Clinton emails’ controversial path
WASHINGTON — Earlier this summer, the inspector general of the nation’s intelligence agencies contacted the longtime lawyer for Hillary and Bill Clinton with a pointed question.
Classified information had been found in a small sample of 30,000 messages from the former secretary of state’s private email account. The inspector general, I. Charles McCullough, wanted to know from the lawyer, David Kendall, where copies of the message collection might still be stored.
Kendall’s answer, like so much in the story of the Clinton emails, pointed in an unexpected direction. The official communications of the nation’s 67th secretary of state, it turned out, were handled by a little Colorado IT company, Platte River Networks, previously best known for being honored in 2012 as Denver’s “small business of the year.”
Last week, FBI agents showed up at Platte River’s modest brick building, opposite a candy factory. Now that government secrets had been found in Clinton’s email, the agents wanted to know about the company’s security measures.
The email account and its confusing reverberations have become a significant early chapter in the 2016 presidential race and a new stroke in the portrait of the Democrats’ leading candidate.
The Clinton campaign declined to comment for this article. The server
On the first day of Clinton’s confirmation hearing in January 2009, an aide to her husband bought the Internet domain name clintonemail.com from a company called Network Solutions in Jacksonville, Fla.. The aide, Justin Cooper, then shifted management of the account to an Atlanta company called Perfect Privacy.
A server was set up at Clinton’s home in Chappaqua, N.Y., evidently with backup provided in Denver at Platte River Networks. To the surprise of many colleagues, she never had a standard State.gov account. There appears to have been no prohibition on the exclusive use of a private server; it does not appear to be an option anyone had thought about.
Clinton has said she decided in 2009 to handle all her email, official and personal, on one account to avoid carrying multiple electronic devices. But for a politician considering a presidential run, the server also would give Clinton some control over what would become public from her four years as the nation’s top diplomat.
There is another factor that some former colleagues say puts Clinton’s decision in a more reasonable light: the archaic computer systems at the State Department. The deletion
As Clinton and her staffers have repeatedly pointed out, most of her emails — they say about 90 percent — were automatically captured on State Department servers because she was writing to aides and colleagues who had State. gov addresses. Some were not captured, however, because a few top aides also used private addresses.
After meeting with two of her closest aides, Cheryl Mills and Philippe Reines, State Department officials decided last year to ask for any emails in the custody of Clinton — and of her three predecessors as secretary of state, who said they had none. She turned over 30,490 emails last December, nearly two years after leaving office.
But it turned out that she had destroyed a larger number of messages from her account — 31,830 — because she or her aides judged them to be personal in nature. But it didn’t take long for evidence to surface that the culling may have included some workrelated emails as well.
In June, the State Department said that it had not been able to find in Clinton’s emails some 15 messages from Sidney Blumenthal, an old friend and aide, who had independently turned them over to the House Benghazi committee. The messages involved Libya and they
appeared to involve policy. The investigation
Shortly after Clinton said in March that her private email account had contained no classified information, the Republican chairmen of the Senate intelligence and foreign relations committees asked the inspectors general for the State Department and Intelligence Community to investigate whether she and other officials had kept classified information on personal email accounts.
In last week’s courtordered State Department release of 2,200 pages of emails, 64 passages from 37 messages were blacked out because they were judged too sensitive to be released. Officials said hundreds more messages might contain classified information.
Because the classified passages are blacked out, it is impossible to gauge how much damage their disclosure might have caused. There is a broad consensus that the government classifies far too much innocuous material.