Clinton turns over private server to Justice Dept. amid report it contained ‘top
From FoxNews.com
Will Clinton server shed light on Benghazi?
Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton announced Tuesday that she had directed her aides to turn over her personal e-mail server to the Justice Department, giving in to months of demands that she relinquish the device she used to store her correspondence while secretary of state.
The move came hours after it was disclosed that the inspector general for the intelligence community, I. Charles McCullough III, had notified senior members of Congress that two of four retroactively classified emails found on Clinton’s server contained material deemed to be more sensitive than had previously been thought.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said two emails that traversed Clinton’s personal system were deemed “Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information” — a rating that is among the government’s highest classifications. Grassley said McCullough had reported the new details about the higher classification to Congress on Tuesday.
The State Department disputes McCullough’s determination that the emails were classified at the time they were sent. McCullough had previously told Congress that potentially hundreds of classified emails are among the cache that Clinton provided to the State Department.
“Department employees circulated these emails on unclassified systems in 2009 and 2011 and ultimately some were forwarded to Secretary Clinton,” said State Department spokesman John Kirby. “They were not marked as classified.”
A source familiar with the investigation told Fox News late Tuesday that the two emails in question contained operational and geospatial intelligence from the CIA and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), which produces satellite images.
The FBI is investigating whether classified information was improperly sent via and stored on the so-called “home-brew” e-mail server she ran from her house in the New York City suburb of Chappaqua after concerns were raised by McCullough. Investigators have said that the probe is not criminal in nature and have denied that Clinton is a target of their inquiries.
Clinton campaign spokesman Nick Merrill said she has “pledged to cooperate with the government’s security inquiry, and if there are more questions, we will continue to address them.”
It’s not clear if the device will yield any information — Clinton’s attorney said in March that no emails from the main personal address she used while secretary of state still “reside on the server or on back-up systems associated with the server.”
An intelligence source familiar with the matter told Fox News that the campaign’s statement of cooperation was overblown, as the FBI had previously taken possession of a thumb drive containing sensitive emails that had been held by Clinton’s personal attorney, David Kendall. The Associated Press reported that Kendall gave three thumb drives containing copies of roughly 30,000 work-related emails sent to and from Clinton’s personal email address to the FBI after the agency determined he could not remain in possession of the classified information contained in some of the emails.
The AP’s report cited a U.S. official briefed on the matter who was not authorized to speak publicly. The State Department previously had said it was comfortable with Kendall keeping the emails at his Washington law office.
Clinton had to this point refused demands from Republican critics to turn over the server to a third party, with Kendall telling the House committee investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, that “there is no basis to support the proposed third-party review of the server.” Clinton has also defended her use of the server, saying she used it as a matter of convenience to limit the number of electronic devices she had to carry.
Congressional Republicans seized on Clinton’s reversal late Tuesday.
“It’s about time,” House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio said in a statement. “Secretary Clinton’s previous statements that she possessed no classified information were patently untrue. Her mishandling of classified information must be fully investigated.”
“Secretary Clinton said she created this unusual email arrangement with herself for ‘convenience.’ It may have been convenient for her, but it has been troubling at multiple levels for the rest of the country,” said Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., the chairman of the Benghazi select committee. “Secretary Clinton’s decision to prioritize her own convenience – and desire for control – over the security of our country’s intelligence should concern all people of good conscience.”
There is no evidence Clinton used encryption to shield the emails or her personal server from foreign intelligence services or other potentially prying eyes. Kendall has said that Clinton is “actively cooperating” with the FBI inquiry.
In March, Clinton said she exchanged about 60,000 emails in her four years in the Obama administration, about half of which were personal and were discarded. She turned over the other half to the State Department in last December.
The department is reviewing those emails and has begun the process of releasing them to the public.
“As she has said, it is her hope that State and the other agencies involved in the review process will sort out as quickly as possible which emails are appropriate to release to the public, and that the release will be as timely and transparent as possible,” Merrill said Tuesday.
Earlier this week, Clinton said in a sworn statement submitted to a federal judge that she has turned over to the State Department all emails from the server “that were or potentially were federal records.” The statement, which carries her signature and was signed under penalty of perjury, echoed months of Clinton’s past public statements about the matter.
