January 20, 1993 – January 20, 2001: Democrat Bill Clinton is the president of the US for eight years and his wife Hillary Clinton is the first lady.
June 9, 2000: Clinton says she doesn’t want to use email. Home video footage from a private fundraiser shows Senator Clinton talking about how she has deliberately avoided using email so she wouldn’t leave a paper trail. “As much as I’ve been investigated and all of that, you know, why would I? I don’t even want… Why would I ever want to do email? Can you imagine?” But apparently necessity will force her to change her mind, and it is known that by 2006 she will start using a BlackBerry for email. (ABC News, 3/6/2015)
November 4, 2005: State Department Policy decrees day-to-day operations are to be done on government servers. The State Department decrees that “sensitive but unclassified” information should not be transmitted through personal email accounts. It also states, “It is the Department’s general policy that normal day-to-day operations be conducted on an authorized [government server], which has the proper level of security control to provide nonrepudiation, authentication, and encryption, to ensure confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the resident information.” (US Department of State, 1/12/2016) (The Washington Post, 3/10/2015)
March 2007 – 2008: The Bush Administration gets embroiled in a private email scandal. A Congressional oversight committee investigates allegations that the White House fired US attorneys for political reasons. The committee asks Bush officials to turn over relevant emails, only to find that government work had been conducted on private email addresses. Millions of emails are deleted and permanently lost, preventing the committee from continuing their investigation. Bush officials use email accounts associated with a private gwb43.com server owned and controlled by the Republican National Committee, which is a private political entity not covered by government oversight laws. (The Washington Post, 3/27/2007) (Vox, 3/2/2015)
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June 20, 2007: Clinton publicly criticizes the Bush administration’s use of non-governmental email accounts. While campaigning for president, Clinton says, “Our Constitution is being shredded. We know about the secret wiretaps. We know about secret military tribunals, the secret White House email accounts. … It’s a stunning record of secrecy and corruption, of cronyism run amok.” (ABC News, 3/6/2015) (The Hill, 3/5/2015)
2008: The US government publishes rules for email storage. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) issues Bulletin 2008-05, which states that every government email system is supposed to “permit easy and timely retrieval,” and all work emails are supposed to be permanently preserved. Additionally, in the case of a cabinet secretary, permanent records are to be sent to the department’s Records Service Center “at the end of the Secretary’s tenure or sooner if necessary” for safekeeping. (The Washington Post, 3/27/2016)
January 15, 2008 – September 30, 2013: The State Department has no permanent inspector general for the entire time Clinton is secretary of state. Instead, an acting inspector with close ties to State Department leadership fills the role. An inspector general is an internal watchdog tasked with discovering mismanagement and corruption. The position goes vacant in January 2008. President Obama doesn’t nominate anyone to fill the position for more than four years, making it the longest time any department ever went without a permanent one. In 2015, The Wall Street Journal will write, “The lack of a confirmed inspector general raises questions about oversight of the department under Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton.” Matthew Harris, a professor who researches inspectors general, will later comment, “It’s a convenient way to prevent oversight.” (The Wall Street Journal, 3/24/2015)
Early 2008: Clinton’s private email server is set up in her house. Hillary Clinton acquires an email server for her 2008 presidential run and has it installed in her house in Chappaqua, New York. This same server (with a new domain name and email addresses) will hold all her emails during her time as secretary of state from 2009 to 2013. (The New York Times, 8/8/2015) The Washington Post will later report, “The server was nothing remarkable, the kind of system often used by small businesses, according to people familiar with its configuration at the end of her tenure. It consisted of two off-the-shelf server computers. Both were equipped with antivirus software. They were linked by cable to a local Internet service provider. A firewall was used as protection against hackers.” (The Washington Post, 3/27/2016)
