By Natasha Bertrand
32 minutes ago
The FBI is mad at its president.
In an interview with "60 Minutes" last Sunday, President Barack Obama said that though it was probably a "mistake" for Hillary Clinton to use a private email server during her time as secretary of state, it “is not a situation in which America’s national security was endangered.”
His comments have reportedly angered the FBI, which has been investigating Clinton's server out of its DC headquarters since August to determine whether any classified national-security information was mishandled.
“Injecting politics into what
is supposed to be a fact-finding inquiry leaves a foul taste in the
F.B.I.’s mouth and makes them fear that no matter what they find, the
Justice Department will take the president’s signal and not bring a
case,” Ron Hosko, a former senior FBI official who retired in 2014, told The New York Times in a story published Friday.
Hosko added that it was inappropriate for the president to “suggest what side of the investigation he is on” during an ongoing investigation.
Though Clinton's use
of a private email address was not illegal and was permitted by State
Department rules, the federal government has standards for how servers
are built, how they are secured, and how their data is stored.
The FBI is looking into the configuration of the server
that Clinton handed over to authorities, as well as whether classified
information passed over the remarkably unsecured server.
In August, the intelligence community's inspector general, Charles McCullough III, told Congress that
he discovered two emails sent to Clinton that contained information
classified as "Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information," which is
the government's highest levels of classification. Those emails were
discovered in a sample of only about 40 emails.
And an email sent to Clinton reportedly contained the name of a CIA asset in Libya.
“If you know my folks,” FBI Director James Comey said earlier this month, “you know they don’t give a rip about politics.”
The administration has since backed off Obama's comments: White House
Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters that Obama was not trying
to undermine the investigation after he was grilled by reporters during
Tuesday's daily briefing.
"The president has a healthy respect for
the kinds of independent investigations that are conducted by inspectors
general and, where necessary, by the FBI," he said.
Clinton's unusual
email system was originally set up by a staffer during Clinton's 2008
presidential campaign, replacing a server used by her husband, former
President Bill Clinton.
Facing criticism earlier this year for her use of the server, Clinton
handed over about 30,000 work-related emails for the State Department
to make public. She also deleted about 31,000 emails she says were personal. She handed over the entire server to the FBI in August.'Like inviting spies over to dinner'
Over the past three months,
officials examining Clinton's emails have determined that some of the
information that passed through her inbox is now considered either
classified or top secret and should not have been discussed over such an
insecure platform.
Indeed, according to a lengthy Reuters investigation, much of the information Clinton sent and received was inherently classified even if it was not marked as such at the time.And reports that hackers in China, South Korea, Germany, and Russia tried to break into her server have raised questions about the kind of security precautions she took to safeguard this sensitive information.
(Reuters) U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks during a community forum campaign event at Cornell College in Mt Vernon, Iowa
It is unlikely that the foreign attacks on Clinton's server were targeted at her directly: The
attempts discovered were basic phishing scams disguised as speeding
tickets, The Associated Press reported, and rather unsophisticated.
But the malicious emails highlight the fact that Clinton's server was a a target.And according to a new AP investigation, the way Clinton's server was connected to the internet — via a Microsoft remote desktop service that permitted remote access connections without additional protective measures — made it particularly vulnerable to hackers, which is something experts say her own security experts should have known.
If
malicious state actors did know that Clinton was running a private
email server and they tried to hack it, "then it's almost a sure thing
that they were successful," Michael Borohovski, CTO of Tinfoil Security,
told Business Insider.
"It's possible Clinton's server was breached before she even sent her first email," Borohovski added. "She probably didn’t
mean to put government at risk, but she ended up doing it by running an
external mail server that was secured with questionable resources."(NBC/screengrab) Clinton defended herself on Meet the Press earlier this month by saying that she was unfamiliar with the technical aspects of the server, which she left in the hands of experts. But because Clinton made a conscious decision to bypass the State Department's server — and the millions the government has spent to protect it — in favor of her own risky setup, her ignorance of the technological particulars a poor excuse, Joe Loomis, CEO of CyberSponse, told Business Insider last week.
"The fact that Clinton chose to use her personal email instead of a .gov account shows that she obviously doesn't understand security," Loomis said. "What she did is like inviting spies over to dinner — every device connected to the internet is an opportunity for them to collect intelligence."
"This world is full of cyber warfare, and your computer is a part of that war zone."
As The Times pointed out, the president and the FBI also sparred in 2012 when he commented on reports that David Petraeus had passed classified information to his mistress.
"I have no evidence at this point, from what I’ve seen, that classified information was disclosed that in any way would have had a negative impact on our national security," Obama said at the time.
FBI officials reportedly believe that their recommendation for Petraeus — felony charges and a prison sentence — was overruled by the Justice Department at least in part because Obama had prejudiced the outcome.
More From Business Insider
- 'Like inviting spies over to dinner': Cyber experts are stunned by the companies Hillary Clinton hired
- Hillary Clinton's personal email server was hit by a 'drive-by' — and that's not even the most troubling part
- An employee at the company managing Hillary Clinton's server feared 'covering up' something
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