Huma Abedin forwarded sensitive State Department emails, including passwords to government systems, to her personal Yahoo email account before every single Yahoo account was hacked, a Daily Caller News Foundation analysis of emails released as part of a lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch shows.
Abedin, the top aide to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, used her insecure personal email provider to conduct sensitive work. This guarantees that an account with high-level correspondence in Clinton’s State Department was impacted by one or more of a series of breaches — at least one of which was perpetrated by a “state-sponsored actor.”
The U.S. later charged Russian intelligence agent Igor Sushchin with hacking 500 million Yahoo email accounts. The initial hack occurred in 2014 and allowed his associates to access accounts into 2015 and 2016 by using forged cookies. Sushchin also worked for the Russian investment bank Renaissance Capital, which paid former President Bill Clinton $500,000 for a June 2010 speech in Moscow.
A separate hack in 2013 compromised three billion accounts across multiple Yahoo properties, and the culprit is still unclear. “All Yahoo user accounts were affected by the August 2013 theft,” the company said in a statement.
Abedin, Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, regularly forwarded work emails to her personal humamabedin@yahoo.com address. “She would use these accounts if her (State) account was down or if she needed to print an email or document. Abedin further explained that it was difficult to print from the DoS system so she routinely forwarded emails to her non-DoS accounts so she could more easily print,” an FBI report says.
Abedin sent passwords for her government laptop to her Yahoo account on Aug. 24, 2009, an email released by the State Department in September 2017 shows.
Huma sends laptop password to Yahoo / Source: State Department
Long-time Clinton confidante Sid Blumenthal sent Clinton an email in July 2009 with the subject line: “Important. Not for circulation. You only. Sid.” The message began “CONFIDENTIAL… Re: Moscow Summit.” Abedin forwarded the email to her Yahoo address, potentially making it visible to hackers.
The email was deemed too sensitive to release to the public and was redacted before being published pursuant to the Judicial Watch lawsuit. The released copy says “Classified by DAS/ A/GIS, DoS on 10/30/2015 Class: Confidential.” The unredacted portion reads: “I have heard authoritatively from Bill Drozdiak, who is in Berlin…. We should expect that the Germans and Russians will now cut their own separate deals on energy, regional security, etc.”
The three email accounts Abedin used were abedinh@state.gov, huma@clintonemail.com, and humamabedin@yahoo.com. Though the emails released by the State Department partially redact personal email addresses, the Yahoo emails are displayed as humamabedin[redacted].
Clinton forwarded Abedin an email titled “Ambassadors” in March 2009 from Denis McDonough, who served as foreign policy adviser to former President Barack Obama’s campaign and later as White House chief of staff. The email was heavily redacted before being released to the public.
Stuart Delery, chief of staff to the deputy attorney general, sent a draft memo titled “PA/PLO Memo” in May 2009, seemingly referring to two Palestinian groups. The content was withheld from the public with large letters spelling “Page Denied.” Abedin forwarded it to her Yahoo account.
Abedin routed sensitive information through Yahoo multiple times, such as notes on a call with the U.N. secretary-general, according to messages released under the lawsuit.
Contemporaneous news reports documented the security weaknesses of Yahoo while Abedin continued to use it. Credentials to 450,000 Yahoo accounts had been posted online, a July 2012 CNN article reported. Five days later, Abedin forwarded sensitive information to her personal Yahoo email.
Abedin received an email “with the subject ‘Re: your yahoo acct.’ Abedin did not recall the email and provided that despite the content of the email she was not sure that her email account had ever been compromised,” on Aug. 16, 2010, an FBI report says.
The FBI also asked her about sending other sensitive information to Yahoo. “Abedin was shown an email dated October 4, 2009 with the subject ‘Fwd: US interest in Pak Paper 10-04’ which Abedin received from [redacted] and then forwarded to her Yahoo email account…. At the time of the email, [redacted] worked for Richard Holbrooke who was the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan (SRAP). Abedin was unaware of the classification of the document and stated that she did not make judgments on the classification of materials that she received,” the report said.
The U.S. charged Sushchin with hacking half a billion Yahoo accounts in March 2017, in one of the largest cyber-breaches in history, the Associated Press reported. Sushchin was an intelligence agent with Russia’s Federal Security Service — the successor to the KGB — and was also working as security director for Renaissance Capital, Russian media said.
