Hey Comey, Your Friday Night DocDump Proves Intent

One has to wonder if James Comey even read the 302’s he approved for release late Friday. Seems all kinds of people were in fact sounding alarms and telling the truth but the FBI did not see anything related to intent? Wow….Hillary’s own close and long time friend as well as attorney, Cheryl Mills is at the core of this whole matter, but yet we are told by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman, Jason Chaffetz that lil’ old Cheryl was given immunity. Full immunity? Good question, has anyone seen the immunity document granted by the Department of Justice? No…not yet.

 

All of us can officially declare that we have lost any hope for the Department of Justice practicing good law and sadly we can say that the Director of the FBI, James Comey too was part of this collusion. So, sit back and read these items if you can stand it. Fair warning…. this IS INTENT.

We will start with a Reuters piece in part:

A State Department employee, whose name was redacted, told investigators they believed senior department officials interfered with the screening of Clinton’s emails for public release last year in a way that helped Clinton.

The employee, who worked on the screening process, said there was pressure to obscure the fact they were finding classified information in the messages. John Kirby, a State Department spokesman, said in a statement the department “strongly disputes” the claim of interference. Clinton repeatedly said last year she never sent or received classified information, but now says she did not do so knowingly since the release of the FBI findings.

The employee also said the Defense Department told the State Department last year it had found about 1,000 emails between Clinton and David Petraeus in its records from his time as the director of the United States Central Command.

The State Department has said that Clinton did not include any of her emails with Petraeus when her lawyers screened and returned what they said were all her work emails in 2014. A single conversation of about 10 emails later emerged last year after the Defense Department provided it.

Spokesmen for Clinton have declined to discuss the omission, and did not respond to questions about the new interview summaries.

Kirby, the department spokesman, said he could not “speculate” whether the Defense Department had found more than just a single conversation between Clinton and Petraeus. “We can only speak to the records in our possession,” he said. Full article here.

Now for more disgusting details:

27 things we learned from Clinton’s FBI files

According to the witness, State Department officials at one point attempted to classify information in order to have an excuse to redact it even though the agency’s own Office of Legal Counsel thought the email was not worthy of classification.

The witness said he and other career officers, who were typically involved in the FOIA process and in responding to congressional inquiries, were “cut out of the loop” when Clinton’s emails needed processing. Instead, new staffers were “placed” by “top State officials” to take over the job of screening Clinton’s emails; the witness said the officials — whose identities were redacted — had “a very narrow focus on all Clinton-related items and were put in positions that were not advertised.”

FOIA reviews are supposed to be performed by career officials to prevent politics from affecting the government’s response, particularly in a case as politically fraught as the Clinton email situation.

Clinton deleted nearly 1,000 emails with Petraeus

In Aug. 2015, the Pentagon called the State Department and informed an unnamed official there that “CENTCOM records showed approximately 1,000 work-related emails between Clinton’s personal email and General David Petraeus.”

The FBI noted that “[m]ost of those 1,000 emails were not believed to be included in the 30,000 emails” that Clinton turned over to the State Department in Dec. 2014.

Officials felt ‘pressure’ not to classify any Benghazi emails

 

At least one witness told the FBI he felt “pressure” not to upgrade any information in a highly-anticipated batch of 296 emails related to Benghazi.

The witness said Patrick Kennedy, the State Department’s undersecretary for management, went to the FBI and “pointedly asked” the bureau “to change [its] classification determination” for a Benghazi email that had been marked classified.

The Benghazi-related emails were among the first records from Clinton’s private server to be made public.

Kennedy “categorically rejected” the notion that he would obstruct the FOIA process when he sat down with FBI agents in Dec. 2015.

Sidney Blumenthal advised more high-level officials

Clinton has often defended her relationship to longtime confidante Sidney Blumenthal by referring to his detailed missives — some of which are now at least partially classified — as unsolicited memos from an old friend.

But Jake Sullivan, Clinton’s former deputy chief of staff, told the FBI he also spoke directly with Blumenthal during his tenure.

Sullivan said he spoke by phone with Blumenthal and emailed with him occasionally, even acting as a go-between for Blumenthal and Clinton or other high-level officials.

Blumenthal’s controversial style prompted the Obama White House to ban him from working in the administration. However, Clinton’s private emails exposed the informal position he held within Clinton’s State Department.

 

Sullivan described Blumenthal as someone who “likes to help the cause.”

State Department officials definitely knew about the server

Many high-level agency staffers, including Kennedy, have claimed they knew nothing of Clinton’s private email server until they saw stories about it in the news.

