Hillary Clinton Turns Over Server After New Classified Emails Are Revealed
Hillary Clinton has turned over her private email server in the wake of reports about highly classified information in her email.
Late yesterday, Hillary Clinton directed her aides and her attorney to turn over the server she had used for official email while Secretary of State, along with a thumb drive containing many of those email communications, to the Justice Department in the wake of reports that investigators had found email with “Top Secret” information in them among those turned over by Clinton:
Hillary Rodham Clinton has directed her aides to give the Justice Department an email server that housed the personal account that she used exclusively while secretary of state, along with a thumb drive that contained copies of the emails, her presidential campaign said on Tuesday.
The Justice Department and the F.B.I. have sought the server and the thumb drive as they investigate how classified information was handled in connection with the account. Earlier on Tuesday, the inspector general for the intelligence community told members of Congress that Mrs. Clinton had “top secret” information — the highest classification of government intelligence — in two emails among the 40 from the private account that the State Department has allowed him to review.
The State Department has declined to give the inspector general, I. Charles McCullough III, access to the entire trove of roughly 30,000 emails that Mrs. Clinton handed over to the department last year. Mrs. Clinton deemed those emails work-related, and said she deleted an additional 30,000 messages that were personal.
ince the account was revealed in March, Mrs. Clinton has been widely criticized for creating an email system that she said was more convenient for her, but that also helped shield her correspondence from Congress and the news media. She said she had never had any classified information on the account, though Mr. McCullough’s findings raise questions about that claim.
“I am confident that I never sent or received any information that was classified at the time it was sent and received,” she said at an event in Iowa in July. “What I think you’re seeing here is a very typical kind of discussion, to some extent disagreement among various parts of the government, over what should or should not be publicly released.”
The House committee looking into the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, asked Mrs. Clinton earlier this year to turn over her server to a third party so it could determine whether she had deleted emails that might have included government records.
In late March, Mrs. Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall, told the committee that there was no reason to do so because the emails had been deleted from the server. It is unclear whether technical experts could recover any deleted emails.
Mr. McCullough alerted the F.B.I. in July that classified information was on the account. Mrs. Clinton decided to hand over the server and the thumb drive to the authorities after the F.B.I. began investigating the matter.
In a statement on Tuesday, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, Nick Merrill, said that she has “pledged to cooperate with the government’s security inquiry, and if there are more questions, we will continue to address them.”
The campaign did not say whether the server and the thumb drive had been handed over yet to the authorities. And it did not say if the server was the one she had set up in her home in Chappaqua, N.Y., to house the private email account.
In addition to the home server, information was stored with a small technology company in Colorado called Platte River Networks.
Mr. Kendall has told government investigators that the server at Platte River Networks has been wiped clean. Nevertheless, F.B.I. agents went to the company this month to inquire about it.
A spokesman for the F.B.I. declined to comment.
This news came mere hours after it was reported that at least two of the messages included in the Clinton emails turned over to the State Department were classified as “Top Secret,” which is among the nations highest levels of classification. Unlike some other material that was sent publicly and then classified at a later date, this material was apparently already marked “Top Secret” which means that it should have been transmitted via un-secure means such as a privately controlled server at Clinton’s home in Chapaqua. These emails appear to be part of the group sparked to Inspectors General to call for a Justice Department investigation into how classified information was handled in Clinton’s private server, an investigation that has reportedly led agents to talk both with Clinton’s attorney and with the technology company that was providing technical support during the period after Clinton left office in January 2013. While reports have made clear that there is no criminal investigation at this point, it’s worth noting that mishandling of classified information if a Federal crime that has brought down more than a few well known people, most recently including retired General David Petraeus, who essentially got a slap on the wrist for Espionage Act violations that would have gotten nearly anyone else at least some degree of prison time. It’s far too early to say whether Clinton, or more likely one of the aides she was communicating with, is in danger of anything approaching Petraeus’s fate, of course, but every new revelation on this email story seems to make clear that this is likely to be a far bigger headache for her than either she or her reflexive supporters would prefer to believe.
