Hillary Clinton used a non-secure BlackBerry to conduct classified State Department business, and there’s evidence that her device was compromised on her very first official trip to China as Secretary of State.
Speculation swirls in Washington that the FBI is close to indicting Clinton for violating the Espionage Act of 1913 by keeping classified information on her private email server. Now, evidence is coming together that could show an Espionage Act violation with regard to her Blackberry use.
A video emerged late Monday showing Wendy Sherman, a State Department official under Clinton, talking about how Clinton used her Blackberry to swap classified information as late as 2011.
“Now we have Blackberries, and it has changed the way diplomacy is done. Things appear on your Blackberries that would never be on an unclassified system, but you’re out traveling, you’re trying to negotiate something,” Sherman said. “And so they sat there, as they were having the meeting, with their Blackberries, transferring language back and forth between them and between their aides to multitask in quite a new fashion, to have the meeting and at the same time be working on the quartet statement.”
For Clinton to have violated the Espionage Act, she must have “through gross negligence permits [national defense materials] to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed.”
Clinton’s Blackberry was never properly secured, and it had a “vulnerability” in Asia. Here are the three most important facts that pertain to a possible Espionage Act violation with Clinton’s Blackberry:
The State Department never gave the Blackberry to Clinton.
Therefore, the device’s security was never cleared by State Department personnel.
“[The State Department] does not believe that any personal computing device was issued by the Department to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and has not located any such device at the Department,” the Department stated in a court filing in a civil case filed by the nonprofit group Judicial Watch.
She couldn’t even use the Blackberry in her office because it was so un-secure. Literally.
State Department security official Eric Boswell sent Clinton and her aide Cheryl Mills a memo on March 2, 2009 telling Clinton not to use her Blackberry on the seventh floor, which is known as “Mahogany Row.”
“Our review reaffirms our belief that the vulnerabilities and risks associated with the use of Blackberries in the Mahogany Row [REDACTED] considerably outweigh the convenience their use can add to staff that have access to the classified OpenNet system on their desktops,” Boswell wrote, followed by another redaction.
“We also worry about the example that using Blackberries in Mahogany Row might set as we strive to promote crucial security practices and enforce important security standards among State Department staff.”
“I cannot stress too strongly, however, that any unclassified Blackberry is highly vulnerable in any setting to remotely and covertly monitoring conversations, retrieving e-mails, and exploiting calendars,” Boswell added.
There was Blackberry “vulnerability” when she went to Asia
On March 11, 2009, a State Department official whose name is redacted sent an email to another State Department official whose name is redacted. That email, obtained in a lawsuit by Judicial Watch, just might be the smoking gun in the Hillary Clinton email case.
The official stated that Hillary Clinton approached Boswell and asked him about Blackberry use. Specifically, Clinton asked about the fact that the Department had “intelligence concerning the vulnerability during her recent trip to Asia.”
The official wrote:
After this mornings “management meeting” with the A/Secys, Secretary Clinton approached Ambassador Boswell and mentioned that she had read the IM and that she “gets it”. Her attention was drawn to the sentence that indicates we (DS) have intelligence concerning this vulnerability during her recent trip to Asia.
Secretary Clinton has asked Ambassador Boswell for this information. Please prepare a short informal paper OR provide the A/Secy with a briefing on this matter. Your assistance is appreciated. The Secretary did not provide a “due date”…BUT the Ambassador would like to close this loop as soon as possible.
The Asia trip in question was actually Hillary Clinton’s first official overseas trip as Secretary of State. Over the course of a week in February 2009, Clinton went to Japan, Indonesia, South Korea, and China, where hacking is prevalent.
Wendy Sherman, therefore, might just have become this generation’s Alexander Butterfield, who nonchalantly informed the world that President Richard Nixon kept secret tapes of his conversations in the Oval Office.
Sherman was hired by Clinton at the State Department in 2011. Sherman served as lead negotiator on the Obama administration’s disastrous and one-sided 2015 nuclear arms deal with Iran, which allowed the Iranians to continue their nuclear program while also dropping U.S. sanctions on the Islamic country.