“It is unknown to the grand jury whether [Renaissance] knew of his FSB affiliation,” the indictment says.
Renaissance Capital paid Bill Clinton $500,000 for a speech in 2010 that was attended by Russian officials and corporate leaders. The speech received a thank-you note from Russian President Vladimir Putin. Renaissance Capital is owned by Russian oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov, who also owned the Brooklyn Nets basketball team. He unsuccessfully ran for Russian president against Putin in 2012.
Sushchin’s indictment says “the conspirators sought access to the Yahoo, Inc. email accounts of Russian journalists; Russian and U.S. government officials,” and others. Information about the accounts such as usernames and password challenge questions and answers were stolen for 500 million accounts, the indictment says. The indictment does not mention Abedin’s account.
A hacker called “Peace” claimed to be selling data from 200 million Yahoo users.
The user data also included people’s alternate email addresses, that were often work accounts tying a Yahoo user to an organization of interest. The hackers were able to generate “nonces” that allowed them to read emails “via external cookie minting” for some accounts.
The New York Times reported that in the 2013 hack, which affected all Yahoo accounts, “Digital thieves made off with names, birth dates, phone numbers and passwords of users that were encrypted with security that was easy to crack. The intruders also obtained the security questions and backup email addressed used to reset lost passwords — valuable information for someone trying to break into other accounts owned by the same user, and particularly useful to a hacker seeking to break into government computers around the world.”
Yahoo published a notification on Sept. 22, 2016, saying: “Yahoo has confirmed that a copy of certain user account information was stolen from the company’s network in late 2014 by what it believes is a state-sponsored actor.”
Clinton downplayed the risks of her email use days later, saying it was simply a matter of convenience.
“After a year-long investigation, there is no evidence that anyone hacked the server I was using and there is no evidence that anyone can point to at all, anyone who says otherwise has no basis, that any classified materials ended up in the wrong hands. I take classified materials very seriously and always have,” Clinton said on Oct. 9, 2016, at the second presidential debate,
Abedin’s use of Yahoo email is consistent with the determination by the FBI that Clinton associates’ emails were, in fact, compromised. “We do assess that hostile actors gained access to the private email accounts of individuals with whom Secretary Clinton was in regular contact from her private account,” then-FBI director Jim Comey said in 2016.
A Florida man beat his stepson to death for sneaking out of bed to get a cookie — and then forced the boy’s brothers to sleep next to his body all night, according to prosecutors.
Jack Junior Montgomery, 31, of Tampa, was arraigned Monday and held on bond for the murder of 7-year-old Brice Russell, WFLA reports.
Brice’s mother, Donya Shenita Russell, had left him in Montgomery’s care — along with three of his siblings — while she worked a double shift Friday night. The family reportedly was staying at a local hotel.
“While she was out working, (Montgomery) chose to not only physically discipline this child himself, by not only repeatedly punching and throwing him on the ground — but threatening bodily harm upon the two brothers if they did not partake and equally discipline him,” Assistant State Attorney Matthew Smith charged in court.
According to his arrest affidavit, Montgomery told investigators he had been trying to discipline Brice after he got out of bed to eat a cookie.
“(Montgomery) picked him up and flung him as described by the other brothers, helicopter across the hotel room into what’s kind of a cabinet, where he hit head first. And ultimately caused his brain to bleed,” said Smith, noting how this caused the little boy to die within seconds or minutes.
“As if that was not aggravated enough, Mr. Montgomery took the child, put him in bed and had his siblings sleep with him while Brice was dead that entire night.”
Authorities believe Montgomery killed his stepson sometime between Friday night and Saturday morning.
Hillsborough County sheriff’s deputies had been called to the family’s hotel room around 1 a.m. Saturday to conduct a welfare check after receiving reports of loud noises, but they never saw or found anything suspicious that would warrant a search, WFTS reports.
Montgomery would later call 911 himself around 10:50 a.m. to report that his stepson was unable to wake up and was not breathing. The boy reportedly was pronounced dead at the scene.
