Hillary Clinton Email ‘Chain of Custody’ Request May Lead To Indictments

Hillary Clinton Email ‘Chain of Custody’ Request May Lead To Indictments

Is there anyone out there that didn’t have access to Hillary’s emails? Anyone? The federal probe into Hillary Clinton’s growing email scandal may go well into 2016 and she is stonewalling Congress at every turn. She simply refuses to divulge the chain of custody for those emails. Not only did she play with them, her aides Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin did as well on multiple email accounts. Then her attorney had them and had staffers print them out… or worse yet, they sent them to a contractor to be printed out. It turns out her attorney did not have a sufficient security clearance to handle those emails on thumb drives and did not secure that evidence once it was at his firm. Hillary’s emails were not encrypted at all. She had a small IT company in Colorado who was not certified by the Defense Department handling classified materials and her server storage etc. They claim that material was stored in New Jersey, where it was also not secure. What a mess and what a national security disaster.

Hillary Clinton

From The Daily Caller:

Department of State officials refused to identify to a congressional committee the “chain of custody” – the complete list of people who had access to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server, according to The Daily Caller News Foundation’s investigation.

The request was made last spring by the House Select Committee on Benghazi probing the 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in which Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were murdered.

The chain of custody evidence is essential to determining if Clinton or people close to her violated federal laws on handling of classified materials.

In a private meeting earlier this year between the State Department, Clinton’s representative and Benghazi committee staff, the committee asked State to identify the “chain of custody” of people who “touched” or otherwise had access to Clinton’s email and to additional copies, according to a knowledgeable congressional source.

The materials were sought “in order to identify those persons who had touched them and then for us to determine who might have violated classified handling procedures. And we got nothing,” the source said.

In a related development Monday, a federal judge with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered an accelerated hearing for Aug. 20 on whether to order discovery by attorneys for Judicial Watch on the State Department’s possession of Clinton’s servers, accounts, hard drives or other devices.

U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered the State Department to respond no later than Wednesday to the non-profit watchdog’s request for discovery following repeated failures by the government to fulfill its obligations under the Freedom of Information Act.

Judicial Watch has filed multiple FOIA requests concerning Benghazi and the Hillarymail scandal. If the non-profit government watchdog is granted discovery, it would create many more potential legal problems for Clinton. She remains the leading candidate for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination but recent polls suggest the scandal is deeply undermining her credibility.

The “chain of custody” issue is important as federal officials have confirmed that at least 300 or more emails on Clinton’s server contained highly sensitive classified material and at least two were stamped “Top Secret,” the highest classification level within the intelligence community.

[…]

In addition to close Clinton aides with access to her Chappaqua, N.Y., home where the private server was located, the committee is focusing its attention on attorneys from the Williams & Connolly law firm where David Kendall is “of counsel.”

Kendall is a long-time Clinton lawyer and confidante who represents the former secretary of state on the email server investigation.

Clinton gave Kendall a thumb drive with more than 30,000 State Department emails. He reportedly instructed his staff to review the thumb drive and print out hard copies for the department.

“We do know it was Kendall’s subordinates — the names for which we do not know — who did that search. But we don’t know who they are to this day,” the congressional source said.

[…]

Kendall has maintained that he enjoyed a security clearance because of his work with Petraeus, but the congressional source told TheDCNF that, “I’d be floored if the attorneys had it for the review.”

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley told Kendall in a letter made public Monday that “it appears the FBI has determined that your clearance is not sufficient to allow you to maintain custody of the emails.”

The Iowa Republican noted that Kendall received the emails in December 2014, but it was only in May of this year that the State Department delivered a classified materials-certified safe to store the thumb drives.

After it was disclosed that “Top Secret” classified information was on the hard drive, Kendall was ordered to build a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF, at Williams & Connolly. A SCIF is a hardened room with very secure restrictions for access.

Grassley added, “since at least May 2015 and possibly December 2014, it appears that in addition to not having an adequate security clearance, you did not have the appropriate tools in place to secure the thumb drives.”

Other parties may have had unauthorized access to the Clinton materials if Kendall printed out the emails using either a commercial printing company or an unsecured Williams & Connolly copier machine.

To print out 30,000 paper emails, “it seems likely that [Kendall] would have contracted a commercial printing firm and then as a result, that has now been exposed to someone else,” observed Alex McGeorge, the head of threat intelligence at Immunity, Inc.

Even if Williams & Connolly printed out the 30,000 emails in-house, the best copiers are really computers with large storage capacity that would keep the classified information, McGeorge said.

The committee is also looking at Platte River Networks, a small IT company in Colorado that was under contract to upgrade and maintain Clinton’s server in July, 2013. TheDCNF reported Friday that Platte River was not certified by the Defense Department to handle classified materials.

Andy Boian, a spokesman for Platte River, confirmed in an interview Monday with TheDCNF that the backup Platte River driver was in New Jersey, not Colorado, but he refused to divulge further details.

[…]

The IG, I. Charles McCullough, found at least two emails were classified “Top Secret/SI/TK/NOFORM.”

According to NewsMax, this investigation is not going to be over in a matter of weeks, or perhaps even months. It will be over a year before possible indictments come down and it will butt right into the 2016 Election. Over 300 emails are now being questioned, with at least two emails flagged as Top Secret. Clinton is busy joking in the face of this congressional probe, but she shouldn’t be. She has admitted deleting about 30,000 emails she says were personal in nature. Then she joked at an Iowa dinner over the weekend: “You may have seen that I have recently launched a Snapchat account … I love it — those messages disappear all by themselves.” That’s a staggering level of arrogance and disrespect for the law, Congress and our national security. Instead of trying to come clean on this, Hillary is blaming a ‘vast right wing conspiracy’ – again. Clinton is just as disastrous at handling her own scandals as she was at playing Secretary of State. Indictments may well be on the way, but it is pretty clear it will take a miracle for her to ascend to the presidency after this.

Terresa Monroe-Hamilton

Terresa Monroe-Hamilton is an editor and writer for Right Wing News. She owns and blogs at NoisyRoom.net. She is a Constitutional Conservative and NoisyRoom focuses on political and national issues of interest to the American public. Terresa is the editor at Trevor Loudon's site, New Zeal - trevorloudon.com. She also does research at KeyWiki.org. You can email Terresa here. NoisyRoom can be found on Facebook and on Twitter.

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