On Friday, the letter sent to Senator Chuck Grassley from the State Department Bureau of Legislative Affairs, outlining the finding on the State Department investigation into “Hillary’s emails,” was released. As expected partisans, especially those in the media leaped on two diametrically opposed conclusions and that’s because the writer of the State Department letter tucked in some weasel words (probably deliberately imo) for Democrats to latch onto. The letter is short and most of it focuses on the methodology used in their process of investigating the emails.
Here are the findings in a nutshell paragraph in the report:
V. ADJUDICATIVE RESULTS (TOP LINE ROLLUP)
APD’ s administrative review of the HRC emails resulted in the adjudication of 91 valid violations attributable to 38 individuals. Additionally, APD adjudicated 497 valid violations where no individual was found to bear culpability, resulting in a ”valid, but not culpable”determination.Total Valid Violations Adjudicated: 91
Total VnC: 497(Paragraph from Page 8)
Most of the liberal media reports I saw, seemed to fixate only on the last sentence, on Page 10 of this report, and offered the Clinton “time to move on” spin, opining that this report should be the end of investigating Hillary’s emails (I could imagine liberals in the media whining about this “witch hunt” and “poor Hillary” amongst themselves). Here’s the last sentence:
“There was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information.”
Yep, the media leaped on that no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information and the State Department official who sent this letter intended that sentence to be “The End” on Hillary’s emails.
None of this answers to the almost 600 valid violations found and these investigators failed to even hold anyone responsible for 497 of them. Yet most of the liberal media thinks Americans should be satisfied with this investigation??? The report itself defines a valid violation as:
“An incident is categorized as a violation when it is “a knowing, willful, or negligent action that could reasonably be expected to result in the unauthorized disclosure of classified information.”
(Page 4)
The Clinton/Dem machine has so many loyal media spinmeisters, who carry their spin messaging without question, that the hopes that truth could ever filter through their spin wall was always highly unlikely.
The FBI investigation into “Hillary’s emails” began with her use of a private email server coming to light and revelations of classified information being stored on that server. Hillary explained her decision to use that private server as a desire to only have to carry one device, which made no sense, since according to the FBI investigation, she went through 13 blackberries and several laptops. In the FBI Notes Bill Clinton’s IT guy, Justin Cooper, described Hillary using a flip-phone to talk on while using her blackberry at the same time, so she could even multi-task with multiple electronic devices….
The cries from the many on the right insisted that Hillary deliberately set up that private server to avoid federal recordkeeping laws and “hide her emails from FOIA requests.”
I don’t believe either of these explanations gets to the truth of why Hillary decided to use a private server, so before “But, her emails” completely vanishes from public record, here are some facts about that server:
- Hillary never set up a private, homebrew server.
- According to FBI Notes of the interviews with Bill Clinton’s IT guy, Justin Cooper and Hillary’s IT guy, Bryan Pagliano, the original private server in the Clinton’s home was set-up by Cooper, around 2007, to serve as Bill Clinton’s private foundation server. Got that everyone? It was Bill Clinton’s private server.
- In late 2008-early 2009 the Clintons decided to use that private server for Hillary’s State Department emails rather than the official government systems. To that end, Hillary’s campaign IT guy, Pagliano, worked with Bill Clinton’s IT guy, Cooper, to upgrade the server. Huma Abedin coordinated that server upgrade. Pagliano told the FBI he believed they were upgrading that server for Bill Clinton’s use. Hillary was sworn is as Secretary of State on January 21, 2009. So, the merging of the Clintons’ private foundation server and the US State Department was implemented before Hillary was even sworn in as Secretary of State.
- . According to the FBI Notes, Pagliano and Cooper have differing accounts of who the two email accounts on the original server belonged to. Pagliano said it was Huma Abedin and BLANK and Cooper said it was Hillary and BLANK.
