Hillary Clinton: I Did Not Know What the Email Issue Was All About

AP Photo/Patrick Semansky

by PATRICK HOWLEY25 Jan 2016433

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton claimed ignorance when asked about her private email scandal at Monday night’s CNN town hall.

“Yes, I think that’s a fair criticism,” Clinton said of the Des Moines Register’s point that she should have apologized for the scandal sooner. “I have no intention of doing anything other than find a convenient way” to communicate, Clinton said. “It turned out not to be so convenient.”

Clinton refused to call it an error in judgment.

“Maybe being faster, trying to figure out what all of this means,” Clinton said, when asked what she could have done differently, suggesting that she did not know what she was doing was wrong and potentially illegal.

“When you’re facing something like that, you’ve got to get the facts. And it takes time to get the facts,” Clinton said of her delayed response to the scandal.

“Some of them are frankly a little embarrassing,” Clinton said of her released emails. “You find out sometimes that maybe I’m not the best at technology, things like that.”

Despite Clinton’s appeals to ignorance, the FBI investigation into her email scandal is heating up. The case hinges on whether Clinton violated a provision of the Espionage Act of 1913.

The law (18 U.S. Code & 793 subsection f) makes clear that anyone who has materials “relating to the national defense” cannot lose or give them away. The law is broken if “through gross negligence permits [materials] to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed.”

The penalty? A fine, a prison term of up to ten years, or “both.”

Since the FBI seized Clinton’s emails in August, the scandal has haunted her campaign.

Senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett threw Clinton under the bus, saying that the White House provided guidance to the State Department, telling employees to use official government email accounts.

Breitbart News first reported, based on high-level government sources, that of seven emails originally being analyzed by investigators to determine their classification status, two were deemed “Top Secret” and at least two were already classified when they were sent. Meaning, Clinton was sending and receiving classified information that she knew to be classified. The classifications were made by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Our exclusive report galvanized our readers and other media outlets, quickly picking up more than 12,000 social media shares and 5,000 comments. The Clinton campaign could not find a suitable talking point on the issue. The campaign tried to claim that Clinton did not send emails that were classified “when originated.”

But Intelligence Community Inspector General I. Charles McCollough, now under attack by Team Clinton, confirmed, “IC classification officials reviewed two additional emails and judged that they contained classified State Department information when originated.”

The inspector general went on to make a comprehensive report, filed earlier this month. He found that “several dozen” emails had classified information in them. “These declarations cover several dozen emails containing classified information determined… to be at the confidential, secret and top secret/sap levels,” McCollough wrote in a letter to Congress. That’s right. A “sap” level is an even higher classification status than “top secret.”

Clinton’s server was highly vulnerable to attack, like the kind that occurred to multiple of her email contractors and could have happened to her when she opened a virus-infected email from her friend.

Breitbart News reported that Clinton’s server was operating on the same email network, and was housed in the same exact physical space, as the server for the Clinton Foundation, indicating that they were sharing a server. Additionally, that space was in New York City, not in the basement of Clinton’s Chappaqua, New York, home, as she claimed. Daughter Chelsea Clinton’s office was also using the email network.

Numerous Clinton Foundation employees used the clintonemail.com server for their own email addresses, which means that they were using email accounts that, if hacked, would have given any hacker complete access to Hillary Clinton’s State Department emails, as well.

Clinton’s server had an open webmail portal that gave potential hackers unrestricted access to Clinton’s personal information.

In fact, Clinton’s server went down at least three times during her tenure as Secretary of State, including weeks after the Benghazi terrorist attack. Clinton never even told her own IT Help Desk at the State Department that she was using a private server, keeping them in the dark about her secret activities.

Clinton even went so far as to hide the identity of the people running her private server, paying a company called Perfect Privacy, LLC. That company, based in Jacksonville, enters its own meaningless contact information into official Internet databases so that its clients’ identities will not be exposed.

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ANALYSIS: Iran Hardliners Generated Crisis with ‘Willing Dupe’ Obama to Solidify Domestic Power

by AARON KLEIN13 Jan 2016348

TEL AVIV – Less than one week before the international community is set to unlock a decade of sanctions imposed on Iran, the country’s Islamic hardliners deliberately generated a crisis with the US for pure domestic consumption with the aim of ensuring the ayatollahs’s continued grip on power.

Once the International Atomic Energy Agency announces on Friday as expected that Iran has fulfilled its obligations under the US-brokered nuclear accord, the billions of dollars in unfrozen accounts and the massive flow of oil exports will usher in historic changes to Iran’s long-isolated economy.

Iran’s hardliners are backed by the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps, the IRGC, which ultimately answers to the country’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. This nexus of power fears that  the sanctions relief – and renewed ties with the West, primarily the US – will shift the center of gravity toward the Iranian internationalists, largely represented by Foreign Minister Mohammad Zarif and President Hassan Rouhani.

Khamenei’s revolution requires that the West be viewed by Iranians as the enemy; indeed, this is the very raison d’être for the Guards’ continued existence. The hardliners cannot afford to be upstaged by any progress on the economic and political fronts following next week’s sanctions relief.

The BBC last year noticed this trend and accurately reported that “the Guards appear to be pursuing a new doctrine: in order to protect the Islamic Republic at home, Iran must confront threats abroad.”

And so the Guards, knowing they will face few consequences from the Obama administration, seized the opportunity to capture ten sailors after two US Navy patrol boards were accused of crossing into the country’s territorial waters.

The Guards said in a statement that the US military personnel were set free after an investigation had determined they had entered by mistake – but not beforemaximizing the humiliation of the US at home and abroad.

The Chief of Staff of Iran’s Armed Forces, Major General Hassan Firouzabadi, boastedto Iranian media that Tuesday’s capture and subsequent release of the sailors “proved how vulnerable the U.S. is in front of powerful Iranian forces.”

Iran’s Tasnim news agency furtherquoted Firouzabadi stating, “This incident in the Persian Gulf, which probably will not be the American forces’ last mistake in the region, should be a lesson to troublemakers in the US Congress.”

On Wednesday, Tasnim released video purporting to show a US sailor apologizing for invading Iranian territory. “It was a mistake, it was our fault, and we apologize for our mistake,” an unidentified sailor told the Iranian interviewer, who then asked him if his GPS system penetrated Iran. “I believe so,” he responded.

Of course, the latest events must also be seen through the lens of the wider Shiite-Sunni divide, and the need for the Iranians to regain the narrative and upstage the Saudi axis after the Kingdom’s provocativekilling earlier this month of the prominent Shiite cleric Nimr Baqir al-Nimr.

It is stunning that the Iranians believe they can get away with these provocations while they use the Obama administration as willing dupes for their internal Soviet-esque propaganda efforts.

Columnist Charles Krauthammer rightlynoted:

In October, Iran test-fires a nuclear-capable ballistic missile in brazen violation of a Security Council resolution explicitly prohibiting such launches. President Obama does nothing. One month later, Iran does it again. The administration makes a few gestures at the UN. Then nothing. Then finally, on Dec. 30, the White House announces a few sanctions.

They are weak, aimed mostly at individuals and designed essentially for show. Amazingly, even that proves too much. By 10 P.M. that night, the administration caves. The White House sends out an email saying that sanctions are off — and the Iranian president orders the military to expedite the missile program.

. . . Just two weeks ago, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards conducted live-fire exercises near the Strait of Hormuz. It gave nearby US vessels exactly 23 seconds of warning. One rocket was launched 1,500 yards from the USS Harry S. Truman.

Obama’s response? None.

Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio.”  Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook.

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