBerry vulnerability to hacking. He affirmed his knowledge of the dangers, and was reportedly told that the Diplomatic Security Bureau had obtained intelligence information about its vulnerability when he was on his way to Asia, but continued to use his BlackBerry outside his office.
Domain names and mail servers
At the Senate confirmation session on Hillary Clinton's nomination as Secretary of State, the clintonemail.com domain name, wjcoffice.com, and presidentclinton.com were registered with Eric Hoteham, with Clinton's home and her husband in Chappaqua, New York, as a contact address. The domain pointed to a personal email server that Clinton (who never had a state.gov email account) used to send and receive emails, and purchased and installed at Clintons' home for his 2008 presidential campaign.
The email server is located at Clintons home in Chappaqua, New York, from January 2009 to 2013, when it was sent to a data center in New Jersey before being submitted to Platte River Networks, a Denver-based information technology company that Clinton hired to manage its email system.
The server itself runs a Microsoft Exchange 2010 server with access to internet mail delivered by Outlook Web App. Web pages are secured with a TLS certificate to enable information to be securely transmitted while using the website. However, during the first two months of its use - January 2009 to 29 March 2009 - web pages reportedly not secured with TLS certificates, which means that the information transmitted using the service is unencrypted and may have been parried.
Initial awareness
In early 2009, officials with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) expressed concern over the possible violation of the normal federal government records procedure at the State Department under then-Secretary Clinton.
In December 2012, towards the end of Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State, a nonprofit group called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, filed a FOIA request seeking records of his email. CREW received a response in May 2013: "no records are responsive to your request." Emails sent to Clinton's personal clintonemail.com were first discovered in March 2013, when a hacker named "Guccifer" sent an extensive email sent to Clinton from Sidney Blumenthal, which Guccifer obtained by illegally accessing Blumenthal's email account. Emails dealt with Benghazi attacks 2012 and other issues in Libya and revealed the existence of its clintonemail.com address.
Blumenthal has no security clearance when he receives material from Clinton that has since been characterized as being classified by the State Department.
In the summer of 2014, lawyers from the State Department looked at a number of emails from Clinton's personal account, while reviewing the documents requested by the Parliament's Select Committee in Benghazi. A request by the State Department for additional emails led to negotiations with his lawyer and his advisers. In October, the State Department sent a letter to Clinton and all previous Secretaries of State returned to Madeleine Albright requesting emails and documents relating to their work at the office. On December 5, 2014, Clinton's lawyers sent 12 boxes of files filled with printed paper containing over 30,000 emails. Clinton held back nearly 32,000 emails that were considered private. Datto, Inc., which provides data backup services for Clinton emails, agrees to provide FBI hardware that stores backups.
As of May 2016, no answer was given to the public, whether 31,000 emails removed by Hillary Clinton as a person have been or can be recovered.
A March 2, 2015 New York Times article broke the story that the Benghazi panel found Clinton exclusively using his own personal email server rather than the government issued during his tenure as Secretary of State, and that his aides did not take action to preserve email sent or received from his/her personal account as required by law. At that time, Clinton announced that he had requested the State Department to release his email. Some in the media labeled controversy "emailgate".
Maps Hillary Clinton email controversy
Private server usage for government business
According to Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill, a number of government officials have used personal email accounts for official businesses, including the state secretary before Clinton.
State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said: "For some historical context, Secretary Kerry is the country's first secretary to rely primarily on state.gov email accounts." John Wonderlich, a transparency advocate with the Sunlight Foundation, observes when many government officials use personal email accounts, the use of their personal email servers is less frequent.
And Metcalfe, former head of the Justice Department's Information and Privacy Office, says this gives him tighter control over his emails by not involving third parties like Google and helps prevent their disclosure by a Congressional order. He added: "He managed to isolate his official email, of course, from FOIA, both during his tenure in the State and long after his departure from it - perhaps forever", making it "an outright escape from FOIA by someone who no doubt know better ".
According to Harf, the use by government officials of personal email for government business is allowed under the Federal Record Act, as long as the relevant official communications, including all work-related emails, are preserved by the agent. The Act (amended at the end of 2014 after Clinton leaves office to require that personal emails be transferred to a government server within 20 days) requires an agent to maintain all official communications, including all work-related emails, and specifies that government employees can not damage or delete the relevant records. NARA's rules dictate how records should be made and maintained, requiring that they be kept "by agency" and "readily found", and that the recording should "allow proper oversight by Congress". Section 1924 of Title 18 of the United States Code discusses the deletion and storage of confidential documents, in which "consciously" removes or classifies confidential information in "unauthorized locations" subject to fines, or up to one year in jail.
Experts like Metcalfe agree that these practices are permitted by federal law with the assumption that the material should not be classified, or at least these practices are allowed in an emergency, but they do not recommend these practices, believe that an official email account should be used.
