FBI dumps new batch of Clinton probe documents
Spilled coffee killed 1 of 13 Clinton devices, emails show
WASHINGTON Nearly 200 additional pages released late Friday from the FBI’s now-closed investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server show an often-haphazard handling of sensitive information and devices by top aides who scrambled to keep their boss in the loop on important digital information.
One aide recalled helping Clinton replace BlackBerry devices three or four times during her tenure, once after the secretary spilled coffee on a device and again when one of the new devices began to “slowly fail over time.”
Each time, confidential assistant Monica Hanley told FBI agents in a January interview, that a new device was secured and a technical aide would “sync” it with Clinton’s server and then “talk Hanley through the process of wiping the old device.”
“Hanley would provide the new BlackBerry to Clinton along with the old/wiped BlackBerry,” the FBI reported. “However, Hanley was not sure what Clinton did with the old BlackBerry after Hanley turned them over.”
An initial release of documents this month showed that Clinton used 13 BlackBerry devices as secretary of State. Not all of those devices, the report said, could be located for analysis.
In July, FBI Director James Comey recommended that no criminal charges be brought against Clinton, though he described the handling of classified information by Clinton and others as “extremely careless.”
The documents released Friday largely included summaries of interviews with former top aides to the now Democratic presidential nominee who outlined their activities on the former secretary’s behalf, including the shuttling of secure documents to Clinton’s homes in New York and Washington.
One unidentified aide, who was responsible for channeling a range of information to Clinton, from benign ceremonial notifications to “top secret intelligence briefings,” was “unaware” that Clinton was working off a personal server. When the aide did receive emails from Clinton, the aide thought it “a little odd” that they were marked as having come from “H,” because State Department emails usually contained the senders full names.
Another unidentified aide who worked in the State Department’s Office of Information Programs and Services (IPS) told FBI agents that although Clinton took office in January 2009, the IPS office was unable to locate any emails between the time of her swearing in through April of the same year.
“At some point, the determination (by State’s Office of Legal Counsel) was made that the emails would not be considered official State records,” the official told agents.
A new report has found “strong, consistent and statistically significant” evidence that federal gun agents singled out minorities for controversial drug stings in Chicago.
The stings had been a centerpiece of efforts by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to target violent crime. Agents lured suspects with the promise of a huge payday for robbing a drug “stash house” that did not actually exist, then left them facing long prison sentences for plotting to resell the imaginary drugs.
An investigation by USA TODAY in 2014 found that the stings overwhelmingly targeted minorities. At least 91% of the people agents charged nationwide were racial or ethnic minorities. The ATF stings are particularly sensitive because they seek to enlist suspected criminals in new crimes, rather than merely solving old ones, giving agents unusually wide latitude to select who will be targeted.
The Justice Department insisted that the report be sealed when it was filed this month in federal court in Chicago.
It was unsealed Friday after a request by USA TODAY.
ATF agents operating around Chicago have arrested 94 people in the stings since 2006; 91% were black or Hispanic.
The new report, prepared by Columbia Law School professor Jeffrey Fagan, found only a 0.1% chance that agents could have selected so many minorities by chance, even if they were targeting only people with criminal records that suggested they were likely to be part of a robbery crew, as ATF policies require. Those results, Fagan wrote, show that “the ATF is discriminating on the basis of race” in choosing targets for the stings.
The ATF declined to comment on Fagan’s report.