Brice’s brothers told detectives that Montgomery punched the child repeatedly in the face, mouth and stomach with a closed fist before hurling him into the wall. They said he threatened to do the same to them if they didn’t participate in the beatdown.
“Push the kid over here,” a hotel employee reported hearing, according to the arrest affidavit.
“Beat the kid!”
Cops have not released the ages of the other boys.
WFLA reports that Montgomery has a history of domestic violence and battery.
‘Cowardly and Criminal Lynching of Police’: France NYE Mob Attack on Female Officer Caught on Video
New Year’s Eve celebrations in France led to national outcry after footage of a female police officer being savagely attacked surfaced, among reports that over 1,000 cars were burned overnight and 510 arrests took place.
The female police officer was attacked alongside her male inspector in the Paris suburb of Champigny-sur-Marne by a large mob in the early hours of Monday morning, with both individuals being hospitalised.
In the footage widely shared to social media, a large group of African appearance males stand around cheering as a female police officer is kicked to the ground, taking several blows to the head. In other parts of social media footage shared by Front National member of parliament Gilbert Collard, men cheer as cars are rolled over.
France’s RTL reports the officers had become isolated from their colleagues while trying to calm a disturbance related to a New Year’s party in the Parisian suburb. While reinforcements were quickly deployed, with officers using “grenades and gunfire” to disperse the crowd, it was too late for the attacked officers to escape injury. Several government vehicles including two fire engines were also damaged during the unrest.
Champigny-sur-Marne, which is the home of three “Zones Urbaines Sensibles” — French government language for areas of extreme deprivation which are known in common discourse as heavily migrant-populated No Go Zones — is also the former home of suspected French Islamic State executioner Michael Dos Santos.
French President Emmanuel Macron spoke out against the violence on Monday afternoon, remarking: “The culprits of the cowardly and criminal lynching of the police doing their duty on the night of December 31st will be found and punished. Force will sustain the law. Honor to the police and full support to all officers crudely attacked.”
Macron’s comments were followed by remarks by the French Interior Minister Gerard Collomb, who decried the “society of violence” and called for police forces to be strengthened. Calling out particular “neighbourhoods” where violence was able to flourish, the interior minister described a situation in some areas where fire crews could not even enter without a police escort, reports Le Express.
No arrests have been made.
The news of the attack comes as the French government revealed the shocking extent of violence across the country on New Year’s Eve, despite some 140,000 members of the security forces being deployed to the streets to keep order. Some 1,031 cars were burnt out over the course of the night, up from 935 the year before, and arrests stood at 510, up from 456.
Breitbart London reported in 2017 that French authorities declared New Year’s Eve celebrations that year had gone off without incident, despite nearly 1,000 cars being destroyed in predominantly low income, high immigration neighbourhoods.
Black American residents of Baltimore, Maryland, are now blaming a lower police presence for the city’s soaring murder rate despite three years of Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists insisting that police be pulled from their neighborhoods.
Baltimore has now experienced higher murder rates for three years in a row after riots and BLM-sponsored protests began rocking the city after the death of Freddie Gray, a suspect who died in police custody in the spring of 2015, National Public Radio (NPR) reported.
Since the riots, police morale has collapsed, and city officials began planning a lighter police footprint in response to complaints of residents and protest leaders.
But now, black leaders are blaming cops for the spiraling murder rate, saying that the police pullback has put them in danger.
The Rev. Kinji Scott, a Baltimore activist, is blaming city hall for leaving the neighborhoods unprotected.
“We wanted the police there,” Scott insisted. “We wanted them engaged in the community. We didn’t want them beating the hell out of us, we didn’t want that.”
Scott and others are now pressuring the city to bring police back in as a deterrent to the soaring crime rate.
Despite the loud proclamations from BLM activists that the police are the problem, Scott and his fellow activists are now claiming that they never wanted police to go away.
In an interview with NPR, Scott claims only the progressive activists wanted cops to be eliminated:
No. That represented our progressives, our activists, our liberal journalists, our politicians, but it did not represent the overall community. Because we know for a fact that around the time Freddie Gray was killed, we start to see homicides increase. We had five homicides in that neighborhood while we were protesting.