Jason R. Baron, former head of litigation in NARA, described the practice as "very unusual" but not a violation of the law. In a separate interview, he said, "It is very difficult to imagine a short - winter nuclear scenario - where an agency would be justified in allowing cabinet level officials to use only private email communication channels to do government business." Baron told the Senate Judiciary Committee in May 2015 that "every employee's decision to perform all email correspondence via personal email network, using non-Gov addresses, is not consistent with policies and practices that have long been established under the Federal Record Act and NARA regulations which governs all federal agencies. "
May 2016 report from the Inspector General of the Department of Foreign Affairs
In May 2016, Department of Inspector General Steve Linick's office released a 83-page report on the State Department's email practice. The Inspector General could not find any evidence that Clinton had sought approval from State Department staff for his use of a personal email server, specifying that if Clinton requested approval, Department staff would refuse its arrangement because of "the security risk in doing so". Aside from the security risks, the report states that "he does not comply with Department policies implemented in accordance with the Federal Record Law." Each of these findings contradicts what Clinton and his aides said until then. The report also stated that Clinton and his senior assistants refused to talk to investigators, while four Secretaries of State had previously done so.
The report also examines the practices of some previous Secretaries of State and concludes that the practice of listing the Department is below standard for many years. The Inspector General criticized the use of Clinton's personal email for the Department's business, concluding that it was "not the right method" of preserving the documents and not following the Department's policies aiming to comply with federal record law. The report also criticizes Colin Powell, who uses personal email accounts for businesses, saying that this violates several of the same Department policies. State Department spokesman Mark Toner said the report emphasized the need for federal agencies to adapt "record-keeping practices for decades into the email-dominated modern era" and said that the Department's record keeping practice has been improved under the current Secretary of State. John F. Kerry, Clinton successor. The report also notes that the rules for preserving work-related emails are updated in 2009.
Inspector General Linick wrote that he "found no evidence that the staff at the Office of the Legal Advisor reviewed or approved the Clinton Secretary's private system", and also found that some State employees who raised concerns about the Clinton server were notified that the Office of the Legal Advisor had approved of it, and was subsequently notified to "never talk about the Secretary's private email system anymore".
Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon issued a statement saying: "The report indicates that problems with the State Department's electronic records system have been around for a long time" and that Clinton "took steps that were far more advanced than others to preserve and release their records with right. "However, the Associated Press said," The audit notes that former Secretary of State Colin Powell also exclusively uses personal email accounts.... But Clinton's failure was chosen in the audit as more serious than his predecessor. "The report stated that" With Clinton's term of office, the department's guidance is much more detailed and more sophisticated, cybersecurity practices The appropriate Clinton Secretary should be evaluated in the light of this more comprehensive directive. "
Server security and hacking attempts
Encryption and security
In 2008, before Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State, Justin Cooper, an old aide to Clinton's husband, former President Bill Clinton, manages the system. Cooper has no security permission or expertise in computer security. Later, Bryan Pagliano, a former IT director for the 2008 Clinton presidential campaign, was hired to maintain their personal email server while Clinton was the Secretary of State. Pagliano had requested the Fifth Amendment during a congressional question about the Clinton server. In early 2016, he was granted immunity by the Department of Justice in exchange for cooperation with prosecutors. A Clinton spokesman said his campaign was "happy" Pagliano is now working with prosecutors. As of May 2016, the State Department remains unable to locate most of Pagliano's work-related emails from the period when he was employed by the department under the Clinton Secretary.
Security experts like Chris Soghoian believe that emails to and from Clinton may be at risk of hacking and foreign control. Marc Maiffret, a cybersecurity expert, said that the server has an "amateur hour" vulnerability. During the first two months after Clinton was appointed Secretary of State and began accessing mail on the server via his Blackberry, the transmission to and from the server was not encrypted. On March 29, 2009, a digital certificate was obtained that enabled encryption.
Former Defense Intelligence Director Michael T. Flynn, former United States Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and former deputy director of Central Intelligence Agency Michael Morell said that it is possible that foreign governments can access information on Clinton servers. Michael Hayden, former Director of the National Security Agency, Deputy Director of National Intelligence, and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, said: "I will lose all respect for a large number of foreign intelligence services if they do not sit back, rummaging through emails.
Hacking attempts
The Clinton server is configured to allow users to connect openly from the Internet and control it remotely using Microsoft Remote Desktop Services.
It's known that hackers are aware of Clinton's non-public email address in early 2011. Secretary Clinton and his staff are aware of hacking efforts in 2011, and are reportedly worried about them.
