The private email account Hillary Clinton used while she was secretary of state reportedly contained sensitive information, including the whereabouts Chris Stevens, the U.S Ambassador who was murdered in the Benghazi attacks along with three other Americans, while he was an envoy in 2011.
The New York Times obtained a third of the 850 pages of emails related to Benghazi that Clinton turned over to the agency and discovered that “Clinton’s emails show that she had a special type of government information known as ‘sensitive but unclassified,’ or ‘SBU,’ in her account”:
That information included the whereabouts and travel plans of American officials in Libya as security there deteriorated during the uprising against the leadership of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in 2011. Nearly a year and a half before the attacks in Benghazi, Mr. Stevens, then an American envoy to the rebels, considered leaving Benghazi citing deteriorating security, according to an email to Mrs. Clinton marked ‘SBU.’
One email marked sensitive but unclassified reportedly contained the whereabouts of Stevens “as he considered leaving Benghazi during the uprising against the Qaddafi regime because of the deteriorating security”:
“The envoy’s delegation is currently doing a phased checkout (paying the hotel bills, moving some comms to the boat, etc.),” said the email that was forwarded to Mrs. Clinton from a close aide, Huma Abedin. “He will monitor the situation to see if it deteriorates further, but no decision has been made on departure. He will wait 2-3 more hours, then revisit the decision on departure.”
Clinton’s use of a private and less secure email account has raised serious concerns about how secure her emails were, especially when she traveled to nations like China and Russia that are notorious for their hacking. Former CIA deputy director Mike Morell recently said intelligence services of foreign nations most likely have all of the emails from Clinton’s private email account.
After the State Department suggested releasing Clinton’s emails two weeks before the Iowa caucuses in January of 2016, a federal judge ordered the agency on Tuesday to release her emails on a rolling basis.
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