Submitted by: ButtCracker
New Revelations—always on a Friday or just before a major holiday, or both
A 189-page summary of interviews conducted in the year-long investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private server shed new light on the shifting stories Clinton’s aides told agents.
The report, which was made public Friday evening, came on the heels of House Republicans’ revelation that three additional witnesses had received immunity agreements from the Justice Department, bringing the total number of witnesses who were shielded from prosecution to five.
Here are 27 new details that emerged from the latest FBI documents.
Someone was messing with FOIA
After the public learned of Clinton’s private email use, Congress and watchdog groups began demanding the release of emails. The House Select Committee on Benghazi had already requested records related to the 2012 terror attack, and Freedom of Information Act cases that had been closed improperly began to come back to life.
But one witness told the FBI he “believed there was interference with the formal FOIA review process.”
That witness pointed to the collection of 296 Benghazi emails that were among the first records to emerge publicly from Clinton’s email trove. The unnamed individual told the FBI that State Department officials had “included redactions done for Clinton’s privacy but unrelated to national security.”
According to the witness, State Department officials at one point attempted to classify information in order to have an excuse to redact it even though the agency’s own Office of Legal Counsel thought the email was not worthy of classification.
The witness said he and other career officers, who were typically involved in the FOIA process and in responding to congressional inquiries, were “cut out of the loop” when Clinton’s emails needed processing. Instead, new staffers were “placed” by “top State officials” to take over the job of screening Clinton’s emails; the witness said the officials — whose identities were redacted — had “a very narrow focus on all Clinton-related items and were put in positions that were not advertised.”
FOIA reviews are supposed to be performed by career officials to prevent politics from affecting the government’s response, particularly in a case as politically fraught as the Clinton email situation.
Clinton deleted nearly 1,000 emails with Petraeus
In Aug. 2015, the Pentagon called the State Department and informed an unnamed official there that “CENTCOM records showed approximately 1,000 work-related emails between Clinton’s personal email and General David Petraeus.”
The FBI noted that “[m]ost of those 1,000 emails were not believed to be included in the 30,000 emails” that Clinton turned over to the State Department in Dec. 2014.
Officials felt ‘pressure’ not to classify any Benghazi emails
At least one witness told the FBI he felt “pressure” not to upgrade any information in a highly-anticipated batch of 296 emails related to Benghazi.
The witness said Patrick Kennedy, the State Department’s undersecretary for management, went to the FBI and “pointedly asked” the bureau “to change [its] classification determination” for a Benghazi email that had been marked classified.
The Benghazi-related emails were among the first records from Clinton’s private server to be made public.
Kennedy “categorically rejected” the notion that he would obstruct the FOIA process when he sat down with FBI agents in Dec. 2015.
Sidney Blumenthal advised more high-level officials
Clinton has often defended her relationship to longtime confidante Sidney Blumenthal by referring to his detailed missives — some of which are now at least partially classified — as unsolicited memos from an old friend.
But Jake Sullivan, Clinton’s former deputy chief of staff, told the FBI he also spoke directly with Blumenthal during his tenure.
Sullivan said he spoke by phone with Blumenthal and emailed with him occasionally, even acting as a go-between for Blumenthal and Clinton or other high-level officials.
Blumenthal’s controversial style prompted the Obama White House to ban him from working in the administration. However, Clinton’s private emails exposed the informal position he held within Clinton’s State Department
Sullivan described Blumenthal as someone who “likes to help the cause.”
State Department officials definitely knew about the server
Many high-level agency staffers, including Kennedy, have claimed they knew nothing of Clinton’s private email server until they saw stories about it in the news.
A common defense for officials who could be implicated if they admitted prior knowledge of the network has been to acknowledge Clinton’s occasional use of a personal address to send messages but to deny awareness of the hardware that sat in her basement.
One unnamed witness who worked in the State Department’s IT office told the FBI he was aware of the server system since the day Clinton was sworn in.
That was because the witness was forced to work with Bryan Pagliano, the technology specialist who had built the server for Clinton, in order for the server to accommodate Clinton’s government work.
For example, the witness “interacted with [Pagliano] to keep [the server] communicating with State systems” during the “5-6 instances” in which Clinton’s private emails were intercepted by the government’s security systems before they could reach the .gov inboxes of her colleagues.
