Yesterday, we learned that a second IT company -- beyond this infamous case -- had possession of the data on Hillary Clinton's private email server, which violated government rules and compromised national security. As the new editor-in-chief of Red State, Leon Wolf, noted, this new development raised serious new issues regarding the security and integrity of her sensitive data. As you read this excerpt, remember that officials have already identified hundreds of classified emails in her archives (she said there were none) -- including messages that she personally sent and received (she said she hadn't done so), as well as work-related emails that she never turned over (she swore she'd surrendered every single one):
The cooperation of a second tech company raises new questions about whether the FBI is now obtaining any of the emails that Clinton says she and her attorneys deemed to be personal and deleted, as Republican critics have demanded to know if any of those emails were really work-related emails that should have been turned over to the State Department along with other federal records. Datto's cooperation also raises more questions about whether anyone at the company, where employees do not have security clearances, had access to classified information that was in Clinton’s server. The source familiar with the investigation said that like all major tech companies on the front lines, Datto has faced cyberattacks, another subject of great interest to the FBI in its probe of Clinton’s server.
Today, another revelation:
A Connecticut company, which backed up Hillary Clinton‘s emails at the request of a Colorado firm, apparently surprised her aides by storing the emails on a “cloud” storage system designed to optimize data recovery. The firm, Datto Inc., said Wednesday that it turned over the contents of its storage to the FBI on Tuesday…There were conflicting accounts as to whether the developments could lead to retrieval of any of Clinton’s more than 31,000 personal emails, which she said she deleted from her private server upon turning over her work-related emails to the State Department, at its request, in December 2014. Congressional Republicans have voiced skepticism as to whether the 30,940 business emails that the Democratic presidential candidate handed over represented all of those related to her position as secretary of state. Clinton has said her lawyers carefully pruned them. The FBI is separately investigating whether Clinton’s arrangement put classified information at risk but has yet to characterize it as a criminal inquiry.
A few points: (1) Republicans can be more than skeptical that all of the deleted and withheld emails were purely personal; they can be confident she's lying because that's already been proven. (2) Of course this email scheme put classified information at risk. Her server had no encryption whatsoever for several months, and its overall security was much, much weaker than those of government networks that were breached by foreign hackers. (3) Clinton defenders can parse and nitpick until they're blue in the face. This is a criminal investigation. (4) The fact that Mrs. Clinton reportedly had no idea that a second company was involved in this data storage arrangement doesn't matter much. As a public official holding the highest security clearance and trafficking in the most sensitive of state secrets, it was Mrs. Clinton's duty to take every requisite step to guarantee the safekeeping of this material. The very existence of her unsecure private server, on which she conducted all of her business, represents a reckless disregard for those responsibilities. Outsourcing the data storage to a second-rate IT firm put this information at even greater risk. And the involvement of a subcontractor expands the circle of vulnerability. Among the classified content discovered on the server were top secret emails. Mrs. Clinton continues to trot out the "they weren't marked classified" excuse, but public officials are required to identify sensitive information when they see it. The materials in those emails were "born classified," experts explain, rebutting the inaccurate Clinton claim that these emails were only deemed classified retroactively. Plus, it doesn't take someone as experienced as the former Secretary of State to recognize that messages about North Korean nuclear weapons and the Iranian nuclear negotiations were obviously secret in nature. (5) By the way, we now know that Clinton's right-hand woman at the State Department twice forwarded classified information to...the Clinton Foundation, the other source of major ethics questions that continue to swirl around Hillary Rodham Clinton. I'll leave you with two video clips; one of journalist Ron Fournier lambasting Clinton for refusing to answer important email scandal questions -- and the second of a supporter introducing Hillary at a rally, announcing that nobody cares about any of this:
Well, many voters care, it would seem. Also, as Katie mentioned earlier, the Associated Press is reporting that Clinton's campaign "did not answer detailed questions" about possible security breaches, preferring instead to attack Republicans.