Watchdog group Judicial Watch has uncovered new Hillary Clinton emails that demonstrate she was using her illicit homebrew email server at least a month earlier than she has previously admitted, and also make it clear she has not handed over all of her official correspondence yet, despite claims to the contrary.
“The emails also contain more evidence of the battle between security officials in the State Department, National Security Administration, Clinton and her staff over attempts to obtain secure Blackberrys,” Judicial Watch points out.
The State Department was extremely reluctant to hand these emails over (imagine that!). It took a court order from a federal judge to pry them loose… over a year after the State Department failed to comply with a lawful Freedom of Information Act request.
What Judicial Watch finally obtained, at long last, is a chain of emails “in which Mills conveys to Clinton that the National Security Agency is not pleased with her request for a more secure, personalized BlackBerry,” as the Washington Examiner adroitly puts it.
The email chain includes a message from at least one nameless NSA official eager to play ball with the incoming Secretary of State:
Debbie Plunkett, D/Chief of our Information Assurance Directorate, is personally assembling a knowledgeable team to work with you and other members of your staff to move forward on your Blackberry requirement. She will engage State’s CIO and DS/comms security folks to ensure everyone is aware of the art of the possible … I am confident we can get to YES on this!
“The art of the possible?” “I am confident we can get to YES on this?” Our national security is in the very best of hands, folks.
Inconveniently for Clinton’s desperate efforts to hide her correspondence from Congress and the American people, the rest of the National Security Agency was not interested in the “art of the possible,” refusing Clinton’s daft demand for a BlackBerry that would help her shovel classified documents through her unsecure mail server, and telling her staff to embrace the art of coloring books. (That was literally their response: “Shut up and color.”)
So Team Clinton didn’t “get to yes,” but she went ahead and used her secret server anyway. Clinton has resolutely maintained it went online in March 2009, but her responses to the “lost” email chain uncovered by Judicial Watch are dated February 13. There are more emails between Clinton and then-CIA Director David Petraeus dated earlier than March 2009, but the American people still aren’t allowed to see those messages.
Also, as Judicial Watch points out, these new emails have been unearthed after Clinton “repeatedly stated that the 55,000 pages of documents she turned over to the State Department in December 2014 included all of her work-related emails”… and she has made sworn statements to that effect, in federal court, under penalty of perjury. Fortunately for her, as Americans discovered to their surprise in the late Nineties, people named “Clinton” are immune to perjury charges.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton knows exactly why Clinton tried to keep these February 2009 emails from the public: “Because she didn’t want Americans to know about her February 13, 2009, email that shows that she knew her Blackberry and email use was not secure.”
All’s well that ends well for Clinton, since she was able to keep these revelations hidden until she secured the Democrat Party nomination for President. (Sorry, Sanders kids, but it’s been over for a while now, in part because Sanders gave Clinton a pass on the email scandal.)
The Hill quotes a State Department official setting up Clinton’s perjury defense by saying she “indicated that she does not have access to work-related emails beyond those she turned over to the Department.”
In other words, she says she didn’t have copies of the “lost” emails uncovered by Judicial Watch’s court order, so she wasn’t technically lying when she said she handed over all her official correspondence. She just kind of forgot to mention there were FOIA-responsive documents from before March 2009 floating around out there somewhere.
What else has she “forgotten” to tell us about her mail server? Stay tuned.
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