Republican strategist Rory Cooper – doing the job Big Media apparently just can’t do – noticed three items in the latest Clinton email dump that “spell trouble” for the embattled Democrat candidate.
One of these emails demonstrates that Hillary Clinton knew there was classified material flowing through her illicit bootleg server.
The email in question is dated April 25, 2012, and came from Clinton aide Jake Sullivan, who figures in many of the email streams containing classified information. It pertained to State Department efforts to infiltrate jihadi web forums.
“If not classified, or otherwise inappropriate, can you send to the NYTimes reporters who interviewed me today? Copying Phillippe,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote to Sullivan.
Clinton, Sullivan, and Alberto Fernandez, who had recently become Coordinator of the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, thought the material contained in this email demonstrated the effectiveness of the CSCC’s efforts to disrupt jihadi communications.
“Phillippe” is Phillippe Reines, the adviser who has lately been making sure “news” organizations write stories exactly the way Hillary Clinton wants them, right down to the use of specific words she favors.
Sullivan declared the material in the email was not inappropriate for publication, which Reines said was “music to my ears.”
It’s not unusual for officials to provide the media with information that paints their agencies in a positive light. (It’s far more sinister when they withhold information that makes them look bad.) As Rory Cooper notes, the significance of this email is that Clinton very obviously knows she does have classified material running through her server – that’s why she asked Sullivan if this particular document was safe to share with the press.
“Secretary Clinton was unsure if information she was reading on her personal email was classified or not, period. And she was not alarmed in the least bit by this lack of knowledge. And neither were her senior aides,” Cooper observes.
That’s a very pertinent point, because all of these people – especially the Secretary of State – were supposed to be aggressively protecting the nation’s secrets, and all of them signed and swore to agreements that made them personally responsible for the mistreatment of classified material. They all knew damn well they were conversing on an illicit mail server that was not authorized, or secure enough, to process such material.
One the other two emails Cooper thought were “trouble” for Clinton demonstrated that she was still using her unsecure homebrew server for highly sensitive communications, on the very day WikiLeaks published thousands of classified U.S. military documents. Electronic security was not an issue that troubled Clinton much.
In that message, she also instructs Middle East envoy George Mitchell to send “born classified” material to what Clinton herself explicitly describes as her “personal email.”
The third email Cooper highlights remains completely classified and redacted, so we don’t know what it says, but it had something to do with North Korea, at a time when they were shooting off missiles and launching cyber-attacks against the United States. As with the WikiLeaks document, Clinton stubbornly insisted on using her unsecure private server, even while the news of the day concerned electronic espionage.
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