12 things I learned from the FBI report on Hillary Clinton’s private email server: A breakdown of th

At the time of Senate confirmation hearings on Hillary Clinton's nomination as Secretary of State, the domain names clintonemail.com, wjcoffice.com, and presidentclinton.com were registered to Eric Hoteham,[25] with the home of Clinton and her husband in Chappaqua, New York, as the contact address.[26][27] The domains were pointed to a private email server that Clinton (who never had a state.gov email account) used to send and receive email, and which was purchased and installed in the Clintons' home for her 2008 presidential campaign.[28]

12 things I learned from the FBI report on Hillary Clinton’s private email server | washingtonpost

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In December 2012, near the end of Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State, a nonprofit group called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, filed a FOIA request seeking records about her email. CREW received a response in May 2013: "no records responsive to your request were located."[18] Emails sent to Clinton's private clintonemail.com address were first discovered in March 2013, when a hacker named "Guccifer" widely distributed emails sent to Clinton from Sidney Blumenthal, which Guccifer obtained by illegally accessing Blumenthal's email account.[37][38][39] The emails dealt with the 2012 Benghazi attack and other issues in Libya and revealed the existence of her clintonemail.com address.[37][38][39]

A March 2, 2015 New York Times article broke the story that the Benghazi panel had discovered that Clinton exclusively used her own private email server rather than a government-issued one throughout her time as Secretary of State, and that her aides took no action to preserve emails sent or received from her personal accounts as required by law.[44][45][46] At that point, Clinton announced that she had asked the State Department to release her emails.[47] Some in the media labeled the controversy "emailgate."[48][49][50]

In May 2016, the Department's Office of the Inspector General Steve A. Linick released an 83-page report about the State Department's email practices.[59][60][61] The Inspector General was unable to find evidence that Clinton had ever sought approval from the State Department staff for her use of a private email server, determining that if Clinton had sought approval, Department staff would have declined her setup because of the "security risks in doing so."[59] Aside from security risks, the report stated that "she did not comply with the Department's policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act."[62] Each of these findings contradicted what Clinton and her aides had been saying up to that point.[63][64][65] The report also stated that Clinton and her senior aides declined to speak with the investigators, while the previous four Secretaries of State did so.[59]

In 2008, before Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State, Justin Cooper, a longtime aide to Clinton's husband, former President Bill Clinton, managed the system. Cooper had no security clearance or expertise in computer security.[71] Later, Bryan Pagliano, the former IT director for Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign, was hired to maintain their private email server while Clinton was Secretary of State.[72][73] Pagliano had invoked the Fifth Amendment during congressional questioning about Clinton's server. In early 2016, he was granted immunity by the Department of Justice in exchange for cooperation with prosecutors.[74] A Clinton spokesman said her campaign was "pleased" Pagliano was now cooperating with prosecutors.[75] As of May 2016, the State Department remained unable to locate most of Pagliano's work-related emails from the period when he was employed by that department under Secretary Clinton.[76]

In 2013, Romanian hacker Marcel Lehel Lazăr (aka "Guccifer") distributed private memos from Sidney Blumenthal to Clinton on events in Libya that he had acquired by hacking Blumenthal's email account.[91][92] In 2016, Lazăr was extradited from Romania to the U.S. to face unrelated federal charges related to his hacking into the accounts of a number of high-profile U.S. figures,[93] pleading guilty to these charges.[94][95] While detained pending trial, Lazăr claimed to the media that he had successfully hacked Clinton's server, but provided no proof of this claim.[96] Officials associated with the investigation told the media that they found no evidence supporting Lazăr's assertion,[97] and Clinton press secretary Brian Fallon said "There is absolutely no basis to believe the claims made by this criminal from his prison cell."[98][99] FBI Director James Comey later stated in a congressional hearing that Guccifer admitted his claim was a lie.[100]