February 1, 2008: Clinton’s private email domain is set up under a false name. An IP address associated with the clintonemail.com domain later used by Hillary Clinton is registered to “Eric Hoteham” on this date. The IP address for clintonemail.com, along with others registered in Hoteham’s name, is connected to Bill and Hillary Clinton’s home address in Chappaqua, New York. He may or may not be the same as the similarly named Eric Hothem who worked for Bill Clinton when he was president, was an aide for Hillary Clinton in the early 2000s, and has worked for Citicorp and then JP Morgan since. (ABC News, 3/5/2015) (ABC News, 3/6/2015)
June 7, 2008: Clinton concedes the Democratic presidential nomination to Barack Obama after a close primary race. Obama will win the general election in November 2008 and make Clinton his secretary of state shortly thereafter. (ABC News, 6/7/2008)
After June 7, 2008: Clinton’s computer technician starts managing Clinton’s private server. At some unknown point after Clinton ends her presidential campaign on June 7, 2008, Bryan Pagliano is tasked as the lead specialist to take care of the new private email server in Bill and Hillary Clinton’s Chappaqua, New York, house. Pagliano worked as the IT (information technology) director for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. He is paid by Clinton’s Senate leadership PAC (political action committee) through April 2009, then starts working for the State Department a month later. (The Washington Post, 8/4/2015)
Early 2009: President Obama bans Blumenthal from working at the State Department. Clinton wants to hire Sid Blumenthal as an official national security adviser in the State Department. Blumenthal had worked in President Bill Clinton’s White House in the 1990s, then had been a journalist, then joined Clinton’s presidential campaign as a senior adviser in 2007. However, Obama bans him from any government job. According to a 2015 Politico article, “Obama aides were convinced that Blumenthal spread false personal and policy rumors about Obama during the battle between Clinton and Obama for the Democratic nomination.” (Politico, 10/22/2015) (Politico, 1/8/2016)
Early 2009 – March 2015: Sid Blumenthal takes a job at The Clinton Foundation, advises the secretary of state frequently, and promotes the interests of two government contractors. Sid Blumenthal is paid about $120,000 a year as a full-time employee of The Clinton Foundation. He gets the job in early 2009 as the behest of former President Bill Clinton, who employed him in the White House in the 1990s. He keeps the job until March 2015, the same month that the Clinton email scandal first becomes news. Blumenthal appears to have been a private citizen without a security clearance since the 1990s. Yet for the duration of Clinton’s time as secretary of state, and while he is being paid by The Clinton Foundation, he frequently emails her with intelligence information and advice. His foundation job doesn’t seem to have anything to do with any of the foundation’s charitable works. According to Politico, “While Blumenthal’s foundation job focused on highlighting the legacy of [Bill] Clinton’s presidency, some officials at the charity questioned his value and grumbled that his hiring was a favor from the Clintons, according to people familiar with the foundation.” After March 2015, Blumenthal will be a paid consultant to American Bridge and Media Matters, two groups supporting Clinton’s presidential campaign that are run by David Brock, an ally of both Clinton and Blumenthal. (Politico, 5/28/2015)
January 13, 2009: A Clinton aide registers the email domain that Clinton will use for her private server while secretary of state. Justin Cooper registers three email domains for Hillary Clinton at her Chappaqua, New York, address. One domain, clintonemail.com, will be used for all of Clinton’s emails for at least the next five years. (The Washington Post, 3/10/2015) (The New York Times, 8/8/2015) Cooper is a long-time personal assistant to Bill Clinton. However, he has “no security clearance and no particular expertise in safeguarding computers, according to three people briefed on the server setup.” (The Washington Post, 8/4/2015)
January 20, 2009: Barack Obama takes office as president of the US. He had been elected on November 6, 2008. He will win reelection in 2012.
