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09-10-2016, 10:20 PM
Hillary Clinton’s Team Lost a Laptop Full of Her Emails in the Actual Mail
A laptop filled with Hillary Clinton’s emails is missing, the FBI just revealed. It makes the stink around Hillary’s private account even worse.
A laptop containing a copy, or “archive,” of the emails on Hillary Clinton’s private server was apparently lost—in the postal mail—according to an FBI report released Friday. Along with it, a thumb drive that also contained an archive of Clinton’s emails has been lost and is not in the FBI’s possession.
The Donald Trump campaign has already called for Clinton to be “locked up” for her carelessness handling sensitive information. The missing laptop and thumb drive raise a new possibility that Clinton’s emails could have been obtained by people for whom they weren’t intended. The FBI director has already said it’s possible Clinton’s email system could have been remotely accessed by foreign hackers.
The revelation of the two archives is contained in a detailed report about the FBI’s investigation of Clinton’s private email account. The report contained new information about how the archives were handled, as well as how a private company deleted emails in its possession, at the same time that congressional investigators were demanding copies.
The archives on the laptop and thumbdrive were constructed by Clinton aides in 2013, using a convoluted process, before her emails were turned over to State Department officials and later scrubbed to determine which ones had classified information and should either be withheld from public view or could be released with redactions. The archive of messages would contain none of those safeguards, potentially exposing classified information if it were ever opened and its contents read.
The FBI has found that Clinton’s emails contained classified information, including information derived from U.S. intelligence. Her campaign has disputed the classification of some of the emails.
The archive was created nearly a year before the State Department contacted former secretaries of state and asked them to turn over any emails that they had sent using private accounts that pertained to official business. A senior Clinton aide, Huma Abedin, told the FBI that the archive on the laptop and thumb drive were meant to be “a reference for the future production of a book,” according to the FBI report. Another aide, however, said that the archive was set up after the email account of a Clinton confidante and longtime adviser, Sidney Blumenthal, was compromised by a Romanian hacker.
Whatever the rationale, the transfer of Clinton’s emails onto two new storage devices, one of which was shipped twice, created new opportunities for messages to be lost or exposed to people who weren’t authorized to see them, according to the FBI report. (The Clinton campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request to comment for this story.)
The FBI found that in the spring of 2013, just after Clinton left the Obama administration, aides for Hillary and Bill Clinton worked together to create the archive.
Justin Cooper, who handled technology matters for the former president, provided Hillary Clinton aide Monica Hanley with an Apple MacBook laptop from the Clinton Foundation. Over the phone, Cooper “walked Hanley through the process of remotely transferring Clinton’s emails” from the server she’d been using as secretary of state, located in her home in New York, to the new “Archive Laptop,” as the FBI called it, as well as to the thumb drive.
“Hanley completed this task from her personal residence,” the FBI found.
The two copies of the Clinton email archive were supposed to be stored in Clinton’s homes, in New York and Washington, D.C. But, Hanley later told the FBI, that never happened, because she “forgot to provide the Archive Laptop and the thumb drive to Clinton’s staff following the creation of the archive.”
According to the FBI, months later, in early 2014, Hanley found the “Archive Laptop” at her personal residence and worked with another person to transfer the the emails to a technology company, Platte River Networks, which the Clintons had hired to manage the email system. (The name of the person helping Hanley is redacted in the FBI report, but appears to be an employee of Platte River Networks.)
After trying unsuccessfully to remotely transfer the emails to a Platte River server, Hanley shipped the laptop to the employee’s home in February 2014. He then “migrated Clinton’s emails” from the laptop to a Platte River server.
That task was hardly straightforward, however, and ended up exposing the email archive yet again, this time to another commercial email service.
The employee “transferred all of the Clinton e-mail content to a personal Google e-mail (Gmail) address he created,” the FBI found. From that Gmail address, he downloaded the emails into a mailbox named “HRC Archive” on the Platte River server.
A laptop filled with Hillary Clinton’s emails is missing, the FBI just revealed. It makes the stink around Hillary’s private account even worse.
A laptop containing a copy, or “archive,” of the emails on Hillary Clinton’s private server was apparently lost—in the postal mail—according to an FBI report released Friday. Along with it, a thumb drive that also contained an archive of Clinton’s emails has been lost and is not in the FBI’s possession.
The Donald Trump campaign has already called for Clinton to be “locked up” for her carelessness handling sensitive information. The missing laptop and thumb drive raise a new possibility that Clinton’s emails could have been obtained by people for whom they weren’t intended. The FBI director has already said it’s possible Clinton’s email system could have been remotely accessed by foreign hackers.
The revelation of the two archives is contained in a detailed report about the FBI’s investigation of Clinton’s private email account. The report contained new information about how the archives were handled, as well as how a private company deleted emails in its possession, at the same time that congressional investigators were demanding copies.
The archives on the laptop and thumbdrive were constructed by Clinton aides in 2013, using a convoluted process, before her emails were turned over to State Department officials and later scrubbed to determine which ones had classified information and should either be withheld from public view or could be released with redactions. The archive of messages would contain none of those safeguards, potentially exposing classified information if it were ever opened and its contents read.
The FBI has found that Clinton’s emails contained classified information, including information derived from U.S. intelligence. Her campaign has disputed the classification of some of the emails.
The archive was created nearly a year before the State Department contacted former secretaries of state and asked them to turn over any emails that they had sent using private accounts that pertained to official business. A senior Clinton aide, Huma Abedin, told the FBI that the archive on the laptop and thumb drive were meant to be “a reference for the future production of a book,” according to the FBI report. Another aide, however, said that the archive was set up after the email account of a Clinton confidante and longtime adviser, Sidney Blumenthal, was compromised by a Romanian hacker.
Whatever the rationale, the transfer of Clinton’s emails onto two new storage devices, one of which was shipped twice, created new opportunities for messages to be lost or exposed to people who weren’t authorized to see them, according to the FBI report. (The Clinton campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request to comment for this story.)
The FBI found that in the spring of 2013, just after Clinton left the Obama administration, aides for Hillary and Bill Clinton worked together to create the archive.
Justin Cooper, who handled technology matters for the former president, provided Hillary Clinton aide Monica Hanley with an Apple MacBook laptop from the Clinton Foundation. Over the phone, Cooper “walked Hanley through the process of remotely transferring Clinton’s emails” from the server she’d been using as secretary of state, located in her home in New York, to the new “Archive Laptop,” as the FBI called it, as well as to the thumb drive.
“Hanley completed this task from her personal residence,” the FBI found.
The two copies of the Clinton email archive were supposed to be stored in Clinton’s homes, in New York and Washington, D.C. But, Hanley later told the FBI, that never happened, because she “forgot to provide the Archive Laptop and the thumb drive to Clinton’s staff following the creation of the archive.”
According to the FBI, months later, in early 2014, Hanley found the “Archive Laptop” at her personal residence and worked with another person to transfer the the emails to a technology company, Platte River Networks, which the Clintons had hired to manage the email system. (The name of the person helping Hanley is redacted in the FBI report, but appears to be an employee of Platte River Networks.)
After trying unsuccessfully to remotely transfer the emails to a Platte River server, Hanley shipped the laptop to the employee’s home in February 2014. He then “migrated Clinton’s emails” from the laptop to a Platte River server.
That task was hardly straightforward, however, and ended up exposing the email archive yet again, this time to another commercial email service.
The employee “transferred all of the Clinton e-mail content to a personal Google e-mail (Gmail) address he created,” the FBI found. From that Gmail address, he downloaded the emails into a mailbox named “HRC Archive” on the Platte River server.