In 2012, according to server records, a hacker in Serbia scan the Chappaqua Clinton server at least twice, in August and in December 2012. It is not clear if the hacker knows Clinton's servers, even though it identifies itself as an email service provider for clintonemail.com. During 2014, Clinton servers are the target of recurring annoyances originating from Germany, China, and South Korea. The threat monitoring software on the server blocked at least five such attempts. The software was installed in October 2013, and for three months prior to that, no software was installed.
According to Pagliano, Clinton's email server security logs do not show evidence of successful hacking. The New York Times reports that "forensic experts can sometimes see sophisticated hacking unclear in logs, but computer security experts view logs as key documents when it detects hackers," adding logs "to support Mrs. Statement Clinton that he's using a personal email account [...] does not put American secrets into the hands of hackers or foreign governments.
In 2013, Romanian hacker Marcel Lehel Laz? R (aka "Guccifer") distributed a personal memo from Sidney Blumenthal to Clinton on an event in Libya. In 2016, Laz? R was extradited from Romania to the United States to face federal charges unrelated to hacking into accounts of a number of US figures, and pleaded guilty to these charges. While being held for trial, Lazr claimed to the media that he had hacked into the Clinton servers, but did not provide proof of this claim. Officials linked to the investigation told the media that they found no evidence to support Lazand's statement, and Clinton's press secretary Brian Fallon said, "There is absolutely no basis to believe the claims made by this criminal from his prison cell." FBI Director James Comey later stated in a congressional hearing that Guccifer admits his claim is a lie.
According to security researchers at Secureworks, the email leak was caused by Threat Group-4127 (TG-4127), which targets government, military, and international non-governmental organizations. The CTU researchers believe that the group is gathering information for the Russian Government.
Confidential information in email
In various interviews, Clinton said that "I do not send classified material, and I do not accept any material that is marked or classified." However, in June and July 2016, a number of news outlets reported that Clinton's emails did not include messages with the "portion" classification. The FBI investigation found that 110 messages containing the information classified at the time were sent. The sixty-five emails were found to contain information classified as "Confidential"; more than 20 contains "Top-Secret" information. Three emails, of 30,000, were found marked as being classified, although they did not have headers classified and were only marked with a lowercase "c" in parentheses, which were described as "part marks" by Comey. He added that Clinton might not be "technically sophisticated enough" to understand what the three secret signals mean.
Clinton personally wrote 104 of 2,093 emails that were retroactively found to contain information classified as "confidential." From the rest of the email that was classified after being sent, Clinton's maid, Jake Sullivan, wrote the most, 215.
According to the Department of Foreign Affairs, there are 2,093 email chains on servers that are retroactively marked as classified by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the "Secret" secret level. TG-4127 accesses the Hillary for America Campaign Gmail account via a fake login page. Victims think they are standard pages and hackers can access their email accounts.
Inspector reports and General report of the Department of Foreign Affairs
June 29, 2015, a memorandum from the Department of State's Inspector General, Steve A. Linick, said that a review of the 55,000-page email release found "hundreds of potentially classified emails". A memo of July 17, 2015, a follow-up memo, sent jointly by Linick and Intelligence Community Inspector (IC), I. Charles McCullough III, to the Deputy Secretary of State for Management Patrick F. Kennedy, stated that they have confirmed that some emails contain confidential information that is not marked as confidential, at least one of which is publicly released.
On July 24, 2015, Linick and McCullough said they had found confidential information about Clinton's email account, but did not say whether Clinton sent or received an email. Researchers from their office, looking for a randomly selected sample of 40 emails, found four containing confidential information from US intelligence agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA). Their statements say that the information they find is classified when sent, remains as their examination, and "should not be transmitted via an unclassified personal system".
In a separate statement in the form of a letter to Congress, McCullough said that he had made a request to the State Department for access to the entire set of emails submitted by Clinton, but the Department rejected his request. The letter states that no emails are marked as confidential, but because they include confidential information they should have been tagged and handled as such, and delivered safely.
On August 10, 2015, the inspector general of IC said that two of the 40 emails in the sample were "Confidential Compatibility/Sensitive Top Information" and were then given a secret label "TK" (for "Talent Keyhole", indicating materials obtained by air or image based sources space and NOFORN). One of them is a discussion of news articles about US drone aircraft operations. The second, he said, either refers to the secret material or the other is the "parallel reporting" of open source intelligence, which may still be classified by government "having agents" sourced information in a confidential manner even though the same information is also available in the public domain. The Clinton and Foreign Affairs presidents campaign denied the letter, and questioned whether the emails had been over-classified by an arbitrary process. According to unnamed sources, the secondary review by the CIA and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency endorsed previous inspectors the general findings concluded that the email (one related to North Korea's nuclear weapons program) was "Top Secret" when it was received by Clinton via his personal server on in 2009 and 2011, a conclusion was also denied by the Clinton campaign.