On August 10, 2015, the IC inspector general said that two of the 40 emails in the sample were "Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information" and subsequently given classified labels of "TK" (for "Talent Keyhole," indicating material obtained by aerial or space-based imagery sources and NOFORN).[127] One is a discussion of a news article about a U.S. drone strike operation.[127] The second, he said, either referred to classified material or else was "parallel reporting" of open-source intelligence, which might still be classified by the government "owning agency" that sourced the information by secret means even though the same information was also available in the public domain.[127][128][129] Clinton's presidential campaign and the State Department disputed the letter, and questioned whether the emails had been over-classified by an arbitrary process. According to an unnamed source, a secondary review by the CIA and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency endorsed the earlier inspectors general findings concluding that the emails (one of which concerned North Korea's nuclear weapons program) were "Top Secret" when received by Clinton through her private server in 2009 and 2011, a conclusion also disputed by the Clinton campaign.[130]

In late June 2016, it was reported that Bill Clinton met privately with Attorney General Loretta Lynch on her private plane on the tarmac at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. Officials indicated that the 30 minute meeting took place when Clinton became aware that Lynch's plane was on the same tarmac at the airport. When the meeting became public, Lynch stated that it was "primarily social" and "there was no discussion of any matter pending for the department or any matter pending for any other body." Lynch was criticized for her involvement in the meeting and was called on by some critics to recuse herself from involvement in the FBI's investigation of the email case. In response, she stated "The F.B.I. is investigating whether Mrs. Clinton, her aides or anyone else broke the law by setting up a private email server for her to use as secretary of state," but "the case will be resolved by the same team that has been working on it from the beginning" and "I will be accepting their recommendations."[164][165][166]

In early October 2016, FBI criminal investigators working on a case involving former Congressman Anthony Weiner sending sexually explicit texts to a fifteen-year-old girl discovered emails from Weiner's estranged wife, Huma Abedin, vice chair of Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign, that they considered potentially relevant to the Clinton server investigation. FBI officials reportedly decided to disclose the development despite its potential effect on the pending presidential election to preempt the possibility that it would be leaked in another way.[183]

Clinton turned over copies of 30,000 State Department business-related emails from her private server that belonged in the public domain; she later explained that she instructed her lawyer to err on the side of disclosure, turning over any emails that might be work-related. Her aides subsequently deleted about 31,000 emails from the server dated during the same time period that Clinton regarded as personal and private.[226][227][228] State Department employees do have the right to delete personal emails.[229]

On June 22, 2015, the Benghazi panel released emails between Clinton and Sidney Blumenthal, who had been recently deposed by the committee. Committee chairman Gowdy issued a press release criticizing Clinton for not providing the emails to the State Department.[271] Clinton had said she provided all work-related emails to the State Department, and that only emails of a personal nature on her private server were destroyed. The State Department confirmed that 10 emails and parts of five others from Sidney Blumenthal regarding Benghazi, which the committee had made public on June 22, could not be located in the Department's records, but that the 46 other, previously unreleased Libya-related Blumenthal emails published by the committee, were in the Department's records. In response, Clinton campaign spokesman Nick Merrill, when asked about the discrepancy said: "She has turned over 55,000 pages of materials to the State Department, including all emails in her possession from Mr. Blumenthal."[272] Republican Committee members were encouraged about their probe, having found emails that Clinton failed to produce.[272][273] Clinton campaign staff accused Gowdy and Republicans of "clinging to their invented scandal."[273]

On October 22, 2015, Clinton testified before the committee and answered members' questions for eleven hours before the Committee in a public hearing.[283][284][285] The New York Times reported that "the long day of often-testy exchanges between committee members and their prominent witness revealed little new information about an episode that has been the subject of seven previous investigations ... Perhaps stung by recent admissions that the pursuit of Mrs. Clinton's emails was politically motivated, Republican lawmakers on the panel for the most part avoided any mention of her use of a private email server."[283] The email issue did arise shortly before lunch, in "a shouting match" between Republican committee chair Trey Gowdy and two Democrats, Adam Schiff and Elijah Cummings.[283] Late in the hearing, Republican Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio accused Clinton of changing her accounts of the email service, leading to a "heated exchange" in which Clinton said that she had erred in making a private email account, but denied having dealt with anything marked classified, instead seeking "to be transparent by publicly releasing her emails."[283] 2ff7e9595c