Notorious Hacker Makes 'Bombshell' Claim: "I Got Inside Hillary's Completely Unsecured Server"

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 05/04/2016 23:33 -0400
Guccifer
In a dramatic development that could lead to renewed focus on Hillary Clinton's email server scandal, NBC reports that the Romanian hacker who first exposed Hillary Clinton's private email address is making a "bombshell" new claim: that he also gained access to the former Secretary of State's "completely unsecured" server.
"It was like an open orchid on the Internet," Marcel Lehel Lazar, who is better known by his handle Guccifer which he used when he first unveiled the formerly unknown domain name of Hillary personal server one year ago, told NBC News in an exclusive interview from a prison in Bucharest. "There were hundreds of folders."

Cynthia McFadden, right, with the Romanian hacker Guccifer in Romania
As previously reported, Lazar was extradited last month from Romania to the United States to face charges he hacked political elites, including Gen. Colin Powell, a member of the Bush family, and former Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal.
NBC further reports that according to a source with knowledge of the probe into Clinton's email setup told NBC News that with Guccifer in U.S. custody, investigators fully intend to question him about her server.
To this point Lazar, 44, has not provided documentation to back up his claims, nor has he released anything on-line supporting his allegations, as he had frequently done with past hacks. The FBI's review of the Clinton server logs showed no sign of hacking, according to a source familiar with the case.
Brian Fallon, national press secretary for Clinton's presidential campaign, said Guccifer's claims were baseless. "There is absolutely no basis to believe the claims made by this criminal from his prison cell," said Fallon. "In addition to the fact that he offers no proof to support his claims, his descriptions of Secretary Clinton's server are inaccurate. It is unfathomable that he would have gained access to her emails and not leaked them the way he did to his other victims.
"We have received no indication from any government agency to support these claims, nor are they reflected in the range of charges that Guccifer already faces and that prompted his extradition in the first place," Fallon added. "And it has been reported that security logs from Secretary Clinton's email server do not show any evidence of foreign hacking."
That strawman, of course, now puts Hillary in harms way as it redoubles attention on a scandal that many had decided was likely going to blow over. All that Trump will have to do now is find confirmation that Lazar is telling the truth and suddenly Clinton's email transgressions will get a renewed lease on life at the worst possible moment, just as a federal judge opened the door to interviewing Hillary Clinton as part of a review into her use of a private email server while secretary of State.
All this is happening just as as Hillary thought she had managed to put her email scandals behind her.
According to The Hill, Judge Emmet Sullivan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia laid out the ground rules for interviewing multiple State Department officials about the emails, with an eye toward finishing the depositions in the weeks before the party nominating conventions.
Clinton herself may be forced to answer questions under oath, Sullivan said, though she is not yet being forced to take that step.
“Based on information learned during discovery, the deposition of Mrs. Clinton may be necessary,” Sullivan said in an order on Wednesday. [READ THE ORDER BELOW] Discovery is the formal name for the evidence-gathering process, which includes depositions.
“If plaintiff believes Mrs. Clinton’s testimony is required, it will request permission from the Court at the appropriate time.”

In his order, Sullivan pointed to revelations from the emails appearing to show officials trying to evade demands of FOIA.

In one email, for instance, Mull told Abedin that Clinton’s emails “would be subject to FOIA requests” if she used a department-issued BlackBerry, even though her identity would remain secret. Abedin responded that the idea “doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”

In February, Sullivan ruled that the evidence-gathering process could proceed, and the two sides have been haggling since then.

Sullivan had previously suggested that Clinton could be forced to respond to questions, but his order on Wednesday offered the clearest indication that it remains a real possibility.

The order comes in the course of a lawsuit from conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, and leaves open the possibility that Clinton will be forced to answer detailed questions on the eve of her formal selection as the Democratic presidential nominee about her creation of the server.
While it is unclear yet if Hillary will be deposed, Sullivan ordered at least six current and former State Department employees to answer questions from Judicial Watch, which has filed multiple lawsuits over the Clinton email case. Among these are longtime Clinton aide Huma Abedin, former chief of staff Cheryl Mills, under secretary for management Patrick Kennedy, former executive secretary Stephen Mull and Bryan Pagliano, the IT official believed to be responsible for setting up and maintaining the server. The judge also ordered the State Department to prepare a formal answer
about Clinton’s emails. Donald Reid, a senior security official, may
also be asked to answer questions, if Judicial Watch so decides.
More importantly, that process is scheduled to be wrapped up within eight weeks, putting the deadline in the final week of June, and well ahead of the presidential election.
* * *
Judicial Watch brought suit against the State Department under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in an effort to bring Abedin’s emails to light. The lawsuit has since evolved into a battleground over Clinton’s use of the private server.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton called Wednesday’s order “a significant victory for transparency and accountability,” and promised that it would shine a light on Clinton’s email practices.
“Judicial Watch will use this discovery to get all of the facts behind Hillary Clinton’s and the Obama State Department’s thwarting of FOIA so that the public can be sure that all of the emails from her illicit email system are reviewed and released to the public as the law requires,” he said in a statement.
* * *
Any deposition would surely roil the presidential race and force her campaign to confront the issue, which has dogged her for a year. Once again, this is precisely what Trump will pounce on and will be sure to make it the centerpiece of all his upcoming debates with

See court documents here:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-05-04/notorious-hacker-makes-bombshell-claim-i-got-inside-hillarys-completely-unsecured-se

With Hillary Clinton's Email Lies Unravelling, 147 FBI Agents Are On Her Heels

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 03/28/2016 21:18 -0400
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-03-28/hillary-clintons-email-story-unravels-147-fbi-agents-are-her-heels

Earlier this month, conservative legal advocacy group Judicial Watch released a series of documents obtained via an FOIA request which appear to prove that Hillary Clinton knew her BlackBerry wasn’t secure when she and her staff moved into Mahogany Row (the nickname given to the set of offices reserved for senior officials in the Department of State).