Although the witness helped Pagliano keep the server running remotely, the individual told the FBI “he did not know how the server was paid for or where it was physically located.”
At least three people had emails on the ‘clintonemail.com’ network
Besides Clinton, the only other individual known to have used an email address on the “clintonemail.com” domain was Huma Abedin, then her deputy chief of staff.
Justin Cooper, a former aide to Clinton’s husband and to the Clinton Foundation, told the FBI that at least one other person used an account on that network “as part of their association or work for Hillary Clinton.”
That person’s name, or multiple other names, were redacted by the FBI. Clinton has sworn under penalty of perjury that Cheryl Mills, her former chief of staff, did not use an account on the server.
Pagliano tried to sound the alarm
In a Dec. 2015 interview with the FBI, Clinton’s former IT aide said he had repeatedly attempted to warn her team about the potential record-keeping implications of her unauthorized network.
Pagliano said he had been called into a high-level State Department official’s office in summer 2009 and asked if he knew about the existence of a “clintonemail.com” domain in use by the former secretary of state.
When Pagliano relayed the incident to individuals whose names were redacted, an unidentified witness had a “visceral” reaction and “didn’t want to know anymore.”
One unidentified witness told Pagliano in 2009 that Clinton’s private email use “may be a federal records retention issue” and stated “that he wanted to convey this to Hillary Clinton’s inner circle, but could not reach them.”
Pagliano said he “then approached Cheryl Mills in her office and relayed [redacted]’s concerns regarding federal records retention and the use of a private email server.”
However, Mills dismissed the concerns by arguing other former secretaries of state had done the same thing — an assertion later proven false.
Witnesses were nervous about talking to the FBI
One former State Department aide told investigators she was worried Clinton would be angry if she learned the unnamed individual had spoken to the FBI.
At the end of her Dec. 2015 interview, the witness told agents “she had not mentioned the interview to Clinton or any of [her] contacts from [State Department].” That witness explained her concerns that Clinton and her staff “could be upset to learn she spoke with the FBI without telling them.”
President Obama used a fake name
During an interview with Abedin, FBI agents presented the longtime Clinton aide with a copy of an email from Obama to Clinton.
The president had used a pseudonym to communicate with Clinton on her private server.
“How is this not classified?” Abedin “exclaimed,” according to the FBI’s summary of its conversation with her.
Abedin explained that Clinton had notified the White House when she changed her primary email address because Obama’s network was set up to block unfamiliar accounts from sending him messages.
The new revelation has raised questions about the president’s claims to have had no knowledge of Clinton’s private email use before March 2014, since her private address had to be added manually to a list of accounts with permission to communicate with his own server.
FBI agents conducted interviews in Denver, San Francisco
FBI agents traveled to Denver in September of last year to question employees of Platte River Networks, the Colorado company Clinton hired in 2013 to manage her email network.
At least one employee of Platte River, Paul Combetta, was granted an immunity agreement in exchange for information.
Combetta was asked to delete emails in defiance of a preservation order for those documents that had been issued by the House Select Committee on Benghazi.
Agents also traveled to San Francisco to question Lewis Lukens, a former State Department official during Clinton’s tenure.
Clinton’s team tried to mop up emails after NYT story
In March 2015, an unspecified individual from Clinton’s staff reached out to Platte River to determine how many emails existed and where those records were stored. The New York Times exposed Clinton’s private email use in a story on March 1 of that year.
Clinton’s team sprang into action in the immediate aftermath of that story, scrambling to account for the location of any email she might have sent during her State Department tenure in the days between the initial Times story and her first public statements on the controversy at a press conference on March 10, 2015.
Another unnamed employee at the firm said he received an email from Clinton’s staff on March 9 of that year but told FBI agents he “did not recall seeing” the preservation order attached to that email by David Kendall, Clinton’s primary attorney.
Yet another unnamed staffer from Platte River told investigators he genuinely believed the archive of Clinton’s emails “should still be on the server in possession of the FBI.”
He said only two people in the world had the authorization to delete an entire mailbox. The names of those two individuals were redacted.