The Inspector General of IC issued another letter to Congress on January 14, 2016. In this letter he stated that an unnamed intelligence agency has made a sworn statement that "several dozen emails [have been] determined by IC elements reside in SECRET, SECRET, and level TOP SECRET/SAP. "Other intelligence officials added that a few dozen were not two emails from the previous sample and that the IC inspector general's own permission should be upgraded before he can learn about the program referenced by email. NBC News reported on January 20, 2016 that senior US officials described these emails as "harmless" because - although they discussed the CIA drone program technically classified TOP SECRET/SAP - the existence of the CIA drone program is well known. and was discussed in the public domain for many years. These officials characterize the IC inspector general as unfair in how he handles this issue.
On January 29, 2016, the State Department announced that 22 documents from Clinton's email server would not be released because it contained highly confidential information that was too sensitive to public consumption. At the same time, the State Department announced that it initiated its own investigation into whether the server contained classified information at the time it was sent or received.
In February 2016, the State Department IG Linick submitted another report to Undersecretary of State Kennedy, stating that his office also found secret material in 10 emails in personal email accounts of former staff member Secretary Condoleezza Rice and two emails in a private email account of former Minister Abroad Colin Powell. None of the emails are classified for intelligence reasons. PolitiFact found out a year earlier that Powell was the only former foreign minister who used a personal email account. In February 2016, Clinton's campaign chief issued a statement claiming that his email, like his predecessor, "is improperly subject to overclassification."
FBI investigation
July 2015 - Security reference
The findings of the Inspector General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Community Intelligence (IC) of four emails containing confidential information, from a random sample of 40, prompted them to make security references to the FBI counter-intelligence office, to alert authorities that confidential information be stored on Clinton servers and by his lawyer with a thumb drive. As part of an FBI investigation at the request of the IC inspector general, Clinton agreed to submit his mail server to the US Department of Justice, as well as a thumb drive containing a copy of his work related email. Another email was obtained by the US House Select Committee on Benghazi from other sources, in connection with the committee's inquiry. Clinton's own emails were made public gradually by the State Department with a gradual timetable.
Clinton's IT contractor switched his personal email server to the FBI on August 12, 2015, as well as a thumb drive containing a copy of his email.
In a letter describing the matter to Senator Ron Johnson, Chairman of the Senate of the Internal Security Committee, Clinton's attorney David E. Kendall said that email, and all other data stored on the server, had previously been removed before the device was handed over to the authorities, and that he and other lawyers have been given a security clearance by the State Department to handle a thumb drive containing about 30,000 emails that Clinton later also submitted to the authorities. Kendall said that the thumb drive was stored in a safe provided to him in July by the State Department.
August 2015 - Investigation continues; email recovery
On August 20, 2015, US District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan stated that Hillary Clinton's actions to maintain a private email server conflicted directly with US government policies. "We will not be here today if this employee has followed the government's policy," he said, and ordered the State Department to work with the FBI to determine if any emails on the server during his tenure as Minister for Foreign Affairs can be recovered.
Platte River Networks, a Denver-based company that manages Clinton servers since 2013, says it has no knowledge of deleted servers. "The Platte River has no knowledge of deleted servers", company spokesman Andy Boian told the Washington Post . "All the information we have is the server is not deleted." When asked by the Washington Post, the Clinton campaign declined to comment.
In September 2015, FBI investigators engaged in the sorting of messages restored from the server. In November 2015, the FBI expanded its investigations to check whether Clinton or his aides were endangering the secrets of national security, and if so, who should be held accountable.
Conflicting media sources measured FBI investigations from 12 to 30 agents as of March 2016.
May-July 2016 - Public statement
In May 2016, FBI Director James Comey said that Clinton's description of the investigation as a "security inquiry" did not accurately say "It's on our behalf I'm not familiar with the term 'security inquiry'" and "We're investigating... That's what we do ".
At the end of June 2016, it was reported that Bill Clinton met privately with Attorney General Loretta Lynch on her private plane on an airstrip at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. Officials indicated that the 30-minute meeting took place when Clinton learned that the Lynch plane was on the same runway at the airport. When the meeting became public, Lynch stated that it was "primarily social" and "no discussion of any pending issues for any department or any pending matter for any other body". Lynch was criticized for his involvement in the meeting and was asked by some critics to resign from involvement in an FBI investigation into an email case. In response, he declared "the FBI is investigating whether Mrs Clinton, his aide or anyone broke the law by setting up a personal email server for him used as state secretary", but "this case will be resolved by the same party." teams who have done it from scratch "and" I will accept their recommendations. "
On July 1, 2016, the New York Times reported on behalf of the "Justice Department Officer" that Attorney General Loretta Lynch would receive "whatever the career prosecutor and director of the FBI recommends about whether to file charges related to the mail server personally Hillary Clinton. "
Clinton stated that he did not send or receive any confidential emails from his private server. In a Democratic debate with Bernie Sanders on February 4, 2016, Clinton said, "I never send or receive any secret material." In a Meet the Press interview on July 2, 2016, he stated: "Let me repeat what I have reviewed for months now, I have never received or sent marked material classified."