Perhaps the biggest of this news, of course, is the fact that Clinton is backing away from the position she has taken in March since this story broke that she would not turn over the server for examination by any third-party, instead claiming that she had turned over all of her work-related emails to the State Department and allegedly deleted some 30,000 email communications that she and her aides deemed to be private. When the story first broke, Congressman Trey Gowdy, who chairs the Select Committee investigating the Benghazi attack, and Speaker John Boehner, called on Clinton to turn the server over, and made clear that they were considering a subpoena if she refused to do so. Clinton remained adamnant, though, and has continued to say that she already turned over all email regarding her time as Secretary of State. The fact that they are backing down now, and that it came so quickly, seems to be a fairly obvious admission on their part that the previous strategy was not working and that this story is not going away any time soon.
It’s been five months now since the email story broke, and while Clinton continues to lead in the polls for the most part, her favorability numbers have taken a huge hit and every month seems to bring something new that calls what she did in question. From the beginning, Clinton’s claim that she utilized a private server for the “convenience” of not having to use two separate mobile devices is one that strained credulity, of course. The most important part of her claims at the beginning, though, was that she never utilized the system to knowingly share classified information. Now, after an examination of just 40 emails it’s been found that at least 10% contained classified information. If that ratio held up across the roughly 30,000 emails that Clinton turned over to the State Department when she left office, that would be 3,000 pieces of classified information. Even if it was not done knowingly, it displays a disregard for security that really ought to call Clinton’s judgment into question even among the most ardent supporters, and probably would if she were anyone other than Hillary Clinton.
The most immediate question, of course, is what impact all of this will have on Clinton’s political fortunes. So far at least, it doesn’t seems to have had much of an impact at all. While Clinton’s unfavorable numbers continue to rise, she leads in nearly all the polls, although there are at least some signs that the Bernie Sanders insurgency is causing her harm. At the same time, though, this latest development seems to guarantee that the slow drip of stories about this case will continue for some time. The examination of the content of the emails for classified information will continue, for example, and we are likely to hear of yet more examples of such information being improperly handled. Additionally, physical examination of the server may make it possible to recover some or all of the nearly 31,000 “private” emails that Clinton deleted after leaving office. More importantly, as Chris Cillizza points out this morning, the fact that server is out of Clinton’s hands means that the story is now completely out of her hands. And that’s not a good position to be in when you’re running for President.
“They’re gonna find the email she sent to Ayman al-Zawahiri while blood was coming out of her wherever to tell him the mission was successful, that Barack HUSSEIN Obama personally took the White House Quinjet to Benghazi and led the attack there because he hates America and Jesus. You libtards are in for a world of hurt when the truth comes out.” –suppiluliumas
Forgot a negation? Hate when I forget a negation.
The faux-scandal gets bumped up to pseudo-scandal!* Instead of being artificial, it is now just of inferior quality. Still maintain the uranium deal was too complicated for her (or any single actor, really) to massage through. The email server, though, presented all sorts of ways to attack her without anything criminal going on. I figured the Select Committee on Benghazi(!) would’ve already found something worth sharing with the world, but I suppose I might have overestimated their intelligence.
* Playing with words that mean the same thing is a favorite pastime of English teachers of which I am not but learned from. “Compare and contrast” is a seminal phrase in this pastime.
Leave it to Doug to parrot talking points from Hillary Rodham Clinton campaign spokesman
Media: “Directing aides to turn over” is not the same as “surrendering pursuant to a search warrant” no matter how many times you say it.
“Hillary Clinton ‘directs’ her server be handed over to the FBI.” Right, media. Sure. This was voluntary. Run with that.
Well, I think they found the email where she ordered security to stand down at Benghazi, and told the president to Skype her soon so that they could discuss plans for an ISIS-themed Christmas party at the White House.
