State Dept. Whistleblower Has Email Hacked

A whistleblower who had helped expose misconduct by Hillary Clinton’s security detail had his Gmail account hacked and key evidence against State Department officials deleted, according to an exclusive New York Post report.

Diplomatic Security Service criminal investigator Richard Higbie had exposed earlier this year that the State Department allegedly covered up reports alleging improprieties by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s security detail, in which they had engaged with prostitutes abroad. Those reports would have also exposed the Belgian ambassador’s alleged attempts to solicit underaged prostitutes. After Higbie alleged problems at work in a lawsuit and begun to correspond with members of Congress about State Department wrongdoings, his lawyer, Cary Schulman, contends that he has been dragged into an extensive plot to stop him from speaking out which culminated in a “sophisticated” email hack that deleted much of his evidence and correspondence with Congressional officials.

The Gmail hack deleted four years’ worth of messages, according to Schulman, including significant damning evidence against high-ranking officials in the State Department. It also included messages with evidence sent to members of Congress and their offices investigating the story. Higbie has called for the FBI to investigate the hacking, and continues to have unanswered questions about other strange occurrences since he began to expose the covered-up investigation. Schulman, Higbie’s lawyer, had his office burgled shortly after accepting to represent Higbie in this matter. While the thieves took three computers and the matter was declared a petty crime, they left behind other valuables that would not have potentially had information on them pertaining to the case.

Higbie also had significant disputes of the human resources variety with the State Department. This year, he sued Hillary Clintonhas been antagonized for attempting to demote Higbie for not accepting assignments abroad while his daughter was battling a terminal illness, according to reporting by Fox News’ James Rosen (who has been antagonized by the White House some himself). According to Rosen’s report, some State Department officials may have even committed perjury while testifying for the State in that case.

The Higbie case in its entirety and the hacking specifically caps off a year of public mistrust of the Obama White House’s foreign policy and national security wings, beginning with the bombshell revelations of another whistleblower, Edward Snowden, formerly of the National Security Agency. Those revelations turned the tide with some in the media who actively pursued the story and attacked the Obama administration for their secrecy. Higbie’s revelations are of a different sort; they do not impact the daily lives of Americans as pervasively, but appear to expose genuinely embarrassing behavior by public officials abroad. Investigation into how his emails were deleted and how his account was so thoroughly breach continue, and will become public as the story develops.