July 2016 - The investigation ends
On July 5, 2016, FBI Director Comey announced in a statement he read to a press and television reporter at the FBI headquarters in Washington, DC that the FBI had completed his investigation and referred him to the State Department with the recommendation "that there is no corresponding fee in terms of this. "He added," Despite the evidence of potential violations of the law regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor will bring such a case. "
Regarding the mistake of handling classified information, Comey said, "there is evidence that they [Clinton and his team] are very careless in handling highly sensitive and highly confidential information." The investigation found 110 emails that should be considered classified when sent; 2,000 other emails are retroactively classified which means they are not classified when they are shipped. Comey says that "any reasonable person in the position of the Clinton Secretary, or in the position of the government employee who corresponds to him... should know that the unclassified system is not the place for the conversation."
The FBI knows that Clinton uses his personal email extensively while out of the United States, both sending and receiving work-related emails in sophisticated enemy territories. The FBI did not find "direct evidence that the personal e-mail domain of the Clinton Secretary... was hacked"; they rate it "possible that a hostile actor gained access" to it. Researchers found that State Department employees often use personal email to do business. Comey noted, "We also developed evidence that the State Department's security culture in general, and with respect to the use of e-mail systems that are not specifically classified, are generally lacking in the type of care for confidential information found elsewhere in government."
On July 6, 2016, Lynch confirmed that an investigation into the use of Hillary Clinton's private mail server while the state secretary will be closed without criminal charges.
October 2016 - Additional investigations
In early October 2016, FBI criminal investigators worked on a case involving former Congressman Anthony Weiner who allegedly sent an explicit sexual texts to a fifteen-year-old girl who found an email from Weiner's exiled wife, Huma Abedin, vice president of Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign , that they are considered potentially relevant to Clinton's server investigation. FBI officials reportedly decided to disclose developments despite its potential impact on a delayed presidential election to precede the possibility that it would leak in another way.
On October 28, 2016, Comey told Congress that "in relation to an unrelated case, the FBI has noticed the existence of an email that appears to be related to the investigation." He said the FBI would take "appropriate investigative measures designed to enable researchers to review these emails to determine if they contained confidential information, as well as to assess their interest in our investigations." He added that the FBI "has not been able to assess whether or not this material may be significant." The FBI obtained a new search warrant to allow them to review Abedin's email.
Comey informed Congress of this additional investigation despite being advised by Justice Department officials that such an announcement would violate the policies and procedures of the department, including the policy of not commenting on an inquiry approaching the election. Comey later explained, in a letter to the FBI employee, "We usually do not tell Congress about ongoing investigations, but here I feel obligated to do so as I testify repeatedly in the last few months that our investigation is over." Law enforcement sources added that he was afraid he would be accused of hiding relevant information if he did not reveal it.
News of this new investigation was revealed shortly before the US presidential election led to the so-called "surprise October" announcement, and sparked statements from Democratic and Republican campaigns. Donald Trump reiterates his characterization that Hillary Clinton's use of email as state secretary is "worse than Watergate." Clinton called on the FBI to immediately release all information about the newly discovered email and said he believes the FBI will not change the previous conclusion that there is no basis for criminal prosecution. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) said he was "shocked" by the letter, saying it was "playing right on Donald Trump's political campaign."
On November 6, in another letter to Congress, Comey stated that, after working "all the time" to review all newly discovered emails, the FBI did not change the conclusions reached in July. An unnamed government official added that the newly discovered email turned out to be a previously reviewed private or duplicate email, and that the letter Comey was the conclusion of the inquiry. The next day, stock markets and currencies around the world soared in response.
On November 12, during a telephone conference to top donors, Hillary Clinton linked the loss of her presidential election to Comey's announcement, saying they were halting her momentum. In January 2017, the US Department of Justice initiated an investigation into Comey's announcement.
The Senate investigates Loretta Lynch's interference
According to Comey June 8, 2017, testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee, Attorney General Loretta Lynch has asked him to downplay the investigation into Clinton's e-mail by calling it a "problem" rather than an investigation. He said the request was "confusing and worried" about him. He added that Lynch's tarmac meeting with Bill Clinton also influenced his decision to publicly announce the results of the FBI investigation.
