The New York Post reports that Hillary Clinton’s maid, Marina Santos, was routinely instructed to print out emails containing sensitive and classified information, even though she lacked the necessary security clearance:
Clinton entrusted far more than the care of her DC residence, known as Whitehaven, to Santos. She expected the Filipino immigrant to handle state secrets, further opening the Democratic presidential nominee to criticism that she played fast and loose with national security.
Clinton would first receive highly sensitive e-mails from top aides at the State Department and then request that they, in turn, forward the messages and any attached documents to Santos to print out for her at the home.
Among other things, Clinton requested Santos print out drafts of her speeches, confidential memos and “call sheets” — background information and talking points prepared for the secretary of state in advance of a phone call with a foreign head of state.
The New York Post goes on to quote various Clinton emails in which Clinton aides asked Santos to print sensitive and classified documents. This was such a common practice that the aides always referred to “Marina” by her first name.
Those aides included Huma Abedin, the formerly indispensable top aide who suddenly vanished from public view after her husband Anthony Weiner’s inappropriate message to an underage girl prompted the FBI to reopen its investigation of the Clinton email server.
Abedin told FBI agents that Santos had access to the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF, at Clinton’s D.C. residence. She frequently “collected documents from the secure facsimile machine for Clinton,” according to notes from the FBI interview with Abedin.
“Just how sensitive were the papers Santos presumably handled? The FBI noted Clinton periodically received the Presidential Daily Brief — a top-secret document prepared by the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies — via the secure fax,” the New York Post reports.
The procedures for securing a SCIF allow for government contractors to obtain certification to enter them, but the New York Post’s report offers no indication Santos was ever classified as a contractor and certified. The FBI would certainly have obtained her certification documents, if that was the case. SCIF procedures specify very strict procedures for sanitizing such a facility before an escorted, non-certified individual enters, and those procedures prominently include securing and concealing exactly the sort of documents Santos handled.
Intelligence experts have long complained about how Clinton’s aides boosted sensitive material across the “air gap” by copying it from secure facilities and dumping it into emails sent from and received by her illicit private server. One of the most important features of a SCIF is that relaying sensitive material directly to unsecure systems like ClintonEmail.com is impossible.