Fox News’ Matt Dean and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Related stories
Clinton email saga means work for big law
By Zoe Tillman, From The National Law Journal
Williams & Connolly, Boies Schiller, Paul Weiss and Bryan Cave lawyers represent Clinton and former State Department aides asked to produce emails and other
As the U.S. State Department grapples with dozens of lawsuits seeking emails from Hillary Clinton’s private server and other records about her time as secretary of State, Clinton and former aides have separately lawyered up.
Court papers filed on Thursday in a public-records suit in Washington revealed communications between the State Department and lawyers for Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, who served in the department under Clinton. Abedin and Mills were asked to turn over any potential “federal records” they had in their possession, including emails from private accounts.
Karen Dunn of Boies, Schiller & Flexner and Miguel Rodriguez of Bryan Cave are representing Abedin, who serves as the vice chairwoman of Clinton’s presidential campaign. Dunn and Rodriguez have Clinton ties of their own. Dunn worked for Clinton when she was a U.S. senator. Rodriguez worked for Clinton during her time in the Senate and served in the State Department.
Dunn and Rodriguez, who also both spent time working for President Barack Obama, declined to comment about their representation of Abedin.
Mills, who served as chief of staff and counselor to Clinton at the State Department, is represented by Beth Wilkinson, a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, the court papers filed on Thursday show. Wilkinson didn’t work for Hillary Clinton, although she did serve in the Justice Department under President Bill Clinton in the 1990s.
Wilkinson is no stranger to high-profile cases. Her clients have included Major League Baseball, the National Football League, Philip Morris USA and Pfizer. Wilkinson was general counsel to Fannie Mae before joining Paul Weiss.
Wilkinson is also representing Philippe Reines, a former Clinton spokesman at the State Department, and Jacob Sullivan, a former Clinton aide also at State, who were similarly asked to produce any potential federal records in their possession, according to a Paul Weiss spokeswoman. The firm had no additional comment on the representation.
David Kendall of Williams & Connolly represents Clinton, a relationship that stretches back to the early 1990s. Kendall represented the Clintons in 1993 in connection with the Whitewater scandal, and he worked with them on a variety of investigations and other matters over the years, including Bill Clinton’s impeachment proceedings. He “currently represents them in miscellaneous civil matters,” according to his law firm bio.
Kendall could not immediately be reached for comment.
The papers filed in court on Thursday show that the State Department tried to contact Abedin in March to ask for emails or other records in her possession that might be responsive to Freedom of Information Act requests. But according to a June 29 letter from Dunn and Rodriguez to the State Department, the March letter went undelivered and emails were sent to accounts that were no longer active. The State Department didn’t successfully make contact until May, when it sent a letter to Abedin’s lawyers.
According to the letters, Mills and Abedin are in the process of turning over records to the State Department. A State Department official said in court last month that Reines had produced 20 boxes of documents and in an earlier court filing said Sullivan had also turned over documents.
Clinton has defended her use of a private email server to conduct official business. Several judges are overseeing lawsuits in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia over access to those emails as well as emails and other records from former Clinton staffers at the State Department. They’ve expressed frustration with the department’s speed in making documents public. Government watchdog groups Judicial Watch and Cause of Action filed a lawsuit earlier this year accusing the State Department of violating federal recordkeeping laws.
U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras has ordered the State Department to produce Clinton’s emails on a rolling basis over the next few months. Other judges in recent weeks have ordered the State Department to share additional information about how they handled Freedom of Information Act requests for Clinton-related records.
IMAGE: (Clockwise, from top) Beth Wilkinson, Huma Abedin, David Kendall, Cheryl Mills, and Karen Dunn.
For more on this story go to: http://www.nationallawjournal.com/id=1202734081315/Clinton-Email-Saga-Means-Work-for-Big-Law#ixzz3i951xtUB
Judge Napolitano, Trey Gowdy: Hillary Could Face Email Criminal Prosecution
By Sandy Fitzgerald
Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server and the FBI’s role in the Benghazi investigation indicate the probe could result in criminal prosecutions, conservatives warned.
Trey Gowdy, the chair of the House committee investigating the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, told Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom” that the same prosecutors who investigated former CIA Director David Petraeus are investigating Clinton’s email issues.
Gowdy said Clinton wanted to control information about the workings of her office while she was secretary of the State Department.
“She wanted to control access to the public record and she almost got away with it,” Gowdy said.
And while Gowdy was not saying if Clinton committed a crime, as “that was my old job” as a prosecutor, “I know her unique email arrangement is interfering with our ability of finding out what happened to the four Americans killed in Benghazi.”