A common defense for officials who could be implicated if they admitted prior knowledge of the network has been to acknowledge Clinton’s occasional use of a personal address to send messages but to deny awareness of the hardware that sat in her basement.

One unnamed witness who worked in the State Department’s IT office told the FBI he was aware of the server system since the day Clinton was sworn in.

That was because the witness was forced to work with Bryan Pagliano, the technology specialist who had built the server for Clinton, in order for the server to accommodate Clinton’s government work.

For example, the witness “interacted with [Pagliano] to keep [the server] communicating with State systems” during the “5-6 instances” in which Clinton’s private emails were intercepted by the government’s security systems before they could reach the .gov inboxes of her colleagues.

Although the witness helped Pagliano keep the server running remotely, the individual told the FBI “he did not know how the server was paid for or where it was physically located.”

At least three people had emails on the ‘clintonemail.com’ network

Besides Clinton, the only other individual known to have used an email address on the “clintonemail.com” domain was Huma Abedin, then her deputy chief of staff.

Justin Cooper, a former aide to Clinton’s husband and to the Clinton Foundation, told the FBI that at least one other person used an account on that network “as part of their association or work for Hillary Clinton.”

That person’s name, or multiple other names, were redacted by the FBI. Clinton has sworn under penalty of perjury that Cheryl Mills, her former chief of staff, did not use an account on the server.

Pagliano tried to sound the alarm

In a Dec. 2015 interview with the FBI, Clinton’s former IT aide said he had repeatedly attempted to warn her team about the potential record-keeping implications of her unauthorized network.

Pagliano said he had been called into a high-level State Department official’s office in summer 2009 and asked if he knew about the existence of a “clintonemail.com” domain in use by the former secretary of state.

When Pagliano relayed the incident to individuals whose names were redacted, an unidentified witness had a “visceral” reaction and “didn’t want to know anymore.”

One unidentified witness told Pagliano in 2009 that Clinton’s private email use “may be a federal records retention issue” and stated “that he wanted to convey this to Hillary Clinton’s inner circle, but could not reach them.”

Pagliano said he “then approached Cheryl Mills in her office and relayed [redacted]’s concerns regarding federal records retention and the use of a private email server.”

However, Mills dismissed the concerns by arguing other former secretaries of state had done the same thing — an assertion later proven false.

Witnesses were nervous about talking to the FBI

One former State Department aide told investigators she was worried Clinton would be angry if she learned the unnamed individual had spoken to the FBI.

At the end of her Dec. 2015 interview, the witness told agents “she had not mentioned the interview to Clinton or any of [her] contacts from [State Department].” That witness explained her concerns that Clinton and her staff “could be upset to learn she spoke with the FBI without telling them.”

President Obama used a fake name

During an interview with Abedin, FBI agents presented the longtime Clinton aide with a copy of an email from Obama to Clinton.

The president had used a pseudonym to communicate with Clinton on her private server.

“How is this not classified?” Abedin “exclaimed,” according to the FBI’s summary of its conversation with her.

Abedin explained that Clinton had notified the White House when she changed her primary email address because Obama’s network was set up to block unfamiliar accounts from sending him messages.

The new revelation has raised questions about the president’s claims to have had no knowledge of Clinton’s private email use before March 2014, since her private address had to be added manually to a list of accounts with permission to communicate with his own server.

FBI agents conducted interviews in Denver, San Francisco

FBI agents traveled to Denver in September of last year to question employees of Platte River Networks, the Colorado company Clinton hired in 2013 to manage her email network.

At least one employee of Platte River, Paul Combetta, was granted an immunity agreement in exchange for information.

Combetta was asked to delete emails in defiance of a preservation order for those documents that had been issued by the House Select Committee on Benghazi.

Agents also traveled to San Francisco to question Lewis Lukens, a former State Department official during Clinton’s tenure.

Clinton’s team tried to mop up emails after NYT story

In March 2015, an unspecified individual from Clinton’s staff reached out to Platte River to determine how many emails existed and where those records were stored. The New York Times exposed Clinton’s private email use in a story on March 1 of that year.

Clinton’s team sprang into action in the immediate aftermath of that story, scrambling to account for the location of any email she might have sent during her State Department tenure in the days between the initial Times story and her first public statements on the controversy at a press conference on March 10, 2015.

Another unnamed employee at the firm said he received an email from Clinton’s staff on March 9 of that year but told FBI agents he “did not recall seeing” the preservation order attached to that email by David Kendall, Clinton’s primary attorney.

