FBI gets Hillary Clinton server, Top Secret emails found

After months of resisting calls to turn over her private email server, Hillary Clinton has agreed to hand over her secret server and a flash drive containing copies of her emails to the FBI and the Justice Department. Both agencies are currently conducting investigations which sources have indicated are criminal in nature.

Clinton has signed a sworn affidavit under the risk of perjury that she has turned over all work related emails to the State Department for review and eventual release. This comes despite the fact that emails that were previously not handed over by Clinton were found in the trove turned over by Sidney Blumenthal in his Benghazi Committee testimony back in June.

The multiple probes into Clinton’s use of a secret private server have expanded to include top aides including Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin, both of whom have been ordered to turn over all work related documents and explicitly not to destroy any electronic or hard copy documents in their possession. Abedin in particular is the focus of multiple court cases and congressional inquiries regarding possible improprieties during her employment at the State Department, at which time she was also a paid employee of the Clinton Foundation and Teneo.

Further damaging Clinton’s credibility and raising the specter of possible criminal charges, two Top Secret–the highest possible classification of sensitive information–emails have been discovered amongst those turned over by Clinton.

The Intelligence Community’s inspector general requested that the FBI scrutinize the security implications of Clinton’s use of the private email after determining that at least five emails containing classified information had been stored on her private server, including one email that State Department officials inadvertently released in response to a public records lawsuit. Two others are under review for final classification.

I. Charles McCullough III, the inspector general for the intelligence community, said State Department officials had warned that there were “potentially hundreds of classified emails” on Clinton’s private server.

Even more disturbing is that the classified materials were circulated to other people’s private email addresses rather than official and secure government provided accounts, further raising concerns about security precautions followed by Clinton and her team:

Republicans shared exclusively with CNN Tuesday a review of those emails that the State Department had released, which they said showed Clinton and her aides sent information that would later be classified to six people’s private email addresses. They include former Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns; Cheryl Mills, who was Clinton’s chief of staff at the State Department; and Jake Sullivan, who served as Clinton’s top foreign policy adviser. Clinton also emailed information that would later be classified to close confidant Sidney Blumenthal, whose communications with Clinton about Libya have become a focus of the House committee investigating the 2012 Benghazi attacks.

In what must have come as a small consolation prize to the increasing legal difficulties Clinton is facing, the RICO case filed by long-time ClintonWorld nemesis Larry Klayman has been dismissed by the judge overseeing the case. Klayman was determined by the court not to have legal standing to prove that he was personally injured by the alleged activities.

[AP] [CNN] [McClathy DC] [The Hill] [Photo courtesy AP]

Originally published at The Hill Talk on August 12, 2015.