On June 23, 2017, several members of the Senate Judiciary Committee opened a bipartisan inquiry as to whether former Prosecutor General Lynch intervened in an FBI investigation into the use of Hillary Clinton's personal email server.
Investigations Department of Foreign Affairs
On July 7, 2016, the Department of the Interior went on to review whether the confidential information had been mismanaged. The review has been suspended until the investigation of the Department of Justice has been completed.
Department of Justice Report Inspector General
Inspector General of the Department of Justice (IG) launched an investigation into how the DOJ and the FBI have handled an investigation into Clinton's email. On June 14, 2018, IG released a very critical report on Comey's actions. Regarding the July press conference, where he criticized Clinton even when announcing the investigation was completed, the IG said it was "extraordinary and disobedient for Comey to hide his intentions (about press conferences) from his superiors", and that "we find no reason to be persuasive basis to deviate from the Department's established policy. "The October decision to send a letter informing Congress that the investigation has reopened a week before the election is described as" ad-hoc "and" serious error in judgment ". However, IG concludes that the prosecution decision in the Clinton case is consistent with precedents and is unaffected by the bias.
Opinions of journalists and experts
According to the New York Times , if Clinton is a recipient of a secret email, "it is not clear that he will know that they contain government secrets, since they are not marked classified." The newspaper reported that "most specialists believe that sometimes the occurrence of secret information in a Clinton account may be a marginal consequence." Steven Aftergood, director of the Government Secrets Project at the Federation of American Scientists, says that the "spill" of accidental unintended information into an unclassified area is a common occurrence.
The August 2015 review of a set of emails released found "at least 30 email threads from 2009, representing a number of individual emails," which includes what the Department of Foreign Affairs identifies as "foreign government information", defined by the US government as "information, written or spoken, are provided with confidence to US officials by their foreign counterparts. "Though unmarked, Reuters's checks seem to indicate that these emails were" classified from scratch. " J. William Leonard, former director of the NARA Information Security Control Office, said that such information is "born disaggregated" and that the [ US and US owned channels. "According to Reuters, the US government's covert disclosure agreement" warns the authorities to handle confidential information that may not be marked in that way and that it may come in oral form. " The State Department "refutes the Reuters analysis" but refuses to explain.
The Associated Press reported, "Some officials say they believe that the designation is a stretch - a jolting step in bureaucracy with an exaggerated classification." Jeffrey Toobin, in an article in August 2015 New Yorker , writes that Clinton's email affairs are an illustration of overclassification, a problem written by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his book Secrecy: The American Experience Toobin that "government bureaucracies use classification rules to protect grass, to avoid embarrassment, to embarrass rivals - in short, for motives that have nothing to do with national security." Toobin writes that "It is not just the public that can not know the level or content of government secrecy.Realistically, government officials can not know it - and it is a matter of Hillary Clinton.Toobin notes that" one of Clinton's potentially clasified email exchanges is nothing more than a discussion of a newspaper story about drone "and wrote:" That such discussions can be classified underlines the absurdity of the current system. But it is an existing system, and if and when the agency determines that he sends or receives confidential information through his personal server, Clinton will be accused of misconduct in handling national security secrets. "
In an analysis of the Clinton email controversy published by the Brookings Institution, Richard Lempert writes that "security professionals have a reputation for being mistaken in the direction of overclassification." Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the national liberation and security program at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, said "It is likely that any confidential information in Clinton's email should not be classified," as about 50 to 90 percent of classified documents can be published without jeopardizing national security. Nate Jones, an expert with the National Security Archive at George Washington University, said: "Clinton's abuse of federal records and the intelligence community's desire to overclassize retroactively are two different issues.No politicians give the right message: Blame Clinton for bad notes practice, but do not accept overclassification when you do it. "'
House Oversight Committee hearing
On July 7, 2016, Comey was questioned for 5 hours by the US House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform. Comey stated that there was "evidence of misconduct" of confidential information and that he believed that Clinton was "very careless, I think he was negligent". He defended the FBI's recommendation not to file charges because "... would be unfair and almost unprecedented..."
Response and analysis
Clinton.27s_initial_response Clinton's early response
Clinton's spokesman Nick Merrill defended Hillary's use of his personal server and email account as in accordance with the "letter and spirit of the rules" .
Clinton himself stated that he had done it as "comfort".
On March 10, 2015, while attending a conference at UN headquarters in Manhattan, Clinton spoke with reporters for about 20 minutes. Clinton says he has used personal email for convenience, "because I think it would be easier to bring just one device for my work and for my personal email instead of two." He then decided that Clinton had used the iPad and BlackBerry when the Secretary of State.
Clinton submitted copies of 30,000 emails related to the State Department from his private servers belonging to the public domain; he then explains that he instructed his lawyers to err on the side of openness, reversing emails that are possible related to the job. His aides then removed about 31,000 emails from the server dated during the same time period that Clinton considered private and personal. Employees of the Department of Foreign Affairs have the right to delete personal emails.