Yet another unnamed staffer from Platte River told investigators he genuinely believed the archive of Clinton’s emails “should still be on the server in possession of the FBI.”

He said only two people in the world had the authorization to delete an entire mailbox. The names of those two individuals were redacted.

A dated list of files on the server indicated the archive of Clinton’s emails was still on the server by the time the list was generated in Jan. 2015 — a month after the original batch of 30,000 emails was provided to the State Department.

But at some point over the next few months, someone scrubbed the archive from the server.

Staffers shattered discs that stored emails

After Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s former chief of staff, asked a Platte River staffer in July 2014 to hand over all of Clinton’s correspondence with any address that ended in “.gov,” the employee burned the emails onto DVDs and prepared to ship them to Mills.

However, Mills said she didn’t want the discs to be transferred via mail and instead asked the tech specialist to arrange a “secure electronic transfer” of the emails. The Platte River staffer said he “destroyed the DVDs by breaking them in half” once the digital transfer was complete.

The July 2014 request came just two months after the House Select Committee on Benghazi was created

Witnesses pleaded the 5th during FBI interviews

One employee of Platte River was advised by the company’s lawyer to invoke his Fifth Amendment rights and refuse to answer any further questions when FBI investigators started asking about what the technology specialist had discussed with Kendall.

The agents referred to documentation that the employee had spoken to Mills and Kendall on a March 31, 2015 conference call.

That employee used a digital deletion tool called Bleachbit to scrub emails from the server on the very same day.

The State Department timeline doesn’t fit

Multiple witnesses told the FBI that Mills asked them to round up all of Clinton’s work-related emails in July of 2014. The timing of the request described to investigators fits with the progression of the Benghazi committee’s probe.

But the State Department has said it did not ask Clinton for her emails until Oct. 2014, and claims it only did so because officials realized they had no emails from previous secretaries of state.

Clinton has long touted the fact that the State Department sent letters to other secretaries of state requesting copies of personal emails.

The new timeline confirmed by the FBI suggests it took Clinton’s staff five months to prepare her work-related emails for submission to the State Department. The 30,000 emails she ultimately provided were not given to the agency until early Dec. 2014.

Clinton relied on staff outside State

Justin Cooper, an aide to Clinton’s husband and a former Clinton Foundation adviser, supported Clinton’s staff during her time at the State Department.

Monica Hanley, Clinton’s assistant, told the FBI she would contact Cooper each time she needed to synch Clinton’s BlackBerry with the server that was partially under Cooper’s care.

What’s more, Hanley said she would contact Cooper — not anyone at the State Department — “when [she] needed reimbursement for items she purchased for Clinton.”

Like Pagliano, Cooper performed services for Clinton that were related to her State Department work but that were paid for out of the Clinton’s own pocket.

There’s a lost thumb drive with all the emails on it

Hanley was tasked with transferring all of Clinton’s emails onto a laptop Cooper provided from the Clinton Foundation. That laptop eventually got lost in the mail, a detail that was revealed in the 58 pages of notes the FBI released on Sept. 2.

But Hanley also transferred all of Clinton’s emails onto a thumb drive at the same time. She told the FBI she “could not recall what happened to the thumb-drive.”

The transfer came in spring 2013, shortly after longtime Clinton confidante Sidney Blumenthal’s inbox was breached by a Romanian hacker. Platte River advised the former secretary of state to change email addresses, touching off the shuffle of records onto devices that were ultimately lost.

Clinton’s attorney was cleaning up

In addition to the conference call with a Platte River employee that prompted that employee to suddenly invoke his Fifth Amendment rights, Kendall contacted Hanley in “March or April 2015,” shortly after the New York Times story was published.

Hanley did not describe what she and Kendall discussed, but she immediately cleaned out State Department records from her inbox after she spoke with him.

“Following her conversation with Kendall, Hanley searched the Gmail account she used while at [State Department] for any email communications with state.gov accounts and deleted emails associated with state.gov accounts,” the FBI wrote in its report.

An aide left classified documents in a Russian hotel room

Hanley was given “verbal security counseling” after she accidentally left a classified document and a sensitive “briefing book” in a Russian hotel suite she was using with Clinton.

Diplomatic security officers “found a classified document from the briefing book in the suite during a sweep following Clinton and Hanley’s departure” and later told Hanley “the briefing book and the document should never have been in the suite.”

