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.
FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok and his mistress, FBI lawyer Lisa Page his Horse. Look At the Teeth of that woman. Can you say Mister Ed?
House Oversight Committee member Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said he is “convinced” that FBI officials used the salacious and false dossier about Donald Trump, paid for by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, to get “warrants to spy on Americans associated with Donald Trump’s campaign.”
Jordan added that the FBI could clear up this issue “if they release the application that they took to court,” but they refuse to do so. It has been reported that former Trump campaign officials Carter Pageand Paul Manafort were spied on in 2016 by U.S. intelligence agencies after the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA Court) granted warrants to do so.
Rep. Jordan, speaking on Lou Dobbs Tonight, said he believes it was FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok “who took the dossier” to the “FISA Court.” Strzok was working with Special Counsel Robert Mueller until this summer when his extra-marital affair and vehemently anti-Trump tweets were discovered; Strzok was reassigned to the FBI’s human resources department in August.
“He’s the guy who took the dossier, I believe,” Jordan told Dobbs, “or part of the team that took the dossier and took it to the FISA court. It’s the dossier that was paid for by the Democratic National Committee. Paid [ex-British spy] Christopher Steele who paid Russians to put this false op together. He [Strzok] is the one I think who was working with others to put this together and take it to the court. That’s what we need to know.”
“This is why we need a second special counsel which we called for months ago,” said Jordan. “But every time we learn more, it just reinforces the idea that we need that second special counsel.”
In the beginning of his Dec. 7 interview of Rep. Jordan, host Lou Dobbs asked, “Congressman, you gave FBI Director [Christopher] Wray quite a grilling today. Are you satisfied with the answers that you elicited?”
Jordan said, “Well, I’ll be satisfied when they release the application that was taken to the FISA court. I’m convinced that most likely Peter Strzok was the guy who helped assembled that application, took it to the FISA where the court granted and that application was based on the dossier with all the garbage in it. That dossier was used as a basis for getting warrants to spy on Americans associated with Donald Trump’s campaign. So they can prove I’m wrong by releasing the application. I hope they do that.”
Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe is a Fraud. LOCK HIM UP!
“Lou, there are couple of fundamental questions here,” said Jordan. “Did the FBI pay [ex-British spy] Christopher Steele? I asked that of Attorney General Sessions two weeks ago, he wouldn’t answer the question. Did they actually vet this dossier, look at this dossier, go through this corroborative, corrected, look at it? Because it’s been disproven.”
“It’s a bunch of lies,” he said. “It’s a bunch of national enquirer garbage and fake news in this thing. Did they actually check it out before they took it to the FISA court which I’m convinced they do? Those are the sort of a fundamental questions.”
“And all this can get cleared up if they release the application that they took to the court,” said Jordan. “He [Wray] said he couldn’t do it, they’re allowed to do that. They can give it to the Judiciary Committee, the committee with oversight of the Justice Department. They can do that. That clears up a lot of things.”
“But I think they won’t give it to us, because they did take that to Steele,” said the congressman. “I think they did use the dossier as a basis for the warrants to spy on Americans associated with President Trump’s campaign.”
Lou Dobbs then remarked, “Your charges put it straightforwardly that the FBI leadership is corrupt and acted in corrupt and unlawful manner to achieve a political purpose.”
Congressman Jordan answered, “Think about [FBI agent] Peter Strzok, the guy who is dismissed from Mueller’s team, that’s what we learned this weekend. Here’s the guy who headed the Clinton investigation up, interviewed [Huma] Abedin, interviewed Cheryl Mills, interviewed Secretary Clinton. He’s the guy who took the exoneration statement, changed, ‘grossly negligent’ to ‘extreme carelessness.’ Grossly negligence is a crime.”
“He changed it,” said Jordan. “He interviewed [Trump adviser Michael] Flynn. He ran the Russian investigation and they kicked him off for a few text messages because they’re anti-Trump? There has to be more to this story. And I’m convinced the dossier is the key to this.”
Later in the interview, Dobbs said, “Congressman, I am entirely sympathetic with your view on the special counsel, except for one thing. If we end up with twice what Mueller has created, the republic will be in serious threat, if it’s not already. Look at what we’ve got here, as you pointed out today. We have a president whose entire administration is being threatened by a politically corrupt special counsel and politically corrupt leadership of the FBI.”
Jordan said, “All billed on — all billed on this dossier. And remember what the dossier is about. It was about the FBI working with the Democrat National Committee and their campaign to go after the other party’s nominee and the other party’s campaign. That is not supposed to happen in this country, and I think it did and all the evidence is pointing in that direction.”
people need to be held to account who were involved in, making that all happen.”
On Dec. 23 it was reported that Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe will resign in March or April 2018, which is when his full pension and benefits would kick in. McCabe’s wife, Dr. Jill McCabe, received a little more than $700,000 in payments from two Democratic PACs in 2015, one headed by Clinton ally Terry McAuliffe. (Jill McCabe, a left-wing Democrat, ran for a state senate seat that year.)
In early 2016, Andrew McCabe helped to oversee the Hillary Clinton email investigation, a scandal for which she was exonerated by then-FBI Director James Comey in July 2016. (McCabe did not recuse himself from the Clinton case until one week before the 2016 presidential election.)
Andrew McCabe is also the FBI official whose emails show that the Hillary Clinton email investiagtion was designated “special” by the bureau and, contrary to procedure, a “decision was made to investigate it at HQ with a small team.”
Concerning Andrew McCabe’s decision to retire, President Trump tweeted on Dec. 23, “FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is racing the clock to retire with full benefits. 90 days to go?!!!”