In 2016 when the FBI Notes were released I wrote a blog post, The Servers, and my thoughts about these email accounts were:
“Pagliano stated that he transferred email from the old system to the new system and there shouldn’t be ANY email content left on the old server. Pagliano stated to the FBI that he ONLY transferred clintonemail.com email accounts for Huma Abedin and BLANK and that he was unaware of and did not transfer any email account for Hillary. So, who is BLANK. Since Pagliano ONLY transferred clintonemail.com email accounts for Huma Abedin and BLANK and this was Bill Clinton’s PERSONAL email server for foundation business, who could BLANK be….. Now, Clinton’s IT guy, Justin Cooper, recalls the one email account as being Hillary’s email account, not Huma’s, which again brings us back to whose email account was the only other email account on Bill Clinton’s personal server…”
At this point, I’m still curious who BLANK was and why the FBI redacted that name. It would seem to me that if Bill Clinton went to the trouble to set up a private server in his home around 2007, either he or one of his closest aides set up an email account for Bill Clinton’s business. Hillary’s device and email account information the FBI released, indicated she was still using her email on her blackberry the first few months she was Secretary of State.
The Clintons used that homebrew server to merge the Office of the Secretary of State’s business onto their private Clinton Foundation server in their home. Tens of thousands of emails were destroyed, so some of them had to be Bill Clinton’s foundation business.
And that might be why Bill Clinton went so far as to personally arrange that meeting with Loretta Lynch on the tarmac in AZ, weeks before Hillary’s FBI interview. I believe he was likely strong-arming Lynch about how he wanted that FBI interview handled and that he wanted that email investigation closed ASAP.
Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills and Jake Sullivan, all close Hillary staffers, told the FBI they didn’t know anything about the private server until after Hillary’s tenure as Secretary of State, even though both Cooper and Pagliano told the FBI that Huma Abedin coordinated the server upgrade before Hillary was sworn in as Secretary of State. And Huma had an email account on the second server for sure and likely even the original server.
The classified email issue never caused the Clintons any concern, because Hillary had the power to declassify information. The Clintons spun so successfully that few people even realize that original server was Bill Clinton’s personal foundation server, which he had set-up around 2007. The Clinton spin machine always insists that Bill Clinton doesn’t use email, but perhaps by 2007, he wanted to get with the times and decided a “private email server” tucked in his house, guarded by Secret Service agents, would be a secure way for him to begin using email.
Hillary had been online even when Bill Clinton was still president according to various media reports back then.
But, her emails, indeed…
Update: October 20, 2019 8:27 pm – I decided to post part of James Comey’s July 5, 2016 statement:
“From the group of 30,000 e-mails returned to the State Department, 110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained Confidential information, which is the lowest level of classification. Separate from those, about 2,000 additional e-mails were “up-classified” to make them Confidential; the information in those had not been classified at the time the e-mails were sent.
The FBI also discovered several thousand work-related e-mails that were not in the group of 30,000 that were returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014. We found those additional e-mails in a variety of ways. Some had been deleted over the years and we found traces of them on devices that supported or were connected to the private e-mail domain. Others we found by reviewing the archived government e-mail accounts of people who had been government employees at the same time as Secretary Clinton, including high-ranking officials at other agencies, people with whom a Secretary of State might naturally correspond.
This helped us recover work-related e-mails that were not among the 30,000 produced to State. Still others we recovered from the laborious review of the millions of e-mail fragments dumped into the slack space of the server decommissioned in 2013.
With respect to the thousands of e-mails we found that were not among those produced to State, agencies have concluded that three of those were classified at the time they were sent or received, one at the Secret level and two at the Confidential level. There were no additional Top Secret e-mails found. Finally, none of those we found have since been “up-classified.”
libertybelle diaries 
I’d suggest, possibly BLANK might be Sid. Confidence 40% – meaning, just throwing it out there.
On another tangent – any idea what, in the context of witnesses’ statements, “coordinate” means? Surely in no “electronics technical” sense I can imagine, I mean I’ve never been so curious as to inquire of Huma’s educational background, just sort of taking her as a sort of “glorified secretary” person – no demeaning of the profession you understand.
JK, I had responded, but failed to hit reply, so the comment below is my lengthy response. Well, I came across this link I cited, a RealClear Investigation report by Paul Sperry from 2018 – it’s long and has a lot of details. How accurate the details are, I have no idea.