Kennedy may have misled the inspector general

Patrick Kennedy, the undersecretary for management with a history of blocking inspector general probes, assured State Department Inspector General Steve Linick that Clinton had turned over electronic copies of her emails in a July 2015 meeting with the watchdog.

Then, when Linick requested the electronic file for those emails, Kennedy said he only had hard copies.

Linick also referred the FBI to additional witnesses who alleged current employees at the State Department have been “meddling with the FOIA review process.” Other witnesses pointed to Kennedy as a potential interference in the document screening that took place before Benghazi-related records were provided to Congress.

During his internal probe of agency email practices, Linick said Pagliano refused to be interviewed by the inspector general’s team about his involvement with the Clinton network.

Clinton ‘could not use a computer’

Abedin told the FBI Clinton conducted most of her work in person or on paper due to her limitations with technology.

“Abedin explained that Clinton could not use a computer and that she primarily used her iPad or BlackBerry for checking emails,” the FBI wrote of its April interview with Abedin.

Another witness told the FBI Clinton had “little patience” for technology problems.

State officials weren’t buying Clinton’s email excuses

Clinton continues to stress the fact that most of the classified emails found on her server were only retroactively designated as such — that is, they were not classified at the time they were written, but merely upgraded to classified at a later date due to a change in circumstances regarding the information.

An unnamed witness told the FBI he had “heard the argument” but didn’t quite buy it.

“It was very rare for something that was actually unclassified to become classified years after the fact,” the witness told investigators.

Including the retroactively classified documents, there were more than 2,000 classified records on Clinton’s server.

Clinton left the doors of her SCIF open when she wasn’t home

The State Department had installed SCIFs, or areas designed for the secure consumption of classified material, in both her her New York and Washington, D.C. homes.

Clinton did not always keep those areas secure, however. Cooper told the FBI she was careless when it came to keeping the SCIFs locked.

“The SCIF doors at both residences were not always secured, including times when Clinton was not at the residences,” Cooper told the FBI, according to its summary of their second of three interviews with the former Clinton family aide.

State officials worried about Clinton and classified material from the start

Eric Boswell, assistant secretary for diplomatic security for most of Clinton’s tenure, said his team had concerns about how the incoming secretary of state and her staff would treat classified areas from the beginning of their tenures.

Specifically, diplomatic security personnel worried that Clinton and her team would use their BlackBerrys inside the SCIF that encompasses much of the seventh floor at State Department headquarters, an area known as “Mahogany Row.”

Clinton’s staff had asked for a classified-enabled BlackBerry upon joining the agency, but Boswell said no such device exists.

“There was some general concern within [State Department] security personnel that Clinton’s executive staff may try to use their Blackberries [sic] in the SCIF as they were almost all brought on to [State Department] from Clinton’s campaign team, and thus were very accustom to using their Blackberries [sic],” the FBI wrote in a summary of its Feb. 2016 interview with Boswell.

Clinton frequently used a flip phone

Clinton cycled through eight BlackBerry while she was secretary of state for a total of 13 devices throughout the life of her email server, the FBI revealed earlier this month.

But she also used a flip phone to make calls, Cooper said, because she found the device “more comfortable to talk on.”

The flip phone allowed her to check emails on her Blackberry while talking on the phone, Cooper told the FBI. He could not identify what model she used and it is unclear whether the FBI ever recovered any of the flip phones in Clinton’s possession.

Tech aides described ‘Hillary cover-up operation’

Platte River employees sent emails describing the ‘Hilary [sic] coverup [sic] operation’ after Clinton’s staff asked them to begin wiping emails in Dec. 2014.

The unnamed employee who authored the phrase told FBI agents that his reference to the “cover-up” was a joke.

Clinton created second personal account when server crashed

The former secretary of state set up a previously undisclosed email account to communicate when her private server system was down.

Hanley told FBI investigators that Clinton likely created the second private account — a “gmail.com” address — to send messages when her server crashed in 2011 during a trip to Croatia.

Clinton’s top aides were hacked

Stephen Mull, a top record-keeping official at the State Department, told the FBI that “sometime in 2011,” he learned from diplomatic security officers about “concern over the possibility that some personal email accounts of [State Department] employees were hacked.”

Mull said Sullivan, who was one of the aides most frequently in contact with Clinton on her email, was among those hacked in the breaches.

9/11: POTUS Vetoed JASTA, Ability to Sue Saudi Arabia

House intel chairman threatens to subpoena bin Laden files

FNC: The Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee says he’s prepared to take what may be unprecedented action to get the remaining Usama bin Laden documents from the nation’s top military and intelligence agencies – and subpoena the files.