@Paul L.: You realize the media doesn’t really like Clinton going back to the 90s, and it’d be waaaaay more salacious and sensational a story if there was a warrant involved?
If you think the MSM “covers” for liberals or Democrats in all circumstances, you end up thinking idiotic things. Like they would, as a group, deliberately not publish the beautiful, campaign t-boning story you and your Twitter friends think is being covered up just to deny young reporters eager for the truth that Pulitzer they keep saying they want.
Bad day for the libtards cognitive dissonance
@Tillman:
Next you will claim that the media always had out for Mike Nifong and Kermit Gosnell and that is why they are now reviled.
I thought Doug would say turning over the server and coming completely clean would have stopped the slow drip of stories. I guess not.
Huh. It’s almost as if nothing Clinton could have done would have stopped the Republicans from trying to generate a scandal out of her emails.
They ever find those 22 million emails missing from the W Bush administration?
Another post, another attempt by Doug to find the HRC “smoking gun.” When we are not entertained by Doug and James’ attempts to justify their support for some of the Republican clowns, and their efforts to prove that The Donald is not really a Republican and the base will soon come to its senses, we will always have (at least until the election) the spectacle of Doug doing his best Ahab imitation is pursuit of the HRC great white whale. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders pulls in between 12 and 26 thousand supporters at individual events and is now leading HRC in New Hampshire. Nothing to see here, people. Move along.
Another post, another attempt by Doug to find the HRC “smoking gun.” When we are not entertained by Doug and James’ attempts to justify their support for some of the Republican clowns, and their efforts to prove that The Donald is not really a Republican and the base will soon come to its senses, we will always have (at least until the election) the spectacle of Doug doing his best Ahab imitation is pursuit of the HRC great white whale. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders pulls in between 12 and 26 thousand supporters at individual events and is now leading HRC in New Hampshire. Nothing to see here, people. Move along.
On a tangent,
Um, no. It’s not. There are levels of classification higher than “Top Secret”.
These are the sorts of easily-checked factual errors that make me despair of the media in general. Was this the NYT? Pathetic.
@Paul L.:
Next you will claim that Obama slandered the Duke Lacrosse team.
From the NBC link:
John Kirby, a spokesman for the State Department, said that was the case with two emails, adding that it remained unclear “whether, in fact, this material is actually classified.”
“Department employees circulated these emails on unclassified systems in 2009 and 2011, and ultimately some were forwarded to Secretary Clinton,” Kirby said Tuesday. “They were not marked as classified.”
So: one side says the info is classified. The other says it isn’t. No one is saying if it was classified at the time, which makes one wonder about what’s so special about top secret it can be casually applied retroactively.
@Paul L.:
My Wingnutese is pretty good, but I’m certainly not a native speaker. Who are these people and what do they have to do with Hillary Clinton?
Hillary said she only used one device for her e-mail. She lied.
Hillary said she only had one e-mail account on her private server. She lied.
Hillary said she turned over all official, work-related correspondence. She lied.
Hillary said she never sent or received any classified material in her e-mails. She lied.
The basic truth in this whole case: Hillary put a higher priority on protecting her political security from Americans than protecting national security from foreign enemies. So she put the e-mails where they would be harder to access via legal means by Congress and the courts, but far more vulnerable to foreign hackers.
She saw Congress as a greater threat than China, than Russia, than Islamic radical terrorists, than any enemy. And she put her personal political security as a higher priority than national security.
Her only hope right now is that Obama controls the Justice Department, and he can protect her, or he can throw her under the bus. He owns her, and she knows it.
@Jenos Idanian #13:
Evidently not, given the ease with which Chinese and Russian hackers regularly tap in to our government databases.
@michael reynolds: We know for a fact that at least one Eastern European hacker got into her server. And since it was her private property, it wasn’t protected by federal standards for security or laws treating such hacking as espionage.
And “she was as incompetent as rest of the Obama administration” is a really crappy defense.”