Clinton has used humor to try to avoid scandal. In August 2015, when asked by reporters if he had "erased" his server, Clinton laughed and said: "What? Like with a cloth or something? I do not know how it works digitally at all." In September 2015, Clinton was asked in an interview with Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show about the email content. He laughs, saying there's nothing interesting and joking that he's offended people find his email 'boring'.
Response later
Clinton's response to the question, made during his presidential campaign, evolved over time.
Clinton initially said that there was no secret material on his server. Then, after a government review found some of his emails contained confidential information, he said he never sent or received any information marked . His campaign claimed another email containing information that is now classified, but retroactively classified by US intelligence services after Clinton received the material. See also the above section of the May 2016 IG report for a number of Clinton statements that are contrary to the report, and how he and his supporters responded afterwards.
Brian Fallon's campaign spokesman said: "He is a passive recipient of accidental information which is then considered a secret." Clinton's campaign spokesman, Jennifer Palmieri, has "emphasized that Clinton was allowed to use her own email account as a government employee and that a similar process of classification review would still be undertaken if she used the state.gov standard email account used by most people. "Palmieri later stated:" Look, this kind of bullshit comes with the territory to run for president. "We know that, Hillary knows that, and we expect it to continue from now until Election Day."
In his first national interview on the 2016 presidential election, on July 7, 2015, Clinton was asked by CNN Brianna Keilar about the use of his personal email account while serving as Secretary of State. He says:
Everything I do is allowed. There is no law. There are no rules. No one does not give me full authority to decide how I will communicate. The state secretary previously said they are doing the same thing... Everything I do is permitted by law and regulations. I have one device. When I send anyone in government, it will go into the system of government.
On September 9, 2015, Clinton apologized during an ABC News interview for using a private server, saying he was "sorry for that." Appeared on NBC's Meet the Press on September 27, 2015, Clinton defended its use from a private email server when he became secretary of state, comparing an investigation with a Republican-led investigation of his husband's presidential administration over two decades ago , said, "It's like a trickle, a trickle, a trickle, and that's why I say, there's just so much I can control."
Clinton and the State Department say emails are not marked classified when sent. However, Clinton signed a confidentiality agreement stating that the secret material may be "marked or unmarked". In addition, email authors are legally required to properly mark as classified if they contain confidential material, and to avoid the transmission of confidential material on personal devices, such as those used exclusively by Clinton.
Clinton stated that he did not send or receive any confidential emails from his private server. In a Democratic debate with Bernie Sanders on February 4, 2016, Clinton said, "I never send or receive any secret material." In a Meet the Press interview on July 2, 2016, Clinton declared: "Let me repeat what I have reviewed for months now, I have never received or sent marked material classified."
In an interview with Fox News in late July 2016, Clinton declared "Director Comey says my answer is honest, and what I say is consistent with what I say to the American people, that there are decisions being discussed and made to retroactively classify certain.. "The Washington Post awarded Clinton four" Pinocchios ", his worst rating, to his statement saying" While Comey says there is no evidence he lied to the FBI, it is not the same as saying he was telling the truth to the American public. "
Democratic response
In August 2015, the New York Times reported on "interviews with more than 75 governors, members of parliament, candidates and members of the Democratic Party" on email matters. The Times reported, "None of the interviewed Democrats went so far as to suggest that email issues raised concerns about Mrs. Clinton's ability to serve as president, and many expressed confidence that it had been produced by Republicans in Congress and other enemies. "At the same time, many Democrat leaders have shown increasing frustration among party leaders handling Clinton's email issue. For example, Edward G. Rendell, a former Pennsylvania governor, a Clinton supporter, said that the failure of Clinton's campaign to solve the problem at the beginning meant that the campaign was "left to play defense only." Other prominent Democrats, such as Governor Dannel P. Malloy of Connecticut, were less concerned, noting that the campaign was at an early stage and that an attack on Clinton would take place.
In October 2015's main debate, Clinton's main rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, defended Clinton, saying: "Let me say this Let me say something that may not be great politics, but I think the secretary is True. And that is that Americans are sick and tired of hearing about your fucking email! "Sanders then clarified that he considered Clinton's emails a" very serious problem ", but Americans wanted a discussion of" real "issues "for them, such as family leave pay and medical leave, college tuition, and campaign finance reform.
Republican response
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said in a statement on the June 30, 2015 email release, "This email... is just the tip of the iceberg, and we will never get full disclosure until Hillary Clinton releases her secret server for independent investigation." Trey Gowdy said on June 29, 2015, that he would press the State Department for a fuller record of Clinton's email, after the Benghazi panel took 15 additional emails to Sidney Blumenthal that the department had not given to the Committee.