The FBI, the nation’s “premier law service,” will answer the questions of criminal intent, Gowdy said, “and you don’t need a former prosecutor weighing in.”
But retired Judge Andrew Napolitano, who is a chief judicial analyst for Fox News, was not so careful with his words, declaring the Clinton probe as a “criminal investigation” and that “the maximum penalty is 20 years” behind bars.
“That depends on how bad of problems this caused?” he said. “How bad were the secrets? Were assets hurt? The presumption is 20 years.”
And the fact that the FBI is involved makes it a criminal investigation, said the retired judge.
“The FBI investigates for potential violations of criminal law and breaches of American national security,” Napolitano said. “But given that the top secret, the highest level of classified information we have, was found on a non-government server, you could make the case easily she failed to protect national security secrets in a manner the law required her to protect [them], and that is the same crime the general [David Petraeus] was indicted and prosecuted and convicted [on].”
There is a significant difference between Petraeus and Clinton, though, Napolitano added. In Petraeus’ case, it was confidential information that was being shared, but in Hillary’s, “it is the highest classification.”
Napolitano also pointed out that the Justice Department has revealed that the Chinese most likely hacked senior officials while Clinton was in office, and “if that happened, she made their job easier, putting the information on the [personal] server rather than routing it through a rather more secure, but still hackable, server in the government.”
If Clinton tries to tell a jury that she made a mistake because the word “secret” wasn’t stamped on sensitive communications, that will not be an admissible defense, the retired judge said.
“Before she became secretary of state she was required to go through a one-hour tutorial given by FBI agents, and she had to sign a record under oath after, realizing she had a duty to [protect] the secrets,” said Napolitano. Instead, she “then ran them through a server that was unsecured.”
Petraeus, an ex-CIA director and general who oversaw military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, pleaded guilty earlier this year to a misdemeanor for mishandling classified information. Petraeus had shared eight “black books” of highly classified material, including code words, war tactics, the identities of covert operatives and even his private conversations with President Barack Obama with his biographer and mistress Paula Broadwell. He was sentenced to two years’ probation and a fine of $100,000.
“The lady in the Department of Justice wears are a blindfold and holds a set of scales, and does so because she treats everybody the same,” said Gowdy on Wednesday. “I was not part of the prosecution or defense team so I don’t know all of the facts, but I know the same rules apply to people. I will have to count on the bureau and [Director] Jim Comey, who has a reputation for fairness.”
Gowdy said he has many questions about Clinton’s email server, which her attorney surrendered Tuesday along with a flash drive containing the information on it.
“Is the public record complete?” said Gowdy. “That is what we were asked to do, to find out what happened in Benghazi.”
So far, every explanation Clinton has given “has been proven to be false,” he said, including her claim that no classified information was on the email server, which was proven to be false with the discovery of four classified emails, including two marked “top secret.”
Gowdy is mostly concerned, as chair of the Benghazi committee, with getting access to the records he needs for the job the House has given him.
“As you know, she is turning over the server, and usually the bureau doesn’t ask but demands it happen,” Gowdy said. “But she wiped the server clean and her lawyer self-selected the private record from the public record.
“My concern is getting access to every document I need to do the job the House gave me. I will let the other folks figure out the potential criminal conduct, and let others figure out the classified information part of it.”
Gowdy still doesn’t expect to get custody of the server itself for his committee’s investigation, and in fact has not asked for it.
“We asked for it to be turned over to the Inspector General,” said Gowdy. “We asked that in March and she said no. We want a neutral, detached third party to go through the server. I don’t want to read yoga emails or emails about the bridesmaids’ dresses. I don’t need the server. I just need the documents I am entitled to.”
Clinton’s attorney, David Kendall, has said that it is Clinton’s hope that the State Department and others sort out which emails are appropriate for public release and that she has pledged to cooperate, but Gowdy said he has his doubts.
“I know he is in the business of being paid to say absurd things,” said Gowdy. “But if that was his and her intent, why did they set up this unique unprecedented email arrangement?
“Why did she keep the emails for 20 months and then decide they were too burdensome, so let me delete and wipe the server clean?”
Image: Judge Napolitano, Trey Gowdy: Hillary Could Face Email Criminal Prosecution (Getty Images)
For more on this story and video go to: http://www.newsmax.com/Headline/hillary-clinton-email-trey-gowdy-fbi/2015/08/12/id/669749/#ixzz3idu3vIOd