I’ve been thinking about these details about the Weiner laptop and beyond the incredible volume of Hillary emails on that laptop, those emails supposedly went back to 2007 (which is when Bill Clinton had that private server set up), but anyway, this Weiner laptop came to light in 2016 and there were emails going back to 2007 on it. Does anyone use the same laptop for 9 years??? Did anyone at the FBI ask about that? If the Weiners or Huma got a new laptop, was she transferring all those old email files to new laptops? Just so many unanswered questions.
“Does anyone use the same laptop for 9 years???”
My never *really depending* on a laptop I can’t rightly say however as my girlfriend’s been lucky in that the one … er, tablet is what it’s called? Anyway the tablet’s lasted since I reconnected with her; the three laptops she’s been through in the same timeframe haven’t fared at all that well. Matter of fact the last laptop she bought was sent to recycling earlier this Spring.
Huma’s laptop I’d be tempted to conclude must be one helluva laptop. I wonder where she shops?
The reason I wondered about that is because the Comey & Clinton spin effort went along the lines that Huma wasn’t aware the email was automatically backing up to her laptop.
This Real Clear Investigation report asserts Huma even had Hillary’s emails from her Blackberry stored. According to the FBI Notes – Hillary continued to use her blackberry email during the first few months of her tenure as Sec of State, before switching completely to the private server email account. Some unknown program that Huma was unaware of, backing up Huma’s email doesn’t explain how she was saving Hillary’s emails on Hillary’s blackberry email account.
Sometimes JK, I think I should have found some job investigating stuff, because I always am looking for the missing pieces and trying to sift through all the statements, information and timelines trying to get a clear picture of what really happened.
Other times, the piles of lies, deliberate misdirection, spin smokescreens get so deep that I doubt anyone could ever unravel the mess and make sense of it all. these “other times make me glad I opted for being a homemaker, doing lots of volunteer work and when I went back to work, Walmart suited me just fine. It’s much easier working around normal people, lol.
Well JK, if the BLANK isn’t Bill Clinton himself, I suspect it would be someone high-up in the Clinton’s foundation food chain, like Doug Band, or that type of person. Sid was part of the Clinton’s shadow government intelligence and spin operations. but who knows how the Clintons make their personnel decisions. Then again neither one of their IT guys had any actual computer educational background and since Comey said the server lacked even rudimentary security, they obviously knew nothing about building a secure system.
Huma’s background was working on some Muslim Brotherhood publication and having a family closely tied into Muslim Brotherhood power players in the Arab world, I think. Just looking at the FBI Notes of the interviews, especially the two IT guys, Justin Cooper and Bryan Pagliano (who plead the 5th and wouldn’t testify in front of the House Oversight Committee), then looking at Huma’s role as Hillary’s girl Friday, when Hillary was at the State Department, my first thought was, “How on earth did she ever get a security clearance with all those Muslim Brotherhood ties”? The other thing is she married a Jewish man, yet when she travelled in the Arab world – she was treated like royalty, which made me wonder if she’s a high-value intelligence asset to some entity in the ME.
Then there’s all the other things… the IT guys told the FBI Huma controlled the SCIFs in the Clintons’ homes, she managed all of Hillary’s paperwork, she coordinated the server upgrade, which took place as soon as Hillary was offered the Secretary of State position and before Hillary was even sworn in. However, those IT guys, one of them thought Huma already had an email account on the original server (Bill Clinton’s foundation server set up around 2007).
Add in that Weiner and Huma had hundreds of thousands of emails on that laptop:
“Comey later told Congress that “thanks to the wizardry of our technology,” the FBI was able to eliminate the vast majority of messages as “duplicates” of emails they’d previously seen. Tireless agents, he claimed, then worked “night after night after night” to scrutinize the remaining material.
But virtually none of his account was true, a growing body of evidence reveals.
In fact, a technical glitch prevented FBI technicians from accurately comparing the new emails with the old emails. Only 3,077 of the 694,000 emails were directly reviewed for classified or incriminating information. Three FBI officials completed that work in a single 12-hour spurt the day before Comey again cleared Clinton of criminal charges.