“If they don’t provide these documents to the committee by October 11th, then we’re going to have to subpoena them — which I don’t want to have to do but it appears like we’ve run out of all options,” Republican Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., told Fox News. “For the administration to basically mislead the American people for this many years is flat-out wrong.”

Nunes is seeking documents and relevant analysis, which is thought to comprise at least 50 reports. In a Sept. 22 letter to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan, and Defense Department Undersecretary for Intelligence Marcel Lettre, Nunes says the law required them to comply nearly two years ago based on Section 313 of the Intelligence Authorization ACT (IAA) for fiscal 2014. This section mandated a “complete declassification of the Abbottabad documents within 120 days.”  More here.

Meanwhile there appears to be enough votes to over-ride Obama’s veto on the ability to for the 9/11 families to sue Saudi Arabia.

FNC: With lawmakers eager to return home to campaign ahead of the November election, a vote could come as early as Tuesday. Even House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, an Obama ally, indicated support this week for an override, saying members believe the families “should have their day in court.”

Democratic New York Sen. Chuck Schumer called the veto a “disappointing decision that will be swiftly and soundly overturned in Congress.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office said the Senate would take up the override “as soon as practicable in this work period.”

The Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act sailed through both chambers of Congress by voice vote, with final House passage coming just two days before Obama led the nation in marking the 15th anniversary of the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001. More here.

The passed legislation is known as JASTA, S.2040 – Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act was introduced by Senator Cornyn of Texas. It was presented to Barack Obama and was due for final record by 9/23/2016 if Obama did not take his veto action which he did at the last moment during the week of the United Nations General Assembly.

Related reading: House Intel Cmte has Declassified/Released the 28 Pages

Additionally:

Deleted official report says Saudi key funder of Hillary Clinton campaign

#USA2016

MEE: Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman reportedly said Saudi has enthusiastically funded Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign

Saudi Arabia is a major funder of Hillary Clinton’s campaign to become the next president of the United States, according to a report published by Jordan’s official news agency.

The Petra News Agency published on Sunday what it described as exclusive comments from Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman which included a claim that Riyadh has provided 20 percent of the total funding to the prospective Democratic candidate’s campaign.

Blame Loretta Lynch, Beth Wilkinson and the White House

 

Political activism is the real job of those inside the beltway. Everything and everyone outside of that perimeter is not part of reality, or at least that is how the Federal government operates. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is our method to checks and balances and yet, not one case they have been burdened to investigate has proven fruitful at all. What say you? We don’t see any recoil on this and this precisely how the Obama system has worked for 8 years. It is federal legal terror.

Top Clinton aide Cheryl Mills granted partial immunity in email investigation

A source says the immunity offer came after the FBI interviewed Mills when investigators asked to go through her computers to see if it still contained classified information.

Politico: Top Hillary Clinton aide Cheryl Mills received an immunity deal from the Justice Department in the FBI’s investigation into the former secretary of state’s private email server, records shown to Congress revealed Friday, re-injecting the email controversy into the presidential campaign just days before her first debate with Donald Trump.

In addition to Mills, Clinton’s former chief of staff at State, grants of partial immunity were also extended to former Clinton aide Heather Samuelson, who worked as State’s White House liaison and later as a private attorney for Clinton and to John Bentel, who was director of the the Information Resources Management section in the secretary of state’s office, lawmakers said.

The newly disclosed information brings to five the number of individuals known to have received some form of immunity in connection with the FBI probe, which ended with the bureau recommending that no charges be brought against Clinton or her aides for mishandling classified information.

“This is beyond explanation. The FBI was handing out immunity agreements like candy,” House Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) said Friday in a statement. “I’ve lost confidence in this investigation and I question the genuine effort in which it was carried out. Immunity deals should not be a requirement for cooperating with the FBI.”

The immunity grants to Mills and Samuelson were narrow, covering only their handover of laptops used in 2014, after Clinton left State, to conduct a review of the former secretary’s emails to separate work-related messages from those purely personal in nature. The immunity came after the women were interviewed by the FBI and did not cover any of their statements. People familiar with the immunity offer said it was not related to the lawyers’ testimony, noting that FBI Director James Comey said in July there was no evidence of a deletion aimed at frustrating the investigation.

A lawyer for Mills and Samuelson, Beth Wilkinson, said she requested the immunity grants because of inter-agency disputes about whether some information in Clinton’s emails was classified.

