THEY’VE GOT MAIL
Unnamed sources to Daily Caller: China hacked Hill
A new report that Hillary Clinton’s private email server was hacked by a Chinese-owned company has a congressman calling for an obstruction of justice probe, while experts called for further investigation to determine the extent of the damage and stop it from happening again.
The conservative Daily Caller, citing unnamed sources, reported Clinton’s controversial private server — on which she received classified emails — was hacked by a Washington, D.C.-based Chinese firm throughout her term as former President Barack Obama’s secretary of state.
Two sources told The Daily Caller that the company wrote code to get her server to send them a “courtesy copy” of nearly all her emails, and that the FBI failed to act when alerted by the Intelligence Community Inspector General, which detected the hacking in early 2015. The report said Peter Strzok, then the agency’s top counterintelligence officials, was one of the FBI officials alerted by the ICIG. Strzok, who played key roles in both the Clinton email probe and the Trump Russia probe, was fired last month over texts he sent that showed at anti-Trump bias. In 2016, the FBI recommended that Clinton not face criminal charges for mishandling classified material.
The update comes over a month after Texas U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert said that the ICIG informed a House Judiciary Committee hearing that almost all of Clinton’s emails were sent to a “foreign entity.” Gohmert called for further investigation into the email scandal.
“I didn’t think there was any question before,” Gohmert said on WMAL radio yesterday. “Now it’s very clear. This is just as good of evidence as you could ever have to open an investigation of obstruction of justice. It wasn’t to help Trump, it was to hurt Trump and it was to help Hillary.”
Gohmert said that of the approximately 30,000 emails she sent and received on that server, the Chinese received all but four of little significance.
“The bad guys got everything that was important,” Gohmert said.
GOP political consultant Bradley Blakeman, a senior White House staffer under former President George W. Bush, told the Herald, “I think, governmentally, people need to follow the rules. Had Hillary followed the rules in spirit as it was written she probably would not have been hacked, so No. 1 is people have to follow the rules. No. 2 is we have to make sure that we harden our systems to prevent any government friend or foe from hacking into us.”
“The U.S. should react to this as it did to the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957,” Boston University professor emeritus Andrew Bacevich told the Herald. “We need a comprehensive evaluation U.S. cyber-vulnerabilities followed by a comprehensive, bipartisan program to address them.
“I expect that we do our best to hack into Chinese networks. I sure hope so,” Bacevich said. “Yet here is a further indication that the U.S. government needs to up its game when it comes to cybersecurity.”