“Most of the emails were never examined, even though they made up potentially 10 times the evidence” of what was reviewed in the original year-long case that Comey closed in July 2016, said a law enforcement official with direct knowledge of the investigation.
Yet even the “extremely narrow” search that was finally conducted, after more than a month of delay, uncovered more classified material sent and/or received by Clinton through her unauthorized basement server, the official said. Contradicting Comey’s testimony, this included highly sensitive information dealing with Israel and the U.S.-designated terrorist group Hamas. The former secretary of state, however, was never confronted with the sensitive new information and it was never analyzed for damage to national security.
Even though the unique classified material was improperly stored and transmitted on an unsecured device, the FBI did not refer the matter to U.S. intelligence agencies to determine if national security had been compromised, as required under a federally mandated “damage assessment” directive.”
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2018/08/22/despite_comey_assurance_vast_bulk_of_weiner_laptop_emails_never_examined.html
I wonder if the FBI ever did any in-house computer forensics on any of the Clinton devices and servers or the Weiner laptop. I suspect Comey, at the direction of the Lynch DOJ, outsourced all of that to Crowdstrike.
But back to Huma, the question would be, why on earth was she saving all those emails to a personal laptop, when she had access to all of that on the Clinton email server system? And the other looming question is was she sharing any of that information with other people (especially foreign sources)? I don’t know, but it all raises way too many security worries in my mind. What about you, JK? Do you think Huma could possibly have been unaware all those emails were storing on her laptop? I don’t buy any of it.
” I suspect Comey, at the direction of the Lynch DOJ, outsourced all of that to Crowdstrike.”
That the FBI depended on an analysis performed on the server by Crowdstrike has been confirmed. The bureau only having in its’ possession at any time the analysis and the analysis itself and solely the analysis to be specific.
Now as to whether whatever “direction” there was, if such direction came from a specific department, bureau, agency, individual[s[ remains to be determined. (Publicly at any rate.)
“Do you think Huma could possibly have been unaware all those emails were storing on her laptop?”
I can’t in all honesty offer an opinion about that. Not “can’t” because of my having to have *permission from higher authority or anything like that rather, I’m simply deficient in the requisite knowledge department.
Anecdotal information however persuades me it is likely an individual could be unaware certain sorts of programs/software might be in operation on that individual’s computer. Hell forget thinking in terms of an individual being unaware of stuff on just a single device because there’s examples aplenty worldwide of such ignorance – think what the Norkies [allegedly] did to Sony’s whole organization.
Remember Stuxnet?
Still Huma’s (so far as I’m aware, confirmed) ties to elements of the MB do seem mightily suspicious. In more ways than just the first that pops into my head.
Responding to this one of yours LB, at 10:23 pm
Your mentioning the emails also going to the Blackberry reminds me of something M assisted me with one time I was scheduled for a “on my dime” trip. Basically a computer version of the old fashioned telephone convenience called “call forwarding” except that it was my emails I was wanting … well my “civilian emails” at any rate … Anyway I was wanting my emails to be accessible on a device [laptop in that case] I didn’t own.
At the time being *otherwise employed* the only machine I accessed regularly (before even I’d bought a computer I could call my own) was the work-one. Anyway the process involved my having to set up a personal account along with some other stuff including “mirroring” specific contact info into that new account.
Long story short – to make what I wanted to happen I had to do it manually.
So.
If the RCI reporting is accurate and Huma’s “call forwarding” required the same sort of process I got from M (of Waka) your posing the question from the earlier reply ie “If the Weiners or Huma got a new laptop, was she transferring all those old email files to new laptops [and the Blackberry]?”
I tend to “Yes. Yes she was.”
Confidence? No more than 50% – I’d like to be more helpful but dang it, all this computer gee whizzery still continues to startle me at the capabilities.
“all this computer gee whizzery still continues to startle me at the capabilities”
I would stopped at “continues to startle me”, JK, ’cause I am totally hopeless at all the high tech “gee whizzery”. With even the simplest things I’ve got to convert the fancy technical terminology into terms and concepts using language I understand. All the technical language makes me feel like I’m stranded on an alien planet.