“As the government indicated in these letters, the DOJ and FBI considered my clients to be witnesses and nothing more. Indeed, the Justice Department assured us that they believed my clients did nothing wrong. At all points my clients cooperated with the government’s investigation, including voluntarily participating in interviews with the FBI and DOJ,” Wilkinson said in a statement.

“The letters released to the Hill today only covered the computers that my clients had used in performing their legal work,” Wilkinsion added. “Because of the confusion surrounding the various agencies’ positions on the after-the-fact classification decisions, I advised my clients to accept this letter from DOJ.”

Bentel, however, received immunity before speaking with the FBI, people familiar with the situation said. Former State employees told agency investigators Bentel brushed back their concerns about Clinton’s email setup.

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee stressed in a statement emailed to reporters that the immunity offers to Mills and Samuelson were “very limited.”

“These very limited immunity agreements did not extend to any testimony before Congress, statements to the FBI, or assertions to any other investigators,” they said.

The Clinton campaign attributed the information’s release to the proximity of Monday’s presidential debate.

“House Republicans are trying to make something out of nothing by rummaging through the files of a Justice Department investigation that was closed months ago without any charges whatsoever, and leaking selective details three days before the first presidential debate,” Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon said in a statement, noting that Mills and Samuelson cooperated fully with the FBI’s inquiry and “had already given full interviews to the investigators.”

A top aide to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign said word of the additional immunity grants underscored the recklessness of Clinton’s conduct.

“Revelations that three additional individuals, including Cheryl Mills, were granted immunity from prosecution in Hillary Clinton’s email scandal shows this was without a doubt a criminal scheme,” Trump aide Jason Miller said in a statement. “At its heart, Clinton’s secret server was an end run around government transparency laws designed to hide corruption between the Clinton Foundation and her State Department, an arrangement which ultimately put our national security and sensitive diplomatic efforts at risk. No one with judgment this bad should be allowed to serve as president of the United States or hold any public office.”

Miller also suggested that the immunity grants were aimed at preventing Clinton from facing justice in the case.

“What has become abundantly clear is that the Obama administration is protecting Hillary Clinton from accountability at all costs because she will keep the rigged system in Washington in place. In light of this development, Hillary Clinton must immediately come forward and promise the American people that none of these individuals will ever serve in any capacity in her administration,” the Trump aide added.

For weeks, House Republicans have been seeking the FBI’s full file in the probe and, last week, issued a subpoena demanding the records.

Republicans disclosed the immunity agreements just after learning about them in investigative records shown to congressional staff by the Justice Department on Friday.

Immunity offers to witnesses are not made by the FBI, but by the Justice Department. A department spokesman declined to comment. A spokeswoman for the FBI had no immediate comment.

It was previously disclosed that prosecutors granted immunity to former State Department computer specialist Bryan Pagliano and to a computer technician Clinton hired through a private firm, Paul Combetta of Denver-based Platte River Networks. The immunity deals for the two appear to be broader than those given to Mills and Samuelson, although no one in the probe is known to have received full immunity.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/mills-immunity-228580#ixzz4L71Eulie
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Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/mills-immunity-228580#ixzz4L711E9w4
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WH Hacked: DC Leaks Releases New Emails Of WH Staffer

Much of what the White House puts out is obviously a political Potemkin Village it seems as well.

Zerohedge: DC Leaks has just revealed its latest email hack of White House staffer Ian Mellul.  According to DC Leaks, Mellul works in the White House to coordinate official trips for the First Lady and VP Biden while also serving on Hillary’s presidential campaign.

Ian Mellul is a member of White House Office staff. He coordinates with United States Secret Service and local law enforcement agencies to help maximize the safe exposure of the First Lady and the Vice President of the United States, during official trips and visits. At the same time he works for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

The emails come from Mellul’s personal gmail account, spanning February 2015 through July 2016, and contain a mix of detailed planning logistics, internal campaign chatter and other materials from both the White House and Clinton campaign.  A full list of the emails can be reviewed on the DC Leaks website.

The following tweet was sent out earlier by DC Leaks exposing the hack.

***

Check Ian Mellul’s private correspondence for more interesting stuff:

 

 

The leaks included the alleged passport of Michelle Obama…

*** DC Leaks

And logistics photos, like the one below, intended to coordinate press events for the Hillary campaign.

*** DC Leaks

The White House declined to comment on the leak but both the LinkedIn and Twitter accounts for Mellul were deleted on Thursday morning.

