Friday, August 14, 2015

Hillary Clinton's Emails Discussing 'Top Secret' CIA Drones Strikes Sent on Unsecured Server (VIDEO)

At the video below, from CBS, "An Associated Press report says an email discussing secret CIA drones was sent through Hillary Clinton's private, unsecured server while she was secretary of state. It was one of two messages with top secret information sent to Clinton. The FBI took possession of the server on Wednesday. Nancy Cordes reports from Washington, where the email controversy is stirring up the presidential race."

And here's the report, at AP, "AP EXCLUSIVE: Top secret Clinton emails include drone talk":

WASHINGTON (AP) — Neither of the two emails sent to Hillary Rodham Clinton now labeled by intelligence agencies as "top secret" contained information that would jump out to experts as particularly sensitive, according to several government officials.

One included a discussion of a U.S. drone strike, part of a covert program that is widely known and discussed. A second conversation could have improperly referred to highly classified material, but it also could have reflected information collected independently, U.S. officials who have reviewed the correspondence told The Associated Press.

Still, it's looking increasingly likely the issue of whether Clinton mishandled classified information on her home-brew email server will have significant political implications in the 2016 presidential campaign.

Clinton, who has been seen from the outset as the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, agreed this week to turn over to the FBI the private server she used as secretary of state. And Republicans in Congress have seized on the involvement of federal law enforcement in the matter as a sign she was negligent in handling the nation's secrets.

On Monday, the inspector general for the 17 spy agencies that make up what is known as the intelligence community told Congress that two of 40 emails, in a random sample of 30,000 messages that Clinton gave the State Department for review, contained information deemed "Top Secret," one of the government's highest levels of classification.

While neither of the emails was marked classified at the time they were sent, they have since been slapped with a "TK" marking, for "Talent Keyhole," suggesting material obtained by spy satellites. And they also were marked "NOFORN," meaning information that can only be shared with Americans with security clearances.

The two emails got those markings after consultations with the CIA and other agencies where the material originated, officials said. Some officials said they believed the designations were a stretch — a knee-jerk move in a bureaucracy rife with over-classification.

The officials who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity work in intelligence and other agencies. They wouldn't detail the full contents of the emails because of ongoing questions about classification level.

Clinton didn't transmit the sensitive information herself, they said, and nothing in the emails she received makes direct reference to communications intercepts, confidential intelligence methods or any other form of sensitive sourcing.

The drone exchange, the officials said, begins with a copy of a news article about the CIA drone program that targets terrorists in Pakistan and elsewhere. While that program is technically top secret, it is well-known and often reported on. Former CIA director Leon Panetta and Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, have openly discussed it.

The copy makes reference to classified information, and a Clinton adviser follows up by dancing around a top secret in a way that could possibly be inferred as confirmation, the officials said. Several people, however, described this claim as tenuous.

But a second email reviewed by Charles McCullough, the intelligence community inspector general, appears more problematic, officials said. Nothing in the message is "lifted" from classified documents, they said, though they differed on where the information in it was sourced. Some said it improperly points back to highly classified material, while others countered that it was a classic case of what the government calls "parallel reporting" — receiving information the government considers secret through "open source" channels.

The issue came to light Tuesday after Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said McCullough found four "highly classified" emails on the unusual private server that Clinton used while she was secretary of state...
Well, yeah, it might have an effect on the presidential race, heh.

Still more.

And ICYMI, "The Spy Satellite Secrets in Hillary's Emails."

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