January 21, 2009: Clinton is sworn in as secretary of state. She resigns as senator from New York at the same time. She was confirmed by the Senate earlier the same day. (The Washington Post, 3/10/2015)
January 21, 2009: At the time Clinton takes office as secretary of state, the State Department allows the use of home computers for government officials as long as they are secure. The New York Times will later note, “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 New York Times, 8/8/2015) But the State Department requires that computers be officially certified as secure, and no evidence has emerged that Clinton’s server was given such a certification. Additionally, the department’s Foreign Affairs Manual states, “Only Department-issued or approved systems are authorized to connect to Department enterprise networks.” (US Department of State)
January 21, 2009: Despite Clinton becoming secretary of state on this day, there is no apparent change in the way her private email server is managed. Her IT (information technology) expert Bryan Pagliano has been in charge of running it since 2008 and continues to do so. Yet the Washington Post will later report, “Four computer-security specialists interviewed by the Post said that such a system could be made reasonably secure but that it would need constant monitoring by people trained to look for irregularities in the server’s logs.” One of the specialists will comment, “For data of this sensitivity… we would need at a minimum a small team to do monitoring and hardening.” (The Washington Post, 3/27/2016)
January 21, 2009 – March 29, 2009: During this two-month time period, Clinton’s private email server operates without the standard encryption generally used on the Internet. During this time, Clinton and her aides exchange emails discussing “North Korea, Mexico, Afghanistan, military advisers, CIA operations and a briefing for Obama.”(The Washington Post, 3/27/2016) During these two months, Clinton travels to Belgium, Switzerland, Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Turkey, Mexico, Japan, Indonesia, South Korea, and China. Her emails would have almost no defense against eavesdropping by foreign intelligence and hackers during all those trips. Furthermore, some intelligence agencies are known to attempt eavesdropping around this time. For instance, at a world leader summit in April 2009, British intelligence sets up fake Internet in the hope that government ministers and their staff will use them so their communications can be intercepted. (ComputerWorld, 3/11/2015)
January 21, 2009 – February 1, 2013: In her time as secretary of state, Clinton uses only her private email account on her private server for all her work and personal emails. There are 62,320 emails sent to or from her hdr22@clintonemail.com address, which is an average of 296 a week, or nearly 1,300 a month. Clinton will later claim that roughly half of these (31,830) were private in nature and she will delete them before investigators can look at them. The Washington Post will later explain, “Most of her emails were routine, including those sent to friends. Some involved the coordination of efforts to bring aid to Haiti by the State Department and her husband’s New York-based Clinton Foundation – notes that mixed government and family business, the emails show. Others involved classified matters. State Department and Intelligence Community officials have determined that 2,093 email chains contained classified information. Most of the classified emails have been labeled as ‘confidential,’ the lowest level of classification. Clinton herself authored 104 emails that contained classified material, a Post analysis later found.” (The Washington Post, 3/27/2016) Twenty-two of her emails will later be determined to be classified “top secret” or even higher than top secret in some cases, due to the mention of highly secretive SAP, or secret access programs. (The New York Times, 1/29/2016)
January 21, 2009 – February 1, 2013: Clinton is unable to check her email in her office for the entire four years she is secretary of state. She is said to be addicted to checking her email on her BlackBerry, but security officials refuse to let her take her BlackBerry into her office. Early in her tenure, security officials offer to install a secure computer with Internet access in her office to allow her to check email, but she doesn’t want it and never gets one. In 2015, an unnamed senior NSA official will recall the conflict after retiring: “It was the usual Clinton prima donna stuff, the whole ‘rules are for other people’ act that I remembered from the ’90s. … What did she not want put on a government system, where security people might see it? … I wonder now, and I sure wish I’d asked about it back in 2009.” (The New York Observer, 3/18/2016)
January 21, 2009 – February 1, 2013: Sid Blumenthal sends Clinton over 800 emails; many contain dubious intelligence. That is an average of about one email every other day for Clinton’s four years as secretary of state. Blumenthal is a private citizen with no security clearance, so his emails are never vetted by US intelligence. In 2015, The New York Times will report that Clinton “took Mr. Blumenthal’s advice seriously, forwarding his memos to senior diplomatic officials in Libya and Washington and at times asking them to respond. Mrs. Clinton continued to pass around his memos even after other senior diplomats concluded that Mr. Blumenthal’s assessments were often unreliable.” Furthermore, his “involvement was more wide-ranging and more complicated than previously known, embodying the blurry lines between business, politics, and philanthropy that have enriched and vexed the Clintons and their inner circle for years.” Various officials express skepticism about his emails, as they were sometimes based on false rumors. But Clinton continues to encourage Blumenthal with occasional email replies like “Useful insight” or “We should get this around ASAP.” The Times will note that “Blumenthal’s direct line to Mrs. Clinton circumvented the elaborate procedures established by the federal government to ensure that high-level officials are provided with vetted assessments of available intelligence.” (The New York Times, 5/18/2015) (WikiLeaks, 1/16/2016)