Of course, the key question here remains why is official government business being conducted through personal gmail accounts in obvious violation of the federal records act?  Moreover, who exactly at the White House thinks it’s acceptable to send Michelle Obama’s passport to the gmail account of a 22 year old recent college grad?

**** In part from DailyMail:

DC Leaks said in an email: ‘The leaked files show the security level of our government. If terrorists hack emails of White House Office staff and get such sensitive information we will see the fall of our country.’

The hack also revealed a Power Point detailing the recent trip of Vice President Joe Biden to the Intercontinental Hotel in Cleveland on June 26 of this year.

The detailed report includes how many stairs Biden will be walking up as he arrives at the hotel loading dock and makes his way up to the second floor of the facility.

It also features an photo image of Biden waving as he travels from the loading dock and up the stairs, laying out all the rooms and who he will be expected to meet and speak with at the event.

The First Lady gets the same treatment for a Let’s Move event being held in Waynesboro, Georgia.

And even a Hillary Clinton event held in May of this year in Houston is detailed, from who will be meeting the Democratic hopeful to, once again, the number of steps she will walk up and down.

There are also detailed documents detailing the movements for Clinton and those with her on a number of campaign events, from who will be riding in which car and their phone numbers to the manifest on her private plane as it travels around the country.

Most of those listed are members of the advance team for Hillary for America, along with Clinton aide Connolly Keigher and Clinton senior policy adviser Maya Harris.

There is also personal correspondences between the staffers and friends, as well as notes to professors, like one in April of 2015 in which he informs one of his teachers that he will be late for class due to a last second obligation he has as part of the advance team for the First Lady.

‘I am very sorry about the last minute nature of this email. I am on the advance team for Mrs Obama, and they bumped up our meetings today on site in VA (they were supposed to be tonight!) I hate missing class more than anything else, I hopefully should be back I DC by 430, and I will sprint to the lab,’ writes the staffer.

An email from Arielle Medina, Clinton’s travel coordinator, also reveals how much those who are working on the campaign are getting paid.

You will receive a day rate for full work days and 1/2 of that rate for travel-only days. The rate for leads is $150 ($75 for travel-only); the rate for press leads, site leads and RONs is $110 ($55 for travel-only); the rate for credentials, S2/P2s, and motorcade is $75 ($37.50for travel-only),’ reads the email to the staffer and others on the team.

The email also reminds everyone that receipts must be saved if they want to be reimbursed and that public transportation must be taken to airport for flights between the hours of 7:00am and 10:00pm.

All team members must also share hotel rooms.

The messages were all taken from the staffers GMail account starting back in 2015, while the individual was still in college, through this past July.

DC Leaks is the same group that earlier this month hacked into the email account of former Secretary of State Colin Powell, releasing his private information.

Those emails revealed Powell’s disdain for Trump and his at times reluctance to support Clinton in the upcoming election. More here including additional photos.

 

Judge Blasts State Dept on Hillary Email Production, then this!

Judge blasts State Dept for slow-walking Hillary emails

WashingtonTimes: A federal judge blasted the Obama administration for slow-walking the release of some of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails, saying in court Monday that the government appears to be withholding information from voters ahead of the election.

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon said the State Department in not “being all that cooperative,” and told the Justice Department lawyers to get the State Department to shape up and do its duty.

“Get with the program, so to speak, so that the people of this country can have the information they need,” he ordered. “The State Department needs to start cooperating to the fullest extent possible. They are not perceived to be doing that.”

Judge Leon, who has earned a reputation as a funny but caustic jurist, particularly when he finds government bungling, said the Justice Department, by not forcing the State Department to cooperate better, is risking its own storied reputation.

He specifically called out the federal programs branch that acts as the lawyer for the rest of the government, and the head of that division, Marcia Berman. Ms. Berman wasn’t in the courtroom Monday, but has been a frequent figure at the courthouse over the last year as the administration has had to defend its handling of Mrs. Clinton’s emails.

Mondays’s case, filed by the Daily Caller News Foundation, concerned documents detailing Mrs. Clinton’s access to top secret programs. The State Department said it has found more than 1,000 documents dealing with the subject, but said it would take nearly a month to process 450 unclassified documents, and couldn’t say how long it would take to process the classified ones.

The case is one of dozens pending where the department has been accused of slow-walking, keeping information out of public view for far longer than is allowed under the Freedom of Information Act.

The State Department says it is overwhelmed by the requests and its own limited budget and manpower. Officials also say the Clinton emails are complicated because they involved classified information that requires a stricter, more time consuming process to clear for the public.

