Did the State Department Disable Its Own Email Security To Accommodate Hillary Clinton?

Hillary Clinton's Underground Communications Center by DonkeyHotey, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0/Original

Earlier today, the AP ran a story seemed to blow a hole in Hillary Clinton’s entire email defense. One of Hillary Clinton’s central defenses in the slow moving Chernobyl that is the investigation into her misuse of private email to send top secret information is that her server was never breached. The Weekly Standard has a copy of the original AP report.

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State Department staffers wrestled for weeks in December 2010 over a serious technical problem with then-Secretary Hillary Clinton’s home email server, causing them to temporarily disable security features that left the server more vulnerable to hackers, according to emails released Wednesday.

Just weeks later, according to previously disclosed emails, hackers attacked the server, forcing Clinton’s staff to shut it down. The next day, one of Clinton’s closest aides, Huma Abedin, wrote to other high ranking staff: “Don’t email hrc (Clinton) anything sensitive. I can explain more in person.”

The emails were released under court order Wednesday to the conservative legal advocacy group Judicial Watch, which has sued the State Department over access to public records related to the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee’s service as the nation’s top diplomat between 2009 and 2013.

The emails, reviewed by The Associated Press, show that State Department technical staff disabled software intended to block phishing emails that could deliver dangerous viruses. They were trying urgently to resolve an apparent conflict between the server’s built-in email delivery features with a version of “ScanMail for Exchange” security software from Trend Micro Inc. that had been installed on her server. Clinton has not previously described any security protections on her server.

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This is good stuff, right. Hillary was sending emails that just skipped off into the ether, never to be seen again. It was beyond the abilities of her private email tech, Brian Pagliano, he of the 125 invocations of the Fifth Amendment and the six-figure federal paycheck, to remedy so State Department IT folks got involved. They disabled some of the security features on Clinton’s private server to make it operational. This is an inspired strategy, actually. The Russians/Chinese/Ugandans/Lichtensteiners/etc. would never imagine that the US Secretary of State would be storing top secret stuff, like the identity of CIA officers and undercover assets, on an unsecured server. Hidden in plain freakin sight.

At some point, State obviously objected to AP’s characterization of the story. Now the story looks like this:

The AP initially reported Wednesday that the emails described security features being turned off on Clinton’s own private server, but State Department spokesman John Kirby clarified hours later that the emails described “a series of troubleshooting measures to the department’s system — not Secretary Clinton’s system — to attempt to remedy the problem.”

If you look at the email chain, particularly starting at page 9 (JW-v-State-13-cv-1363-Documents-referenced-in-OIG-Report-pg-9-25), it looks like State turned off its own anti-phishing and anti-spam filters in order to make their email system compatible with Hillary Clinton’s. For the convenience on one elderly harridan, the entire email system of the State Department was made more vulnerable to foreign penetration.

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This is so incredible that it is bizarre, yet it fits perfectly with everything we’ve learned about the corrupt cesspool of #FAIL that is the State Department administrative operation under Patrick Kennedy. Hillary Clinton was not a secretary of state, to the stripey-pants-Ivy-League set of the diplomatic corps she was royalty. No rules applied. There were no limits on her behavior. If she wanted to run her own email system, she could. If she wanted to hire a Democrat political functionary to run it and pay him a six-figure salary, she did. If she wanted to send top secret material via her private email and have aides strip the security classifications from it, fine. No problem. This is abuse of power of the worst kind and should disqualify her from office… were she opposed by anyone but Donald Trump.

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