A lawyer for the Trump presidential transition team is accusing Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office of inappropriately obtaining transition documents as part of its Russia probe, including confidential attorney-client communications, privileged communications and thousands of emails without their knowledge.
In a letter obtained by Fox News and sent to House and Senate committees on Saturday, the transition team’s attorney alleges “unlawful conduct” by the career staff at the General Services Administration in handing over transition documents to the special counsel’s office.
The transition legal team argues the GSA “did not own or control the records in question” and the release of documents could be a violation of the 4th Amendment – which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures.
Kory Langhofer, the counsel to Trump for America, wrote in Saturday’s letter that the GSA handed over “tens of thousands of emails” to Mueller’s probe without “any notice” to the transition.
The attorney said they discovered the “unauthorized disclosures” by the GSA on December 12th and 13th and raised concerns with the special counsel’s office.
“We understand that the special counsel’s office has subsequently made extensive use of the materials it obtained from the GSA, including materials that are susceptible to privilege claims,” Langhofer writes.
The transition attorney said the special counsel’s office also received laptops, cell phones and at least one iPad from the GSA.
Trump for America is the nonprofit organization that facilitated the transition between former President Barack Obama to President Trump.
The GSA, an agency of the United States government, provided the transition team with office space and hosted its email servers.
“We continue to cooperate fully with the special counsel and expect this process to wrap up soon,” Sarah Sanders, the White House press secretary, said Saturday.
The special counsel’s office declined to comment Saturday.
Langhofer wrote that some of the records obtained by the special counsel’s office from the GSA “have been leaked to the press by unknown persons.”
The transition lawyer also argued the actions “impair the ability of future presidential transition teams to candidly discuss policy and internal matters that benefit the country as a whole.”
Langhofer requests in the letter that Congress “act immediately to protect future presidential transitions from having their private records misappropriated by government agencies, particularly in the context of sensitive investigations intersecting with political motives.”
The letter was sent to the Senate Homeland Security and House Oversight Committees.
The committees did not immediately return a request for comment.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/12/16/trump-lawyer-mueller-improperly-obtained-transition-documents-in-russia-probe.html
George W. Bush Bashes Cheney, Rumsfeld: ‘They Didn’t Make One F****** Decision’
Former President George W. Bush went off on his former vice president and defense secretary, stating bluntly that “they did not make one f****** decision.”
Bush made the inflammatory remark about his former colleagues in Mark K. Updegrove’s book The Last Republicans: Inside the Extraordinary Relationship Between George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, which is scheduled to be released November 14.
The 43rd president pushed back against critics who claim he did not make major decisions during his presidency, and that former Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made most of the important decisions in the White House.
They “didn’t make one f****** decision,” Bush claimed. “The fact that there was any doubt in anyone’s mind about who the president was, blows my mind.”
Updegrove’s book describes the relationship between the younger Bush and his father, but his book is making headlines ahead of its November 14 release.
Other excerpts from the book that are already public quote both former presidents making disparaging statements about President Trump.
The elder Bush attacked Trump’s leadership style and called the current president a “blowhard.”
The younger Bush also made his disdain for Trump known recently in an October speech at the George W. Bush Institute, where he rejected Trump’s ideology and defended globalism.
Time for some Billy Beer and peanuts. Old Jimmy is giving us a good show.
Fmr President Jimmy Carter and his wife throw unexpected shade on Barack, Hillary and Michelle
Depending on your politics and tolerance for economic “malaise,” Jimmy Carter may have been one of the worst presidents in modern history, but most consider him an honorable man and few have accused the former president of the inability to call a spade a spade.
So when it comes to party politics, Carter may be a liberal, but he’s not about to toe the party line just because a politician, or even a fellow former president, has a D beside his name.
In a blockbuster New York Times interview on Sunday, the former president proved as much with several eyebrow raising quotes about former President Obama, his wife Michelle, and even Hillary Clinton.
And his comments about President Trump were even more shocking, especially considering today’s divisive political climate, one in which it seems that ‘Trump-deranged’ Democrats and liberals would oppose the man if he wanted to make puppy adoption easier.
Carter’s first jab “knocked Obama on the Middle East,” admitted the Times. The former president does not think “there’s much hope now that Israelis will ever permit a two-state solution,” mainly because President Obama “made some very wonderful statements, in my opinion, when he first got in office, and then he reneged on that.”
Obama’s refusal to negotiate further with North Korea as well as his bombing of Yemen also drew Carter’s criticism. Asked if he had Obama’s email address, the former president flatly said, “No.”
As to Obama’s $400,000 post-presidential speeches, Carter threw some obvious shade his counterpart’s way, saying, “I don’t care if he gets rich or Clinton gets rich or whatever. I don’t want to get into a bragging position; I’m not trying to do that. But I announced when I was defeated I was not going to be on corporate boards, I was not going to try to enrich myself with speeches. I was patterning my policy after Harry Truman.”
When asked about the Clinton Foundation versus the Carter Center, Carter said, “Rosie and I put money in the Carter Center. We never take any out.”
Jimmy wasn’t the only one tossing shade around like it was free. His wife, Rosalynn, has a few issues with Michelle Obama, making it clear that she was “still hurt” over being “left out of a first ladies lunch” on the issue of mental health held by the last first lady.
Who did he and his wife vote for in the primaries?
“We voted for Sanders,” Carter said.
Finally, as if all this weren’t enough, the former president’s references to President Trump raised more than a few eyebrows and had some wondering whether or not he might be the next Trump employee.