January 22, 2009: Clinton gets an annual security briefing on the proper handling of classified materials, but this is her only one in her four years as secretary of state. All State Department employees are required to receive regular security training through a briefing at least once a year. It is not clear how or why Clinton will miss her briefing in the next three years. At the end of the briefing she does attend, she signs a document acknowledging her understanding of what she has been told. (The Daily Caller, 3/24/2016)
January 22, 2009: Under penalty of perjury, Clinton signs a pledge to safeguard classified information whether “marked or unmarked classified information, including oral communications.” The very first paragraph of the “Classified Information Nondisclosure Agreement” she signs states, “As used in this Agreement, classified Information is marked or unmarked classified Information.” According to Executive Order 12958, which is in effect at the time, since she is the secretary of state, she is given the authority to classify or declassify any State Department information she wants. However, as part of her nondisclosure agreement, she has the legal responsibility to identify and safeguard any classified information originating from other government agencies, whether that information is marked classified or not. (The Washington Post, 2/4/2016) (US Department of State, 11/5/2015)
January 24, 2009: Clinton passes on using a secure computer to check her private email account at her office desk. By this time, the National Security Agency (NSA) arranges for President Obama to use a secure, encrypted BlackBerry, allowing him to use it anywhere. Clinton and her top aides want Clinton to have one too. On this day, Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s chief of staff, asks in a group email, “[H]ow can we get her one?” Lewis Lukens, Clinton’s logistics chief, responds the same day that he could help set up “a stand-alone PC [personal computer] in the Secretary’s office, connected to the Internet (but not through our system) to enable her to check her emails from her desk.” Under Secretary of State Patrick Kennedy replies that that is “a great idea.” But apparently, Clinton insists on using her BlackBerry at all times and never a desktop computer, so no such computer is ever set up. (The Washington Post, 3/27/2016)
January 28, 2009: The first known email using Clinton’s private server is sent by Clinton, despite her claim she won’t use it for two more months. Clinton exchanges about ten emails with Army General David Petraeus, who is chief of the US Central Command at the time. The exchange will continue into February 2009. In 2015, Clinton will claim that she didn’t start using her email account for government work until March 18, 2009. As a result, all the emails she will later hand over to the State Department will be from March 18 or later. These emails have not yet been made public. (The Washington Post, 3/27/2016) The emails between Clinton and Petraeus will be discovered by the Defense Department one month after Clinton’s sworn deposition. (Reuters, 9/26/2016)
February 2009: Security officials set up a space near Clinton’s office where she can check her private email account. Clinton’s office in State Department headquarters is a SCIF, which means a secure room, and she’s not allowed to bring her BlackBerry into it. Also, Clinton is unwilling to use a computer to check her emails. But around this time, security officials create a space where she can check her BlackBerry. Apparently, Clinton will use this arrangement for her entire four years as secretary of state. (Fox News, 3/16/2016)
February 13, 2009: The NSA refuses to set up a secure BlackBerry for Clinton. Although the National Security Agency (NSA) has set up a secure, encrypted BlackBerry for President Obama, they are not interested in making one for Clinton. On this day, Donald Reid, the State Department’s senior coordinator for security infrastructure, writes in an email, “The current state of the art is not too user friendly, has no infrastructure at State, and is very expensive.” He adds that “each time we asked the question ‘What was the solution for [President Obama]?’ we were politely told to shut up and color.” On February 18, 2009, Reid says in an email, “The issue here is one of personal comfort,” because Clinton and her top aides are “dedicated [BlackBerry] addicts.” (The Washington Post, 3/27/2016)
February 13, 2009: Two more Clinton emails exist a month before Clinton will claim she starts using her email account. Clinton’s chief of staff Cheryl Mills sends an email to Clinton on this day, and Clinton emails a short reply back. In 2015, Clinton will turn over more than 30,000 emails, claiming those were all her work-related emails and she deleted the rest. These work-related emails will not be included in those. Instead, the State Department will give them to Judicial Watch in 2016 in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit that requests just emails discussing her use of her BlackBerry or iPad. (The Hill, 3/24/2016) (Judicial Watch, 3/24/2016) (Judicial Watch, 3/17/2016)