@Jenos Idanian #13:
I’m not sure where you got such insights into her thinking, but I would be very amused if anyone actually thought this way. Congress as a threat? That paralyzed body of provocateurs and poseurs? Ha.
More likely she set-up her e-mail this way because she’s Hillary Clinton and she does what she wants. Rules? Guidelines? Bah. “Motherf#$%er, I got a bald head.”
@James Pearce: I’m not sure where you got such insights into her thinking, but I would be very amused if anyone actually thought this way.
Apparently you can’t read how I spelled it out. She had a choice between using government servers (theoretically more secure from foreign enemies, but vulnerable to Congressional oversight) or her own server (harder to subpoena, but easier to hack) and she chose the latter.
Please offer an alternate explanation for why she made that choice. Personal political security is the only plausible one.
@Jenos Idanian #13:
We know this for a fact?
@Modulo Myself: Yes, we do. A Romanian hacker called “Guccifer” published e-mails from Sidney Blumenthal’s clintonemail.com account.
We also know that she used a Blackberry, an IPhone, and an IPad for her e-mails.
We also know that she used at least two different clintonemail.com addresses — “hdr22” and “hrod17.”
Now we know that she had Top Secret/Code Word material in that e-mail.
@Jenos Idanian #13:
I hate to be a buzzkill, but there is nothing in federal law which mandates that classified material must be conveyed to and fro only on certain systems. There may or may not be policy restrictions, depending on the department (each federal agency creates its own rules for handling classified materials …), but those implicate personnel action, not legal liability.
The legal / criminal restrictions are on WHO the material is improperly revealed to and whether the revealing party knowingly released it to unauthorized persons, not HOW he/she chose to convey it.
In other words, she (or anyone else for that matter) can email classified documents – including those classified top secret – to permissible recipients all day long, without penalty. She can’t be held criminally liable for any hackers breaking into her server.
But by all means please keep trying to find the snipe.
Bottom line – this is likely to resonate only with people who were never going to vote for her to begin with, so speaking from a political standpoint, who cares?
There will be no criminal liability attaching to her.
On an unrelated note, I happened to catch Trey Gowdy on the TV earlier. What is wrong with the man? He looks like he’s on death’s door.
@Jenos Idanian #13:
Actually, the source you posted contradicts your assertion. According to them, the hacker broke into Sidney Blumenthal’s AOL email account, quoting:
Do you have any evidence that 1) Sidney Blumenthal has ever had an email account on Hillary Clinton’s email server(s), or 2) that said accounts were hacked?
@Jenos Idanian #13:
No. As noted above, we know that at least one Eastern European hacker got into Sidney Blumenthal’s AOL email account.
Please try again …
@Jenos Idanian #13:
That links says that Blumenthal used an AOL account.
@Modulo Myself:
Which is probably the greatest crime in all of this.
@Tillman: Well for what it’s worth, I used to teach my college composition students that the words, though maybe redundant to use together were not exactly synonymous because “contrast” addresses differences specifically.
On the other hand, some of the more recent texts for teaching modes of discourse have replaced “compare and contrast” with “comparison.”
@Rafer Janders: It seems that Mr. Nifong is the prosecutor in the Duke Lacrosse case (I had to look that up because I don’t remember ANYTHING about that event as it wasn’t news in Korea at the time). Wikipedia notes that he was disbarred and whazziz name says he’s “reviled,” but I’m having a hard time believing those things because Wikipedia notes that he’s a Democrat, and we all know that nothing bad ever happens to Democrats, right?
@Jenos Idanian #13: “Please offer an alternate explanation for why she made that choice. Personal political security is the only plausible one.”
Yes. If you’re an idiot.
Is it? She took one position when asked by Republicans in congress intent only on destroying her politically and a different position when asked by the FBI pursuing a legitimate investigation. Those are two very different things deserving of two different responses.
