Hilary’s Emails and our Nation’s Security

My questions are about Hillary’s emails, but they aren’t the usual ones. Everyone is agog about the hubris exhibited by the would-be President and how it reminds us of the First Couple’s dodgy past from not-sex in the oval office to stealing everything they could get their hands on when they left the White House. However, there are much more important questions: namely the security of our nation’s secrets and Hillary’s role in giving them away.

The current White House electronic information security breach by Russian hackers came through U.S. State Department computers. It turns out State Department computers were hacked earlier and the latest report is that it is not at all certain all intrusions have yet been cleaned out. News reports say that State was hacked “for months.” Technically that is true, the reports simply don’t say how many months. If you read all the stories carefully it turns out that those months represent years – the years Hillary was Secretary of State.

While official news releases say State was hacked in the last year, other reports say Hillary set up her private server just about the time the Russians got into the State Department system – quite a bit more than a year ago. Apparently, the servers were hacked for the entire duration of her rein as Secretary of State. If one is a bit paranoid, or one does not believe in coincidences, the timing would then suggest she knew State was hacked and set up a private server to protect herself.

The registration information for shows that the domain was first created on Jan. 13, 2009 — one week before President Obama was sworn into office, and the same day that Clinton’s confirmation hearings began. She didn’t use government servers one day of her tenure in office

However, if that is true the question is why didn’t Hillary tell anyone State was hacked?

Letting that question go as merely coincidence we come to a woman who claims to be sophisticated about technology. She has her own server, her own domain, multiple smart phones, multiple computers, and a smart house that allows observation and control from her phones and computers. At the same, time she had no security at all on that private server for months after it was in place. Moreover, as you can see, her domain name was brilliantly named with security in mind: clintonemail.com. There is also another domain no one is talking about: clintonmail.com. That one was registered at exactly the same time as clintonemail.com. Ownership of both domains are now hidden by Perfect Privacy LLC, but that domain also belongs to our lady of shadows.

Clintonemail.com was revealed to have been registered to Eric Hothem before moving it to Perfect Privacy. Hothem the aide who packed up and carted off furniture from the White House for the Clintons claiming it was personal property before he was stopped. (The Clintons were later required to pay $86,000 in restitution for the items they stole and refused to return.) There has naturally been confusion between the two domain names. True to form, it has allowed Hillary to say things like there are no emails that have secret information on clintonmail.com without addressing the existence of such emails on clintonemail.com. There are also other domains registered by Hothem at the Clinton’s behest: presidentclinton.com, and wjcoffice.com. In fact, there are at least 10 domain names possibly linked to the same residential Internet account as Mrs. Clinton’s email server.

Actually we now know Hillary has confidential and secret information on clintonemail.com. Emails on that domain were hacked and some messages show confidential and secret notations on some. We also know from leaked emails that her claim that there was never any communication about Bengasi is a lie. In March 2013, an adviser to Clinton, Sidney Blumenthal, had his e-mail hacked by Marcel Lazar Lehel whose online name is “Guccifer” – the very public Romanian hacker who revealed George W. Bush’s paintings to the world. Lehel revealed that Blumenthal was communicating with clintonemail.com. There is no doubt Lehel went into Clinton’s server and may have been the impetus for her to secure it. Even if it was secured before Lehel found the server name her system had poor security indeed. She used MX Logic for incoming e-mail filtering, but that was late the life of the domain; that there are indications that a different e-mail security solution was tried first and likely found insufficient. She used encryption that put any communication in plain text between encryption points – plenty of time for a hacker to grab them. Even encrypted the emails were vulnerable to cracking. In fact dozens of those emails have been released and many of those had confidential and secret headings.

More interesting than hackers having been able to poke around a server that held highly classified information that could threaten our nation is that Lehel released private emails from Blumenthal concerning Benghazi; you know, those emails that didn’t exist. Just part of a six part email from Blumenthal to Clinton reads:

There are other serious questions raised by the situation. One of the most important is if Hillary’s server was actually in her home. Examining the “IP address history” of clintonemail.com show the domains were Clinton’s domain had been hosted by two successive private-sector firms: ThePlanet.com, now owned by IBM. More disturbing the Austin-based Confluence Networks has hosted the domains most recently. Confluence Networks is known in the tech community as being of dubious provenance and management. Clinton aides/friends, or Clinton herself, either confirmed or denied that her server was in her home, or at least the only server used.

Why does the physical location matter? If Hillary and the Diplomatic Security corps were not in physical control of her server it is possible the server was compromised. In any event recent activity on the domain shows just how vulnerable it truly is. There are a number of new email addresses created for the clintonemail.com domain. Besides the real addresses, such as [email protected] are addresses that are clearly the work of hackers having fun. These addresses include [email protected], [email protected], and a personal insult to Hillary we will not repeat here.

As I said at the beginning, I have questions. They aren’t the kind followed by most twitter users or gossiped about over cocktails. Among mine are: Were state secrets being handed to Russia either because of either sloppy security or outright cooperation with Russia? Did Hillary know State was hacked and thought the Russians would be polite enough not to bother her server? What about the dozens of emails from Blumenthal to Hillary that prove the would-be Head of State is outright lying to both government investigators and the American public? Why is Hillary claiming the server was set up for Bill Clinton when he was President when that is not possible? And finally, where is that server? How secure is it? Who, if anyone, is guarding it?

As usual the Clintons are hunkered down waiting for the storm to pass. However, if Hillary is to become head of state she needs to answer the serious questions and not just fall back on the usual lies, half lies, and obfuscations.

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Written by

Ziad K. Abdelnour, Wall Street financier, trader and author is President & CEO of Blackhawk Partners, Inc., a private family office that backs accomplished operating executives in growing their businesses both organically and through acquisitions and trades physical commodities – mostly oil derivatives – throughout the world.