February 17, 2009: Clinton and her aides meet with security officials about using BlackBerrys in secure rooms, but no solution is found. Clinton is frustrated, because she insists on using her personal BlackBerry device for all her emails, but she is not allowed to take it into her suite of offices where she works every day. The BlackBerry is considered a security risk, as it could be hijacked by hackers and turned into a listening device, so she always has to put it into a lockbox before entering her office. On this day, she and her top aides have a meeting about this. Clinton, her chief of staff Cheryl Mills, and others meet with five National Security Agency (NSA) officials and security officials from the State Department and other agencies. They discuss ways for Clinton and her aides to use their BlackBerrys in secure rooms, but no easy solution is found. Clinton continues to use her BlackBerry after the meeting. (The Washington Post, 3/27/2016)
February 18, 2009: A security official says Clinton’s continued use of her BlackBerry is a “comfort issue” for her. Donald Reid, the State Department’s senior coordinator for security infrastructure, is working to find a solution that would allow Clinton and her top aides to use BlackBerrys in secure rooms (known as SCIFs). He explains the problem in a work email after having more meetings about it: “As I had been speculating, the issue here is one of personal comfort. [Clinton] does not use a computer, so our view of someone wedded to their email (why doesn’t she use her desktop when in the SCIF?) doesn’t fit this scenario… during the campaign she was urged to keep in contact with thousands via a BB [BlackBerry]… once she got the hang of it, she was hooked… now every day, she feels hamstrung because she has to lock her BB up… she does go out several times a day to an office they’ve crafted for her outside the SCIF and plays email catch-up.” (Ars Technica, 3/17/2016)
February 24, 2009: A security official warns that BlackBerry could be easily hacked on overseas trips. Joel F. Brenner, chief of counterintelligence at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, gives a speech to government officials and urges them to consider what possible attacks could have occurred during a visit to the recent Beijing Olympics. “Your phone or BlackBerry could have been tagged, tracked, monitored and exploited between your disembarking the airplane and reaching the taxi stand at the airport. And when you emailed back home, some or all of the malware may have migrated to your home server. This is not hypothetical.” Clinton had just returned from a trip to China and other Asian countries. Although top State Department officials are aware of Brenner’s warning, she takes her BlackBerry on her future overseas trips despite it still not being inspected and secured by department officials. (The Washington Post, 3/27/2016)
Late February 2009: State Department security officials worry about Clinton’s BlackBerry use. Few State Department officials appear to know that Clinton has a private email server in her house. However, news about her frequent BlackBerry use soon spreads among the Department’s security officials. A decade earlier, Russian spies placed a listening device in a chair on the floor where Clinton now has her office. Since then, on multiple occasions, hackers had breached computers in the State Department and other federal agencies. State Department security officials are particularly concerned that Clinton’s BlackBerry could be compromised, and they worry that she could be setting a “bad example” for others in the department. They craft a memo that discusses the risks, which will be sent out on March 6.(The Washington Post, 3/27/2016)
March 6, 2009 – March 15, 2009: Clinton says she “gets it” about BlackBerry security concerns, but she keeps on using her BlackBerry. On March 6, 2009, Assistant Secretary for Diplomatic Security Eric Boswell emails an internal State Department memo with the subject line “Use of BlackBerrys in Mahogany Row.” (“Mahogany Row” is where the seventh floor offices of Clinton and her top aides are.) The memo states, “Our review reaffirms our belief that the vulnerabilities and risks associated with the use of BlackBerrys in the Mahogany Row [redacted] considerably outweigh the convenience their use can add. … Any unclassified BlackBerry is highly vulnerable in any setting to remotely and covertly monitoring conversations, retrieving emails, and exploiting calendars.” According to an email by another security official nine days later, Clinton tells Boswell that she read his memo and “gets it.” That email adds, “Her attention was drawn to the sentence that indicates (Diplomatic Security) have intelligence concerning this vulnerability during her recent trip to Asia.” However, Clinton continues to use her BlackBerry and private server without any apparent changes. (The Washington Post, 3/27/2016)
March 18, 2009: Clinton claims she starts using her private email address on this day, despite emails proving otherwise. In 2015, Clinton will name this as the date she begins using a private email server and her email account hdr22@clintonemail.com for government business. (The Wall Street Journal, 9/30/2015) However, emails from as early as January 28, 2009 using her new private email address will later be found. (The New York Times, 9/25/2015)
March 29, 2009: For the first three months Clinton uses her private server for all her emails, it operates without the standard encryption generally used to protect Internet communication. This is according to a 2015 independent analysis by Venafi Inc., a cybersecurity firm that specializes in the encryption process. Not until this day does the server receive a “digital certificate” that encrypts and protects communication over the Internet through encryption. The Washington Post will later report, “It is unknown whether the system had some other way to encrypt the email traffic at the time. Without encryption – a process that scrambles communication for anyone without the correct key – email, attachments and passwords are transmitted in plain text.” A Venafi official will later comment, “That means that anyone could have accessed it. Anyone.” (The Washington Post, 3/27/2016)