@Jenos Idanian #13:
You really should revisit my comment before lobbing accusations about reading comprehension, dude.
Your explanation: She was trying to hide things from Congress.
My explanation: Hillary Clinton thinks she’s above the rules.
Your explanation posits a Congress that fulfills it’s function, a Sec of State with something to hide, and efforts made by the latter to avoid the scrutiny of the former.
My explanation requires none of that. Here’s the razor. Start cutting.
@Jenos Idanian #13:
The basic truth was that so far as we know, everything HRC did was completely legal. If not , feel free to post the link to the law, guidance, regulation, or rule you think she violated(Feel free to hold your breath while searching….).
As to your speculations to why she did it, that’s interesting, but guess what-when you do legal stuff you don’t have to justify it. I could paint my car Pepto Bismol pink if I wanted to, and I wouldn’t have to justify that to anyone, because it’s LEGAL, no matter how repulsive or ill-advised people may find it.
As to her having risked a security violation by not complying with federal guidelines, I think there is a fairly good argument to be made that the information was safer on her server than it was on the federal government’s servers.
Personally, if this going to blow up, I’m glad it’s happening now. If she’s the nominee, I’ll vote for Clinton, and I think if things stay as they are now she’d probably win. But even without the email “scandal”, the thought of her as the nominee makes me nervous. Very few people are actually excited about the prospect of a President Hillary Clinton … which could mean slightly fewer people willing to go out in the snow, or stand in line for a couple hours to vote .. and in the right/wrong state, just enough of those people not being quite motivated enough could make a difference.
@Just ‘nutha ig’rant cracker:
Epistemic Closure for the both of us.
MIke Nifong is considered the gold standard for prosecutorial misconduct among libertarian speech nuts.
And even he was granted immunity.
@HarvardLaw92: So being irresponsible with the nation’s secrets is a good reason to vote for her?
Without defending Hillary Clinton (I think the idea of using the private server was boneheaded), I will say this about my experience dealing with classified information … there’s often no rhyme or reason to what gets stamped “Secret” or even “Top Secret” and what doesn’t. One of my biggest pet peeves when I was in Iraq and Afghanistan was people who would add a “secret” classification to any email they sent over the SIPRnet, even if nothing in the email itself needed to be classified.
What I’m saying is that it’s entirely possible (heck even probable) that a lot of information that’s going around via email on the unclassified NIPRnet, probably also shows up (maybe even word for word) in at least some emails on the secure side that someone marked “Secret” simply because they’re too lazy to use the drop down in their email that lets them change the classification.
I’m not saying that’s what happened here, but if it was to be how the story is explained, I wouldn’t be surprised at all.
@Just ‘nutha ig’rant cracker:
Yeah; I always interpreted the phrase “compare and contrast” as meaning “provide instances of both similarity and difference”.
@michael reynolds: Yet no one succeeded at hacking her server.
If nothing else the various anonymous groups would of loved that data dump.
There’s nothing the government does that makes their server’s “harder to hack”. If anything from what I’ve seen private servers are far harder to hack. If for no other reason than the difference in number of people needing access..
@Todd:
Doug, Jenos, and many others are painting this as worse than it is by implying ” classified” as necessarily meaning “implicating national security”. Everyone I know in the government has dismissed that as being flat out wrong. Even then, I’ve heard no one yet say that any of these emails contained information THAT WAS CLASSIFIED AT THE TIME.
In any case, I think there’s a reason why Hillary wants the October hearing public and Gowdy does not. IMO there is a whole lot of nothing here and Hillary wants that to come out as quickly as possible, to the lasting embarrassment of the Republicans who will wasted millions of taxpayer dollars to no purpose .
I think that she should take a page out of DGAF Obama’s book and give the real reason she went the private server route. I bet she wouldn’t lose anything in the polls over it, either.
@John425:
No, 3, possibly 4 Supreme Court justices who will likely need to be replaced over the next 8 to 9 years is a good reason to vote for her. Nothing else matters.