But the government has also been reluctant to divulge important details. At one point on Monday the government lawyer on the case, Jason Lee, said he didn’t know how many pages were in the documents, sparking the judge’s ire.

Judge Leon ordered a faster production of the 450, and when Mr. Lee said they would do their best, Judge Leon pounced.

“Do better than your best. Do it,” he ordered, then proceeded to scold the government for its bungling, and said it was something other judges at the courthouse had noticed.

“You have a client that, to say the least, is not impressing the judges on is court … at being all that cooperative,” he said. “This way of doing business needs to stop.”

He said this was the first open-records case he’d seen where time was so much of the essence, given Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy for the White House, and said the administration needed to realize that.

SMOKING GUN: “BleachBit” Paul Combetta ASKED TO STRIP OR REPLACE VIP’s EMAIL ADDRESS!

The electronic exchange as noted here.

[–]GateheaD 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Add the VIPs email to a generic contact and hide it in plain sight.

[–]exproject 0 points1 point  (5 children)

To my knowledge, there’s no way to edit existing messages, that’s a possibility for a discovery nightmare.

To strip/rename on outbound/inbound you could rewrite it with a transport rule.

[–][deleted]  (4 children)

[deleted]

[–]exproject 0 points1 point  (3 children)

No, a transport rule would only affect future messages.

[–]borismkv 0 points1 point  (2 children)

And it requires an Edge Transport server. Address Rewrite isn’t available on any other role.

[–]exproject 0 points1 point  (1 child)

True. I’ve seen people roll their own Transport Agents for hubs that can do rewrites, but that always looked a bit overkill.

Expanding on what /u/GateheaD said, you could give the VIP a “relay” mailbox. i.e. [email protected] forwards to [email protected]. All your users would mail VIP and Exchange would pass it in the backend so that the forwarding email address was not exposed. Meeting Forward Notifications might give it away though, I’ve never had the requirement of the sender can’t know who the end recipient is so I never actually quantified that behavior.

[–]borismkv 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The Relay mailbox thing is a good solution, but you just know the VIP is going to respond to emails that get forwarded to his personal email by using his personal email, which would of course result in the personal email getting added. I’d just give him a regular mailbox and ask him to use that if he wants his private address to be private. Ultimately, the privacy of the VIP’s personal email address is something the VIP should be responsible for, not the people that person emails.

[–]odoprasm 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Is there no way to access and edb manually?

[–]brkdncr 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you need to control who gets to email the vip, just set up stringent spam filtering where only whitelisted people or people the vip has emailed are allowed.

[–]borismkv 0 points1 point  (2 children)

There is no supported way to do what you’re asking. You can only delete emails after they’re stored in the database. You can’t change them. If there was a feature in Exchange that allowed this, it could result in major legal issues. There may be ways to hack a solution, but I am not aware of any.

[–][deleted]  (1 child)

[deleted]

[–]borismkv 0 points1 point  (0 children)

As a PST file, probably not. MSG files maybe, but you would need a utility to do it, and it would be a one off kind of thing where you’d have to manually modify each email.

Moving forward, though, I would recommend that you create a mailbox for the VIP if they communicate with your environment on a regular basis. That way they aren’t using their personal email and you don’t have to worry about hiding it on future emails. There might not be much you can do about the past ones besides deleting them from all the mailboxes in your environment, which is possible.

[–][deleted]  (1 child)

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[–]exproject 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just because you have the messages available in multiple formats and locations doesn’t change that it’s an attribute of the envelope not meant to be rewritten. The functionality is just not built into any tool I know of. Having that functionality would create the ability to screw with discovery (I mean, there could be mitigation with versioning, but that would need other configuration)

While it may not be a read-only part of the envelope(I’m not actually sure), the only tool that MIGHT be able to do what you want is MFCMapi, and I don’t think you want to play with that for this job. The chance of getting it wrong would be pretty high I think and it is not a particularly friendly tool. I’m not sure it could be scripted with it either.

My recommendation would be what /u/borismkv said. Making a mailbox for VIP and telling them to use that. Forwarding to VIPs mailbox would be ripe for them to just respond directly instead of responding through his relay mailbox.

As for your existing messages, if the current users absolutely cannot see the existing messages, you’ll need to do a search and export and just forcibly remove the messages from their mailboxes. It’s not clean and not advised by me, but if they don’t want VIPs address out there it will need to be removed. I would do a search with his email address as the query with -LogOnly -LogLevel Full and see what kind of results you get.