On September 12, 2015, Republican Senators Charles Grassley and Ron Johnson, head of the Senate Committee on Justice and Homeland Security, respectively, said they would seek independent reviews of deleted emails, if they were found from Clinton servers, to determine if there were related government items among deleted ones.
Comparison and media coverage
Analysis by Columbia Journalism Review, Berkman Klein Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard University, and Shorenstein Center at Harvard Kennedy School show that the Clinton email controversy received more coverage in mainstream media than any other topic during the 2016 presidential election. New York Times coverage of the controversy email is vast; according to the analysis of Colombia Journalism Analysis, "in just six days," the New York Times contains many cover stories about Hillary Clinton's email as they do about all the policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the selection and that does not include three additional articles on October 18, and November 6 and 7, or two articles about emails taken from John Podesta). "In an attempt to explain skewed coverage, the Columbia Journalism Review speculated," In retrospect, it seems clear that the press generally make the mistake of deeming Clinton's victory unavoidable, and positioning themselves as a credible critic of the next government. "
Media commentators drew comparisons to the use of Clinton emails for past political controversies. Pacific Standard Magazine published an article in May 2015, comparing email controversy and its response to it with Whitewater investigations 20 years earlier.
In August 2015, the editorial editors and investigative journalist Bob Woodward, when asked about Clinton's handling of his email, said they reminded him of Nixon's tape from the Watergate scandal. On March 9, 2015, liberal columnist and Clinton supporter Dana Milbank wrote that the email affair was an "unnecessary and self-inflicted wound" caused by "caution" in "trying to ensure one or two embarrassing emails do not become public ", which led to" obsessive secrecy. "Milbank points out that Clinton himself has accurately criticized the George W. Bush administration in 2007 for a" secret "White House email account.
On Fox News Sunday, political analyst Juan Williams contrasted media coverage of Clinton's emails on the coverage of the White House email controversy in 2007 that he claimed was received "only about zero-press coverage". PolitiFact found Williams's statement to be "mostly wrong", concluding "We found hundreds of articles and television transcripts referring to this issue, but Williams has something important compared to the recent extensive coverage of Clinton's personal email usage, media coverage of email controversy The White House in 2007 is thin. "
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published an editorial comment that "the only credible reason for private servers in the crypt is to keep their emails out of the public eye by deliberately avoiding freedom of information laws. no president, no state secretary, no public official at any level above the law, choosing to ignore it, and having to face the consequences. "Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry writes in The Week that Clinton made personal email server, by distorting or at least circumventing regulations, with the motive of possibly avoiding federal records and transparency requirements, and doing so with substandard security. "
On November 2, 2016, Fox News broadcaster Bret Baier reported that, according to Fox anonymous sources, the FBI had found that Clinton's private servers had been hacked by "five foreign intelligence agencies". Baier further reported that according to an anonymous source of the FBI investigation of the Clinton Foundation "the possibility" to lead to Hillary Clinton's indictment. On November 4, 2016, he admitted that his statement was a mistake, saying, "the indictment is clearly a very important word," and that he is sorry.
House Select Committee in Benghazi
On March 27, 2015, Republican Congressman Trey Gowdy, Chairman of the Select Committee in Benghazi, confirmed that sometime after October 2014, Clinton "unilaterally decided to delete its servers clean" and "decided to delete all emails." Clinton's attorney, David E. Kendall, said on the day that the examination showed that no copies of Clinton's email were left on the server. Kendall says the server has been reconfigured to only store emails for 60 days after Clinton's lawyers decide which emails to submit.
On June 22, 2015, the Benghazi panel released an email between Clinton and Sidney Blumenthal, who was recently overthrown by the committee. Chairman of the Gowdy committee issued a press release criticizing Clinton for not giving an email to the State Department. Clinton said he provided all work-related emails to the State Department, and only personal emails on his personal server were destroyed. The State Department confirmed that 10 emails and a share of five others from Sidney Blumenthal on Benghazi, published by the Committee on June 22, could not be found in the Department's records, but that 46 others, the previously unreleased Libyan-linked Blumenthal email. published by the Committee, is in the Department's records. In response, Clinton's campaign spokesman Nick Merrill, when asked about the difference, said: "He has handed over 55,000 pages of material to the State Department, including all the emails he has from Mr. Blumenthal." Members of the Republican Committee were encouraged about their investigation, after finding an unsuccessful email produced by Clinton. Clinton's campaign staff accused Gowdy and the Republicans of "sticking to the scandals they found".
In response to comments that Republican Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy made on September 29, 2015, about damaging Clinton's poll number, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi threatened to end Democratic participation on the committee. Representative Louise Slaughter (D-NY) memper
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