A dated list of files on the server indicated the archive of Clinton’s emails was still on the server by the time the list was generated in Jan. 2015 — a month after the original batch of 30,000 emails was provided to the State Department.
But at some point over the next few months, someone scrubbed the archive from the server.
Staffers shattered discs that stored emails
After Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s former chief of staff, asked a Platte River staffer in July 2014 to hand over all of Clinton’s correspondence with any address that ended in “.gov,” the employee burned the emails onto DVDs and prepared to ship them to Mills.
However, Mills said she didn’t want the discs to be transferred via mail and instead asked the tech specialist to arrange a “secure electronic transfer” of the emails. The Platte River staffer said he “destroyed the DVDs by breaking them in half” once the digital transfer was complete.
The July 2014 request came just two months after the House Select Committee on Benghazi was created
Witnesses pleaded the 5th during FBI interviews
One employee of Platte River was advised by the company’s lawyer to invoke his Fifth Amendment rights and refuse to answer any further questions when FBI investigators started asking about what the technology specialist had discussed with Kendall.
The agents referred to documentation that the employee had spoken to Mills and Kendall on a March 31, 2015 conference call.
That employee used a digital deletion tool called Bleachbit to scrub emails from the server on the very same day.
The State Department timeline doesn’t fit
Multiple witnesses told the FBI that Mills asked them to round up all of Clinton’s work-related emails in July of 2014. The timing of the request described to investigators fits with the progression of the Benghazi committee’s probe.
But the State Department has said it did not ask Clinton for her emails until Oct. 2014, and claims it only did so because officials realized they had no emails from previous secretaries of state.
Clinton has long touted the fact that the State Department sent letters to other secretaries of state requesting copies of personal emails.
The new timeline confirmed by the FBI suggests it took Clinton’s staff five months to prepare her work-related emails for submission to the State Department. The 30,000 emails she ultimately provided were not given to the agency until early Dec. 2014.
Clinton relied on staff outside State
Justin Cooper, an aide to Clinton’s husband and a former Clinton Foundation adviser, supported Clinton’s staff during her time at the State Department.
Monica Hanley, Clinton’s assistant, told the FBI she would contact Cooper each time she needed to synch Clinton’s BlackBerry with the server that was partially under Cooper’s care.
What’s more, Hanley said she would contact Cooper — not anyone at the State Department — “when [she] needed reimbursement for items she purchased for Clinton.”
Like Pagliano, Cooper performed services for Clinton that were related to her State Department work but that were paid for out of the Clinton’s own pocket.
There’s a lost thumb drive with all the emails on it
Hanley was tasked with transferring all of Clinton’s emails onto a laptop Cooper provided from the Clinton Foundation. That laptop eventually got lost in the mail, a detail that was revealed in the 58 pages of notes the FBI released on Sept. 2.
But Hanley also transferred all of Clinton’s emails onto a thumb drive at the same time. She told the FBI she “could not recall what happened to the thumb-drive.”
The transfer came in spring 2013, shortly after longtime Clinton confidante Sidney Blumenthal’s inbox was breached by a Romanian hacker. Platte River advised the former secretary of state to change email addresses, touching off the shuffle of records onto devices that were ultimately lost.
Clinton’s attorney was cleaning up
In addition to the conference call with a Platte River employee that prompted that employee to suddenly invoke his Fifth Amendment rights, Kendall contacted Hanley in “March or April 2015,” shortly after the New York Times story was published.
Hanley did not describe what she and Kendall discussed, but she immediately cleaned out State Department records from her inbox after she spoke with him.
“Following her conversation with Kendall, Hanley searched the Gmail account she used while at [State Department] for any email communications with state.gov accounts and deleted emails associated with state.gov accounts,” the FBI wrote in its report.
An aide left classified documents in a Russian hotel room
Hanley was given “verbal security counseling” after she accidentally left a classified document and a sensitive “briefing book” in a Russian hotel suite she was using with Clinton.
Diplomatic security officers “found a classified document from the briefing book in the suite during a sweep following Clinton and Hanley’s departure” and later told Hanley “the briefing book and the document should never have been in the suite.”
Kennedy may have misled the inspector general
Patrick Kennedy, the undersecretary for management with a history of blocking inspector general probes, assured State Department Inspector General Steve Linick that Clinton had turned over electronic copies of her emails in a July 2015 meeting with the watchdog.