E-mail exchanges between Senior Coordinator for Security Infrastructure Donald Reid and the NSA show Clinton was intent on obtaining a secure BlackBerry that she could use in restricted areas.

Although Clinton would of course be given a desktop computer on which she could safely conduct state business, Reid said the Secretary had become “addicted” to her BlackBerry during her ill-fated 2008 Presidential campaign. “The issue here is one of personal comfort,” an e-mail from Reid reads. “S [Secretary Clinton] does not use a personal computer so our view of someone wedded to their email (why doesn’t she use her desktop when in SCIF?) doesn’t fit this scenario … during the campaign she was urged to keep in contact with thousands via a BB … once she got the hang of it she was hooked … now everyday [sic], she feels hamstrung because she has to lock her BB up.”

When the NSA wasn’t receptive, long-time Clinton aid and BlackRock crony Cheryl Mills tried her hand at convincing security officials to find a work around for Clinton’s BlackBerry but she too was rebuffed. “The department's designated NSA liaison, whose name was redacted from the documents, expressed concerns about security vulnerabilities inherent with using BlackBerry devices for secure communications or in secure areas,” AP recounts, adding that “Clinton began sending work-related emails through private accounts soon after, in March 2009.”

Or so the story goes. In fact, however, Clinton may have begun using the private server housed in her basement before March. And while there’s some ambiguity, that would seem to contradict statements she made under oath.
"Conservative legal watchdogs have discovered new emails from Hillary Clinton’s private email server dating back to the first days of her tenure as secretary of State," The Hill reports, referencing newly released messages turned up by Judicial Watch. "The previously undisclosed February 2009 emails between Clinton from her then-chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, raise new questions about the scope of emails from Clinton’s early days in office that were not handed over to the State Department for recordkeeping and may have been lost entirely." Here, for instance, is a message dated February 13 that appears to reference the meeting Mills had with the NSA:

Just to clarify, this is a problem because Clinton's campaign has contended that she did not use the personal account prior to March and the publicly released e-mails begin on March 18.
Again, there's some ambiguity here. “[Clinton] has previously acknowledged that she emailed with department officials before March 18, 2009, the date of the first email in the collection that former Secretary Clinton provided to the Department in December 2014," a State Department official said last week. “Former Secretary Clinton has also indicated that she does not have access to work-related emails beyond those she turned over to the Department."
So essentially, the argument is that although there were indeed work related e-mails sent prior to March 18, Clinton could not access them to turn them over - or something. The story keeps changing. And indeed that's the whole problem. At this point it's abundantly clear that Clinton would have been far better off telling the truth from the very beginning and the fact that incremental information continues to surface certainly seems to suggest that the former First Lady fully intends to admit only what someone else can prove. That doesn't exactly inspire much trust.
“So now we know that, contrary to her statement under oath suggesting otherwise, Hillary Clinton did not turn over all her government emails,” Tom Fitton, the head of Judicial Watch said in a statement. “We also know why Hillary Clinton falsely suggests she didn’t use clintonemail.com account prior to March, 18, 2009 — because she didn’t want Americans to know about her February 13, 2009, email that shows that she knew her Blackberry and email use was not secure.”
While we would note that there's a bit of confirmation bias going on there (i.e. Fitton said the messages he uncovered earlier this month were proof that Clinton knew her BlackBerry wasn't secure and now he says the new e-mails are proof that that proof was indeed proof), Fitton is probably right. Clinton most likely would rather not have been forced to admit that she and Cheryl Mills essentially tried to browbeat the NSA into figuring out how to accommodate the BlackBerrys because the very fact that they had the conversation in the first place suggests Clinton and Mills knew the devices weren't secure.
But more importantly, it seems exceedingly unlikely that Clinton couldn't have turned over the messages from February had she wanted to. That is, how is it that she had access to mail on her private sever from March 18 but not from the beginning of February? Did she permanently delete the messages? And if so, why?
Well the FBI intends to find out, because as a new Washington Post piece (which you're encouraged to read in its entirety) details, the Bureau now has 147 agents on the case. "One hundred forty-seven FBI agents have been deployed to run down leads" WaPo writes, adding that "the FBI has accelerated the investigation because officials want to avoid the possibility of announcing any action too close to the election."
While we can always hold out some hope that Clinton will one day be held accountable and that someone, somewhere will dispel with the notion that America's political aristocracy is above the law, we can't help but suspect that we'll never see Hillary Clinton in black and white stripes - unless it's a pantsuit.