The Clinton email scandal is getting bigger again, as Fox News cites a source close to the investigation who says at least a dozen different accounts on Hillary Clinton’s notorious homebrew email server handled Top Secret material. The number of different accounts could be as high as 30.
“The official said the accounts include not only Clinton’s but those of top aides – including Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin, Jake Sullivan and Philippe Reines – as well as State Department Under Secretary for Management Patrick F. Kennedy and others. There is no public evidence they were authorized to receive the intelligence some of which was beyond Top Secret,” Fox News reports.
In fact, as former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey pointed out, it’s “counterintuitive to suggest that they all had authorization and access through a non-secure server to information of that sensitivity.”
To put it more bluntly, it’s very unlikely that Clinton’s retinue was cleared to see the material they were handling. The other people with accounts on her server were passing around documents so hot they cannot be released to the public at all.
It looks an awful lot like Under Secretary for Management Kennedy has been caught giving false testimony to Congress, as Fox recalls that he told the House Benghazi Committee he was unaware of the full “scope” of Clinton’s reliance on improper personal email… but now we have emails showing he “routinely sent and received government business from the Clintonemail.com account.”
Besides raising the possibility that Kennedy perjured himself, the latest revelations also make a mockery of his job title, because the Under Secretary of Management is supposed to be responsible for the very information-technology systems he falsely claimed ignorance of.
Fox News mentions something interesting about the evolving Clinton email scandal: in the early days, Clinton claimed the whole thing was a big “food fight” between the State Department and the intelligence community. The latter supposedly has a habit of over-classifying documents, which the Secretary of State and her department disagreed with.
Leaving aside the fact that SecState is not authorized to unilaterally declassify documents when she disagrees with their security level, most of the redactions in the later rounds of Clinton email production were made by the State Department itself. What happened to the “food fight” excuse?
These new discoveries also highlight something that hasn’t been discussed enough in the Clinton email scandal: she wasn’t just hiding her own correspondence from Congress, the courts, and the American people. Her aides all had accounts on her secret server, too. This was an organized conspiracy with numerous participants. Are we supposed to believe they all thought it was too much trouble to carry two cell phones around, to cite the absurd excuse Clinton offered when this story blew up?
Politico reports increasing scrutiny on one Clinton aide in particular: her deputy chief of staff, Jake Sullivan, who now works for her campaign as a senior policy adviser. Sullivan either initiated or forwarded many of the classified email chains:
“I can only tell you that his [Jake Sullivan’s] email account initiated a number of emails,” said one source who identified Sullivan but spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the issue. Since the emails have been withheld from public view, the senders’ names are not a matter of public record.
When asked to confirm Sullivan’s participation in the “top secret” email chains, a separate intelligence source familiar with the investigation did so, but with a caveat: “The person in question is one of the primary participants and instigators but by no means the only one,” the source said.
A third source said that Sullivan was one of about three individuals who sent such content to Clinton. It is unclear who else was involved in the email discussions.
To give you an idea of how serious this is getting, top Senate Intelligence Committee Democrat Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) felt obliged to pretend she didn’t know who Sullivan is. “I don’t know anything about Jake Sullivan and the emails,” she babbled. “I’ve never heard it before… I’ve seen the emails but I don’t register on Jake Sullivan.”
She must be losing her eyesight, then, because his name is all over most of the super-sensitive emails extracted from Clinton’s server. He’s usually on the receiving end of her orders to print or forward the material that wasn’t supposed to be flowing through a private mail system, including the amazing email where she explicitly orders him to pull a document off the secure network and “turn into nonpaper with no identifying heading and send nonsecure.”
“My contacts with former colleagues and current active duty personnel involved in sensitive programs reveal a universal feeling that the HRC issue is more serious than the general public realizes,” former Africom strategic planner Dan Maquire told Fox News. “Most opine they would already be behind bars if they had apparently compromised sensitive information as reported.”
The general public should have no problem understanding that the Secretary of State shouldn’t be running a secret email network that concealed her official correspondence, and the correspondence of her aides – material that belongs to us, the people of the United States – from official inquiry and public requests for years.
They also should have trouble understanding that tossing Top Secret material around to a dozen people who lack proper clearance is a serious security breach… even if we got unreasonably lucky, and foreign agents never got around to raiding their accounts.