As MM pointed out earlier in this thread, the State Dept is saying the emails were not marked classified.
“Classified at origination” isn’t the same thing as “marked classified”.
@dazedandconfused:
It really doesn’t matter. Based on everything I have seen, she did not knowingly convey classified materials to persons not authorized to receive them. That’s the ball game. There is no criminal liability under federal law for her.
She may (and I stress MAY) have violated State Department rules regarding the handling of classified materials. If she did (and that has yet to be established), she would have faced disciplinary action from a personnel standpoint.
Given that she is no longer employed by the State Department, well, that’s dead in the water too. This is a non-starter from anything other than the perspective of Republicans desperately trying to create a scandal.
@HarvardLaw92: hasnt it been the case that email has been held to be mot privleged because it is routed thru servers controlled by others wo privacy duty to sender? could it be that her isp is included in thjose receiving materials emailed? unless theyre both cleared and need to know…
@HarvardLaw92:
Thanks.
I am sure your are right and must defer to your vastly superior knowledge of the law in any event.
For some odd reason I can’t shake a gut feeling that the motivation behind all this to be something other than LE. The lack of diligence displayed by the people making “the case” speaks to a lack of LE professionalism in their ranks. In particular, I wished to point out to Doug he is guilty of strongly asserting an oft-repeated unsubstantiated allegation that the materials were marked classified.
There is sloppiness in Clinton’s conflating of personal and private e-mails, but this is fairly typical of political appointees tasked to temporarily head our vast, complex departments. I imagine some see this as ideal but it is more generally acknowledged that it is “our way”, departments headed by such critters, and it is more feature and bug. If this is the worst they can find it won’t affect my vote.
@HarvardLaw92:
BTW, I am sincerely just wondering about how the relative lack of legal pribancy of email (as I understand it)/squares with the classification laws and regs.
@dazedandconfused:
Don’t. A lawyer pontificating outside of his (or her) practice area doesn’t know any more than you do. This goes for Doug, too (God knows what his practice area is). I’m a lawyer, take my word for it.
@Steve V:
I was an AUSA for several years. This area of the law is somewhat up my alley, so to speak. Are you disagreeing with the content of the commentary, or just the tone in which you feel it was delivered?
All this seems to leave Hillary with the resounding endorsement – Still Not Technically Illegal.
@John425:
The entire Republican Party shut down government 2 times, all the while telling us that a Federal default was not anything to be worried about. All of which raises the question, why vote for a Republican candidate, most of whom do not take seriously domestic and international finance markets?
@rodney dill: “All this seems to leave Hillary with the resounding endorsement – Still Not Technically Illegal.”
And now I can see the next attacks coming:
“HIllary Clinton puts her money in a bank!!!!”
“Hillary Clinton takes medications prescribed by her doctors!!!”
“Hillary Clinton eats a cheeseburger!!!”
And when she says that none of this is illegal, you can come back with your all-purpose retort: “All this seems to leave Hillary with the resounding endorsement – Still Not Technically Illegal..”
@wr: Heh, It’s not me that would come back with that. It’s all her apologists that come back with that (semantically) as the best excuse for her behavior.
@rodney dill:
Is it an excuse for her behavior or is it a reason why the apparently endless investigations are so much wasteful political theater? That, by the way, is also technically legal.
Oh give me a break, people. These were Top Secret cookie recipes and wedding invites. Move on………..
@rodney dill:
So someone who wonders what’s wrong with cheeseburgers is an ‘apologist’, and cheeseburgers need an ‘excuse’?
You missed the point. This is the 427th accusation against Hillary of Improper! Behavior! The first 426 turned out to be false alarms, or unproven, or clearly fictitious, or not-actually-bad-but-we-wanted-to-make-it-look-that-way. At that point, the burden of proof is on the Tireless Accuser to show some actual evidence of an actual misdeed. This is starting to make The Boy Who Cried Wolf look like Rene Descartes.