April 23, 2009: Clinton aide Huma Abedin sends Clinton a series of steps the State Department is taking to secure the US embassies in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Abedin, Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, lists details, such as, “[W]e need to improve the security perimeter – acquiring property adjacent to our current facilities in Kabul, which is now difficult to secure.” In addition to mentioning information that could benefit attackers of the embassies, the email shows that Clinton was briefed on embassy security issues, despite her later claim that she did not directly deal with such matters. (Politico, 10/30/2015)
May 2009: Bryan Pagliano is hired as a political employee in the State Department’s IT (information technology) division, while he continues to manage Clinton’s private server in her house. The Washington Post will later report, “Officials in the IT division have told investigators they could not recall previously hiring a political appointee.” Pagliano had worked as the IT (information technology) director for Clinton’s PAC (political action committee) and also for her presidential campaign, and was paid by the PAC until April 2009. He also provided computer services to the Clinton family. No evidence has yet emerged that he had help running Clinton’s server. (The Washington Post, 3/27/2016) His initial salary is $133,000 a year. (The Daily Caller, 3/3/2016)
May 2009 – February 2013: Clinton’s computer technician secretly manages her private server. During the time Bryan Pagliano works as a political employee in the State Department’s IT (information technology) division starting in May 2009, he continues to secretly manage Clinton’s private email server in her house. The Washington Post will later report, “Three of Pagliano’s supervisors… told investigators they had no idea that Clinton used the basement server or that Pagliano was moonlighting on it.” (The Washington Post, 3/27/2016) An unnamed colleague in Pagliano’s division will later similarly say that Pagliano’s immediate supervisors didn’t know Clinton’s private server even existed until it was revealed in news reports in 2015. In March 2016, Reuters will report that both Clinton and the State Department continues to decline “to say who, if anyone, in the government was aware of the email arrangement.” (Reuters, 3/24/2016)
May 2009 – February 2013: Clinton’s computer technician lies about his outside income running Clinton’s private server. In May 2009, begins working for the State Department while continuing to be paid by Clinton for managing her private server. However, he does not list his outside income in the required personal financial disclosures he files each year. This continues until his full time department job ends in February 2013, the same month Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state ends. In early 2015, a State Department official will say that the department has “found no evidence that he ever informed the department that he had outside income.” (The Washington Post, 9/5/2015) To lie on such a financial disclosure form is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison. (US Legal Code, 2/24/2012)
July 3, 2009: A possibly “top secret” email to Clinton mentions spy satellite information about North Korea. An email is written by Shelby Smith-Wilson, an official in the State Department’s operations center, and is forwarded to Clinton and her top aides. Parts of it will later be deemed “top secret,” then downgraded to “secret,” the medium classification level. The New York Times will later report, “Although that portion was entirely redacted, one government official familiar with the contents said it described a conference call among senior officials, including Mrs. Clinton, about the ballistic missile test that North Korea conducted that day in violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions.” In 2015, the email will be included in a random sample of 40 Clinton emails reviewed by State Department Inspector General Steve Linick. He and Intelligence Community Inspector General Charles McCullough will deem parts of it “top secret.” The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency will later concur, suggesting it contains intelligence from US spy satellites. But the State Department will disagree, and after months of dispute, in February 2016 the email will be downgraded to “secret,” with parts of it publicly released. Even then, this will be called a “provisional” decision, suggesting the dispute is on-going. (The New York Times, 2/29/2016) (Politico, 2/29/2016) (US Department of State, 2/29/2016)
September 21, 2009: An email to Clinton contains classified information about US embassy security. Clinton’s deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin forwards an email to Clinton. The original email, written by State Department official Daniel B. Smith, includes a summary of a senior staff meeting that discussed embassy security. It starts, “Eric Boswell, representing Pat, reviewed two embassy security issues -” Then the rest of a large block of text is later redacted. (US Department of State, 7/31/2015) John Schindler, a former NSA counterterrorism official, will later write, “Embassy security information is something that is always considered classified, given the all-too-common attacks that befall American embassies and diplomats worldwide.” (John Schindler, 8/26/2015)