Then, when Linick requested the electronic file for those emails, Kennedy said he only had hard copies.
Linick also referred the FBI to additional witnesses who alleged current employees at the State Department have been “meddling with the FOIA review process.” Other witnesses pointed to Kennedy as a potential interference in the document screening that took place before Benghazi-related records were provided to Congress.
During his internal probe of agency email practices, Linick said Pagliano refused to be interviewed by the inspector general’s team about his involvement with the Clinton network.
Clinton ‘could not use a computer’
Abedin told the FBI Clinton conducted most of her work in person or on paper due to her limitations with technology.
“Abedin explained that Clinton could not use a computer and that she primarily used her iPad or BlackBerry for checking emails,” the FBI wrote of its April interview with Abedin.
Another witness told the FBI Clinton had “little patience” for technology problems.
State officials weren’t buying Clinton’s email excuses
Clinton continues to stress the fact that most of the classified emails found on her server were only retroactively designated as such — that is, they were not classified at the time they were written, but merely upgraded to classified at a later date due to a change in circumstances regarding the information.
An unnamed witness told the FBI he had “heard the argument” but didn’t quite buy it.
“It was very rare for something that was actually unclassified to become classified years after the fact,” the witness told investigators.
Including the retroactively classified documents, there were more than 2,000 classified records on Clinton’s server.
Clinton left the doors of her SCIF open when she wasn’t home
The State Department had installed SCIFs, or areas designed for the secure consumption of classified material, in both her her New York and Washington, D.C. homes.
Clinton did not always keep those areas secure, however. Cooper told the FBI she was careless when it came to keeping the SCIFs locked.
“The SCIF doors at both residences were not always secured, including times when Clinton was not at the residences,” Cooper told the FBI, according to its summary of their second of three interviews with the former Clinton family aide.
State officials worried about Clinton and classified material from the start
Eric Boswell, assistant secretary for diplomatic security for most of Clinton’s tenure, said his team had concerns about how the incoming secretary of state and her staff would treat classified areas from the beginning of their tenures.
Specifically, diplomatic security personnel worried that Clinton and her team would use their BlackBerrys inside the SCIF that encompasses much of the seventh floor at State Department headquarters, an area known as “Mahogany Row.”
Clinton’s staff had asked for a classified-enabled BlackBerry upon joining the agency, but Boswell said no such device exists.
“There was some general concern within [State Department] security personnel that Clinton’s executive staff may try to use their Blackberries [sic] in the SCIF as they were almost all brought on to [State Department] from Clinton’s campaign team, and thus were very accustom to using their Blackberries [sic],” the FBI wrote in a summary of its Feb. 2016 interview with Boswell.
Clinton frequently used a flip phone
Clinton cycled through eight BlackBerry while she was secretary of state for a total of 13 devices throughout the life of her email server, the FBI revealed earlier this month.
But she also used a flip phone to make calls, Cooper said, because she found the device “more comfortable to talk on.”
The flip phone allowed her to check emails on her Blackberry while talking on the phone, Cooper told the FBI. He could not identify what model she used and it is unclear whether the FBI ever recovered any of the flip phones in Clinton’s possession.
Tech aides described ‘Hillary cover-up operation’
Platte River employees sent emails describing the ‘Hilary [sic] coverup [sic] operation’ after Clinton’s staff asked them to begin wiping emails in Dec. 2014.
The unnamed employee who authored the phrase told FBI agents that his reference to the “cover-up” was a joke.
Clinton created second personal account when server crashed
The former secretary of state set up a previously undisclosed email account to communicate when her private server system was down.
Hanley told FBI investigators that Clinton likely created the second private account — a “gmail.com” address — to send messages when her server crashed in 2011 during a trip to Croatia.
Clinton’s top aides were hacked
Stephen Mull, a top record-keeping official at the State Department, told the FBI that “sometime in 2011,” he learned from diplomatic security officers about “concern over the possibility that some personal email accounts of [State Department] employees were hacked.”
Mull said Sullivan, who was one of the aides most frequently in contact with Clinton on her email, was among those hacked in the breaches.
Sept 24 2016, Sarah Westwood, Washington Examiner