What I wanted to see happen was that people would be able to trust the relationship with our police department so that they would feel more comfortable. We’d have conversations with the police about crime in their neighborhood because they would feel safer. So we wanted the police there. We wanted them engaged in the community. We didn’t want them beating the hell out of us, we didn’t want that.
Scott also blamed the city for not fostering a community atmosphere between police and the neighborhoods.
The primary thrust nationwide is what President Obama wanted to do: focus on building relationships with police departments and major cities where there had been a history of conflict. That hasn’t happened. We don’t see that. I don’t know a city—Baltimore for certain—we’ve not seen any changes in those relationships. What we have seen is that the police has distanced themselves, and the community has distanced themselves even further. So the divide has really intensified, it hasn’t decreased.
And of course we want to delineate the whole culture of bad policing that exists—nobody denies that—but as a result of this, we don’t see the level of policing we need in our community to keep the crime down in our cities that we are seeing bleed to death.
This is despite Baltimore protesters carrying signs that read things such as “disarm the police,” or wearing T-shirts promising to kill cops.
The reverend’s claims also seem to fly in the face of a list of 19 demands issued by protesters in 2015, one of which demanded that police be barred from entering certain buildings or parts of neighborhoods they had designated as “safe” from police. Clearly, the protesters wanted police removed from Baltimore’s neighborhoods. But now that they’ve gotten their wish, community leaders have suddenly realized what a bad idea such a pullback is.
A far-right German politician has been condemned for an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim Tweet, which briefly saw her suspended from the platform.
The Alternative for Germany (AfD) MP Beatrix von Storch said Cologne police were appeasing “barbaric, gang-raping, Muslim hordes” when they tweeted out a New Year’s Day message in Arabic.
Under newly introduced German hate laws, social media platforms must respond quickly to remove hate speech or face fines of up to 50 million euros ($60m).
Von Storch was condemned for the tweet by some social media users, but far-right activists rallied around her, accusing Twitter and the German authorities of censorship.
Once considered part of the eurosceptic right, the AfD has transformed into a hard-right, anti-Islam party in recent years.
That change occurred in the aftermath of the ongoing European refugee crisis, which saw more than a million people, mainly from Syria and Iraq, either claim refuge in Germany or transit through the state to other European nations.
In 2016, the party published a manifesto declaring Islam as “not welcome” in Germany.
Bernd Lucke, one of the party’s founders, resigned in 2016, condemning it as “Islamophobic and xenophobic”.
Rallies against the AfD regularly draw thousands of Germans, but that hasn’t stopped the party’s electoral success.
In September 2017, it became the first far-right party since the Nazis to enter the German parliament, after picking up 12.6 percent of the vote, which equalled 94 seats.
President Trumpon Tuesday took credit for the safest year on record in commercial aviation.
“Since taking office I have been very strict on Commercial Aviation. Good news – it was just reported that there were Zero deaths in 2017, the best and safest year on record!” Trump tweeted.
Donald J. Trump ✔@realDonaldTrump
Since taking office I have been very strict on Commercial Aviation. Good news – it was just reported that there were Zero deaths in 2017, the best and safest year on record!
The president did not detail what steps he took to improve airline safety. His highest-profile initiative — privatizing air-traffic control — stalled in Congress.
“President Trump raised the bar for our nation’s aviation safety and security,” White House spokesman Raj Shah said in a statement seeking to explain the tweet.
Shah cited Trump’s stalled plan to revamp the nation’s air-traffic control system and new vetting procedures for foreign travelers.
“The president is pleased there were no commercial airline deaths in 2017, and hopes this remains consistent in 2018 and beyond,” the spokesman said.
Trump’s tweet came in response to a new study that showed 2017 was the safest year ever for air travel.
Airlines recorded zero deaths on commercial passenger jets worldwide, according to a report published by the group Aviation Safety Network.
Overall, there were 10 fatal commercial passenger and cargo plane crashes that killed 44 people. Those crashes involved small propeller planes and cargo aircraft.
Commercial air travel has had an excellent safety record in the U.S. for almost a decade.
There has not been a fatal passenger airline crash in the U.S. since 2009, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. The last deadly commuter plane crash took place in Hawaii in 2013.
Commercial air travel has had an excellent safety record in the U.S. for almost a decade.