October 2, 2009: New regulations require that all government emails must be preserved. The US Code of federal regulations on handling electronic records is updated: “Agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that Federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency recordkeeping system.” (The Washington Post, 3/10/2015)
November 10, 2009: Clinton sends Sid Blumenthal an email that appears to contain important classified information. Blumenthal asks Clinton in an email, “How did it go in Berlin? Looked terrific. What does Merkel think of the Blair option? Sid.” (“Merkel” presumably is a reference to Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany, and the “Blair option” is an Israel-Palestine peace proposal put forward by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.) Despite Blumenthal having no security clearance, Clinton replies, “Berlin was terrific. Lots of good exchanges [with] leaders.” Then the next four and a half lines of Clinton’s reply are completely redacted in the version that will be made public in 2015. (US Department of State, 6/30/2015)
November 21, 2009: Clinton receives a message sent in confidence from a British official but doesn’t flag it as classified.Clinton’s deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin forwards Clinton an email from Matthew Gould, who is an aide to David Miliband, Britain’s secretary of state. Abedin writes the comment, “Another note from Miliband that he doesn’t want to send through the system.” (It is not clear what is meant by “the system.”) Gould’s note says to Abedin, ‘I’m emailing you from my home account, as we’re just back from Kabul [Afghanistan]. David [Milliband] has downloaded to me and very much wants the Secretary (only) to see this note. He would like to talk it over with her as soon as convenient…” This is followed by four and a half pages’ worth of text that will later be completely redacted.(US Department of State, 7/21/2015) J. William Leonard, a former director of the US government’s Information Security Oversight Office, will later note the mention that Miliband wanted the information to only be read by Clinton clearly indicated it was meant to be classified. He says, “I cannot think of a clearer sign of an expectation that this was to be treated in confidence.” (The Washington Post, 8/27/2015)
February 10, 2010: Clinton encourages an aide to email a document on a classified network. Clinton emails her aide Jake Sullivan that she wants to read a statement regarding Jose Miguel Insulza, secretary general of the Organization of American States (OAS). Sullivan emails back that he can’t send it to her immediately because the State Department has put it on the classified network. Clinton quickly replies, “It’s a public statement! Just email it.” However, Sullivan responds, “Trust me, I share your exasperation, But until ops [operations] converts it to the unclassified email system, there is no physical way for me to email it. I can’t even access it.” (The Washington Post, 3/27/2016)
March 20, 2010: Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s chief of staff, apparently loses her personal BlackBerry. In an email to State Department IT (intelligence technology) staffer Bryan Pagliano, Mills writes, “Somewhere [between] my house and the plane to NYC yesterday my personal BB got misplaced; no one is answering it though I have called.” Mills uses both a personal and a government-issued BlackBerry, and it is her personal BlackBerry that gets lost. However, details in released emails show that Mills sometimes sent and received work-related emails from her personal BlackBerry, including emails that were retroactively classified. It is unclear if Mills ever finds her BlackBerry after losing it. (The Daily Caller, 1/26/2016) (US Department of State, 1/15/2016)
May 21, 2010 to October 21, 2010: Computer records suggest Clinton’s private server could be located at The Clinton Foundation’s headquarters. According to publicly available computer records, the IP (Internet Protocol) address for the mail.presidentclinton.com server is 24.187.234.187 from at least 2009 to 2011. Records also show that mail.clintonemail.com server has the same exact IP address, 24.187.234.187, from at least May 21, 2010 to October 21, 2010. That means the two servers must have been in the same location for that overlapping time period. Computer records can also indicate where the IP addresses are physically located, and that IP address at that time is somewhere in the middle of Manhattan, New York City. That makes sense for presidentclinton.com, since former President Bill Clinton’s offices are there, and The Clinton Foundation headquarters is also there. But that would suggest that Hillary Clinton’s clintonemail.com server used for all her secretary of state work is also based in Manhattan and not Chappaqua, New York, for at least part of 2010. (DNS History, 9/7/2015) (DNS History, 9/7/2015) [https://web.archive.org/web/20150903235435/http://www.ip-tracker.org/locator/ip-lookup.php?ip=64.94.172.146 (IP Tracker, 9/3/2015)
December 22, 2010: Clinton is told a new rule that all work emails must be preserved. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) issues guidelines to the heads of all federal agencies, including Secretary of State Clinton, stating that all emails and email attachments relating to government business are considered records to be preserved under the Federal Records Act.(The Wall Street Journal, 9/30/2015)
2011: Clinton misses a cybersecurity presentation meant just for her. State Department diplomatic security staff give a cybersecurity PowerPoint presentation meant for Clinton. However, she doesn't attend it. (US Senate Judiciary Committee, 3/3/2016)
