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"The Rules Don't Apply To Me" Hillary Clinton failed to report several hacking attempts

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Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did break her 
department’s rules by setting up her own secret email server, 
the inspector general concluded in a report sent to Congress on 
Wednesday that says she failed to report hacking attempts and 
waved off warnings that she should switch to a more official 
email account.

Inspector General Steve Linick, appointed by President Obama, 
said he couldn’t find any evidence that Mrs. Clinton received 
approval for her odd email arrangement, and when lower-level 
staffers pressed the issue, saying she was skirting open-records 
laws, they were ordered “never to speak of the secretary’s 
personal email system again.”

In one instance in 2011, Mrs. Clinton’s tech guru thought the 
server was being hacked and shut it down for a few minutes. 
Months later, Mrs. Clinton feared yet another hack attack was 
underway — yet never reported the incident to the department, in 
another breach of department rules.

“Notification is required when a user suspects compromise of, 
among other things, a personally owned device containing 
personally identifiable information,” the investigators wrote. 
“However, OIG found no evidence that the Secretary or her staff 
reported these incidents to computer security personnel or 
anyone else within the Department.”

The report was transmitted to some members of Congress but has 
not been officially released. The Washington Times and other 
press outlets obtained a copy Wednesday.

Mrs. Clinton refused to cooperate with the probe, as did a 
number of her top aides from her time at the department, leaving 
investigators with a number of questions they weren’t able to 
nail down.

Her predecessors as secretary of state — Madeleine K. Albright, 
Colin L. Powell and Condoleezza Rice — did speak with 
investigators.

Mr. Powell, in particular, did use personal email for government 
business, and his records were not properly stored by the State 
Department, the investigation found. Democrats seized on that 
information to say it proved Mrs. Clinton was not blazing a 
trail of illegal behavior, but rather following the lead of her 
predecessors.

The inspector general, however, rejected that explanation, 
noting that at the time email was new, policies were “very 
fluid” and the department wasn’t aware of cybersecurity risks in 
the early part of the Bush administration. By the time Mrs. 
Clinton took office in 2009, those policies had been firmed up — 
and they preached exactly against Mrs. Clinton’s practice.

“Beginning in late 2005 and continuing through 2011, the 
Department revised the [manual] and issued various memoranda 
specifically discussing the obligation to use Department systems 
in most circumstances and identifying the risks of not doing so. 
Secretary Clinton’s cybersecurity practices accordingly must be 
evaluated in light of these more comprehensive directives,” the 
inspector general wrote.

Mrs. Clinton’s odd email arrangement was first exposed under 
prodding by the congressional investigation into the 2012 
Benghazi terrorist attack, which happened on Mrs. Clinton’s 
watch and cost the lives of four Americans.

In the two years since the breach, Mrs. Clinton has turned over 
some 30,000 messages from her server that she said constituted 
government business. She withheld another 30,000 that she said 
were purely personal.

The inspector general said returning some of the messages in 
December 2014 — nearly two years after she left office — 
“mitigated” her behavior. But investigators said there are still 
troubling gaps in what she produced.

One email exchange mentioned in the report, which Mrs. Clinton 
did not turn over in her 30,000 messages, seemed to indicate 
that she intended for her system to hide communications from the 
public.

In the 2010 exchange, top personal aide Huma Abedin suggested 
that it was time to look into getting an official state.gov 
email address because Mrs. Clinton’s messages from her 
clintonemail.com account were landing in staffers’ spam folders.

Alternatively, Ms. Abedin said, Mrs. Clinton could release her 
secret address to the department so she could be designated as a 
verified account, keeping her messages out of spam folders.

Mrs. Clinton refused, saying she didn’t “want any risk of the 
personal being accessible.” The inspector general at that point 
in the report notes that Mrs. Clinton refused to cooperate, and 
Ms. Abedin did not respond to a request to be interviewed.

Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said the report offers 
little new and instead confirms Mrs. Clinton’s belated efforts 
to fulfill her duties under open-records laws.

“We think there’s a lot in this report that corroborates what 
we’ve been saying all along,” he told MSNBC.

He said Mrs. Clinton and her aides refused to cooperate because 
they were instead focusing on defending themselves in other 
probes — particularly the FBI’s investigation into whether Mrs. 
Clinton compromised secret information.

Mr. Fallon also denied that Mrs. Clinton or her top aides were 
involved in the decision to silence staffers who questioned her 
email arrangement.

“We’re not familiar with that. There were certainly no 
instructions given that this should be kept secret,” he said.

Mr. Fallon said that despite hacking attempts, there was no 
evidence her server was compromised.

The report lays out many of the details of Mrs. Clinton’s 
server. The domain name clintonemail.com was registered on Jan. 
13, while she was still serving in the Senate and before she was 
confirmed to be secretary on Jan. 21.

State Department staffers were repeatedly asked to help solve 
problems with Mrs. Clinton’s server and her devices, such as her 
BlackBerry — particularly while trying to communicate between 
her secret address and the state.gov accounts used by most of 
her subordinates.

But the inspector general was unable to find anyone who gave the 
final approval for Mrs. Clinton to use the odd arrangement. The 
department’s legal office said it was not asked to review or 
approve the setup and was unaware of anyone else approving it — 
though some of them did email Mrs. Clinton on her secret account.

None of the messages Mrs. Clinton returned to the department was 
marked classified at the time, though some 2,000 messages have 
since been redacted in whole or in part because of information 
now deemed too secret to be seen publicly.

Mrs. Clinton did, however, send emails with “sensitive but 
unclassified” over her secret server, again breaching department 
rules put into place in 2008 — the year before she took office — 
that said such an arrangement required prior approval from the 
Office of Information Resources Management.

“OIG found no evidence that Secretary Clinton ever contacted IRM 
to request such a solution, despite the fact that emails 
exchanged on her personal account regularly contained 
information marked as SBU,” the investigators said.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/may/25/hillary-clinton-
failed-report-several-hacking-atte/
    

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"The Rules Don't Apply To Me" Hillary Clinton failed to report several hacking attempts "Martha Stewart Went To Jail For Much Less" <multiple.felonies@hillaryclinton.com> - 2016-05-31 21:38 +0200

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