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
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 III, wanted to know from the lawyer, David E. 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.
Whether Americans believe Clinton’s decision to use only a private email account for her public business is a troubling scandal well worth an FBI inquiry, a pragmatic move blown out of proportion by Republican enemies, or something in between, may depend more on their partisan leanings than the facts of the affair itself.
But 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.
Clinton, who has said she regrets her decision to keep private control of her official messages, is not a target in the FBI’s investigation, which is focused on assessing security breaches. Against the backdrop of other government computer security lapses, most specialists believe the occasional appearance of classified information in the Clinton account was probably of marginal consequence.
The Clinton campaign declined to comment for this article.
The email controversy breaks into three phases: Clinton’s initial choices about how to set up her email; her decision to destroy messages she judged to be personal; and the discovery of classified information in an account where it is not allowed by law.
The Server
On the first day of Clinton’s confirmation hearing in January 2009, a longtime aide to her husband bought the Internet domain name clintonemail.com from a company called Network Solutions in Jacksonville, Florida. 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, New York, 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.
The Washington Post first reported the role of Platte River Networks and the FBI’s investigation.
Clinton has said she decided in 2009 to handle all her email, official and personal, on one account to avoid carrying multiple electronic devices. Yet early this year she joked that she was “two steps short of a hoarder. So I have an iPad, a mini iPad, an iPhone and a BlackBerry.”
So there may have been other reasons for using a private server. For an oft-attacked politician considering a presidential run, the server would give Clinton some control over what would become public from her four years as the nation’s top diplomat.
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 slightly larger number of messages from her account — 31,830 — because she or her aides judged them to be personal in nature.
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 — Blumenthal was passing along analysis from a former CIA officer — and they appeared to involve policy.
The Clinton campaign has not explained the discrepancy.
Classified
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 decided to test that claim. The senators — Richard M. Burr of North Carolina and Bob Corker of Tennessee — asked the inspectors general for the State Department and Intelligence Community to investigate whether she and other State Department officials had kept classified information on personal email accounts.
McCullough, a former FBI agent and the watchdog for the intelligence agencies, took the lead in examining Clinton’s emails. In 900 pages of emails about Libya that the State Department had handed over to the Benghazi committee, his team found one email they judged to contain classified information — but the State Department had already posted it on the Web.
McCullough then looked at a sample of 40 more messages and found four that he concluded contained information that should have been marked “secret.” In last month’s court-ordered State Department release of an additional 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 from the full archive might contain classified information.
J. William Leonard, a former director of the government’s Information Security Oversight Office, said that criminal charges would be highly unlikely. But he said he was dismayed by Clinton’s use of private email. The State Department, he noted, has an obligation to provide emails to Congress or the public when required by law.
“The agency can’t fulfill those legal responsibilities if it doesn’t have control over the server,” Leonard said.