So how did Wendy Sherman rise to become the point person on the most important national security deal in the world? Her resume is littered with catastrophe, from her stint as campaign director for the Democratic National Committee during Michael Dukakis’ run in 1988, and president of the Fannie Mae Foundation the decade before the financial collapse.
But her main value to Clinton appears to lie in her political strategy skills.
Sherman appeared on a September 1989 panel called “Democrats in 1992: Themes For a Presidential Majority,” at which she laid out the basic principles of the “New Democrat” style that Bill Clinton adopted for his 1992 campaign.
“There is either overtly or covertly some discussion going on that there’s been a feminization of the Democratic Party, that the Democratic Party is now made up of really black America and white liberal women and not much of anything else,” Sherman said. “And so what the real target has to be is white men, white Southern men, Westerners, and so forth. The base of the Democratic Party is black America. It is women. And it is multi-ethnic America. We just have to go back and reclaim those values.”
“When it comes to particularly belief in God and strength in family, I can’t think of groups in this country who have stronger feelings about that than women and black America. And law and order is a place where black America and white America come out hard and fast together in being tough, conservative, and wanting us to go forward,” Sherman said.
Thus, Bill Clinton as president put more cops on the street, renewed harsh penalties for crack cocaine violations, and signed the Defense of Marriage Act. All of these “New Democrat” policies are now blights on the Clintons’ record as far as progressives in 2016 are concerned, and are only complicating her campaign. Sherman did not return requests for comment for this report.
Less than six months before it broke, the Clinton email scandal is still the paramount concern for Clinton as she navigates the waters of a contentious primary battle with Bernie Sanders.
Breitbart News first reported, based on high-level government sources, that of seven emails originally being analyzed by investigators to determine their classification status, two were deemed “Top Secret” and at least two were already classified when they were sent. Meaning: Clinton was sending and receiving classified information that she knew to be classified. The classifications were made by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Our exclusive report galvanized our readers and other media outlets, quickly picking up more than 12,000 social media shares and 5,000 comments. The Clinton campaign could not find a suitable talking point on the issue. The campaign tried to claim that Clinton did not send emails that were classified “when originated.”
But Intelligence Community Inspector General I. Charles McCollough, now under attack by Team Clinton, confirmed, “IC classification officials reviewed two additional emails and judged that they contained classified State Department information when originated.”
The inspector general went on to make a comprehensive report, filed earlier this month. He found that “several dozen” emails had classified information in them. “These declarations cover several dozen emails containing classified information determined … to be at the confidential, secret and top secret/sap levels,” McCollough wrote in a letter to Congress. That’s right. A “sap” level is an even higher classification status than “top secret.”
Clinton’s server was highly vulnerable to attack, like the kind that occurred to multiple of her email contractors and could have happened to her when she opened a virus-infected email from her friend.
Breitbart News reported that Clinton’s server was operating on the same email network, and was housed in the same exact physical space, as the server for the Clinton Foundation, indicating that they were sharing a server. Additionally, that space was in New York City, not in the basement of Clinton’s Chappaqua, New York home, as she claimed. Daughter Chelsea Clinton’s office was also using the email network.
Numerous Clinton Foundation employees used the presidentclinton.com server for their own email addresses, which means that they were using email accounts that, if hacked, would have given any hacker complete access to Hillary Clinton’s State Department emails, as well.
Clinton’s server had an open webmail portal that gave potential hackers unrestricted access to Clinton’s personal information.
In fact, Clinton’s server went down at least three times during her tenure as Secretary of State, including weeks after the Benghazi terrorist attack. Clinton never even told her own IT Help Desk at the State Department that she was using a private server, keeping them in the dark about her secret activities.
Clinton even went so far as to hide the identity of the people running her private server, paying a company called Perfect Privacy, LLC. That company, based in Jacksonville, enters its own meaningless contact information into official Internet databases so that its clients’ identities will not be exposed.
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