2011: A "top secret" Clinton email contains intelligence from CIA sources and US spy satellites. Virtually nothing is known about Clinton's 22 emails that are later deemed "top secret," since all details about them have remained classified. However, it is known that one of them is sent sometime this year. A few details about just this one email are known because it will be included in a random selection of 40 emails that will get reviewed by State Department Inspector General Steve Linick in 2015. After Linick decides the email should be top secret, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency will perform a second review and confirm that the email should be top secret. That indicates the email contains information obtained from both CIA sources and US spy satellites. (The New York Times, 9/7/2015) (The New York Times, 2/29/2016)
January 21, 2011 - January 22, 2011: Two emails about the Iran nuclear program are sent to Clinton. Her aide Jake Sullivan sends the emails which appear to include a summary of secret talks conducted by the "P5 1," the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany. The subject line of the first email is "FW: Summary of Day One of Istanbul P5 1 talks," and the second contains a summary of day two. The emails will be published in 2015, but in heavily redacted form. The New York Times will later report, "State Department officials appear to have concluded that those details about conversations among foreign officials should have been classified as "secret" at the time they were sent." "Secret" is the medium level of classification, below "top secret." (The New York Times, 9/30/2015) (The New York Times, 9/30/2015) (US Department of State, 12/31/2015)
March 9, 2011: Clinton asks an aide to print a Blumenthal email without any identifiers. Sid Blumenthal sends Clinton an email with the subject line, "H: Serious problems for Libyan Rebels. Sid." Clinton forwards the email to her deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin and asks her to print it out. But she also asks, "Can you print for me w/o any identifiers?" Abedin replies "Yes." (The New York Times, 6/29/2015)
March 11, 2011: Clinton doesn't think two emails from a former British prime minister should be flagged for classified content. Clinton emails her deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin and tells her to print out two recent emails from former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Both Clinton and Abedin are using private email accounts on Clinton's server. The emails are CCed to Clinton aide Jake Sullivan, who also is using a private email account. Nearly all of the content of Blair's messages is later redacted, due to containing "Foreign government information" and "foreign relations or foreign activities of the US, including confidential sources." (Judicial Watch, 1/29/2016) At the time, Blair is the official Middle East envoy representing the US, Russia, the UN and the EU, and he is heavily involved in Middle Eastern peace negotiations. (BBC, 5/27/2015)
March 18, 2011: Blumenthal's intelligence to Clinton is coming from at least one active CIA official. Clinton confidant Sid Blumenthal sends Clinton an email which states, "Tyler spoke to a colleague currently at CIA, who told him the agency had been dependent for intelligence from [redacted].” “Tyler” is Tyler Drumheller, a CIA official until 2005. (Yahoo, 10/8/2015) Blumenthal sent Clinton hundreds of intelligence updates which appear to be based on information from Drumheller.
April 3, 2011: Clinton’s comments about a Libyan defector will later be deemed “secret.” Clinton aide Jake Sullivan sends Clinton a forward of a Reuters article explaining how former Libyan foreign minister Moussa Koussa has just defected to Britain and will be talking to British intelligence. The article will not be redacted later, but all of the extensive comments by Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs William Burns will be. Then Clinton adds three lines of commentary that also will be totally redacted. Her email will later be deemed “secret,” which is the middle level of classification. (US Department of State, 2/29/2016)
April 5, 2011: Clinton forwards Blumenthal’s unvetted intelligence to the White House after removing his name. Even though Blumenthal is a private citizen with no security clearance, Clinton asks her aide Jake Sullivan, “This is informative. Should we pass on (unidentified) to WH /or other agencies?” (“WH” stands for “White House.”) Sullivan replies, “Yes, I will do so. Very interesting.” Politico will later note that Clinton referred to Blumenthal as “(unidentified)” because “The White House barred Clinton from bringing Blumenthal to [The State Department] because of sharp words he used to attack Obama during the 2008 primary.” (Politico, 2/29/2016)
April 10, 2011: An email forwarded to Clinton appears to contain the most recent US military intelligence, which should have been classified. The email discusses the current security situation in Libya. It says that due to violence in the town of Ajdabiyah, US Special Envoy Christopher Stevens “is considering departure from Benghazi.” It also discusses Stevens’ concerns about departing and it details the “phased checkout” of Stevens’ staff from the area, possibly in a few hours. Additionally, it contains the latest secret intelligence from AFRICOM (US Africa Command, the US military in Africa), detailing nearby troop movements in the Libyan civil war that could threaten Stevens and his staff. Tim Davis, a special assistant to Clinton, writes the email and then sends it to Clinton aide Huma Abedin, who forwards it to Clinton. Davis marks it “SBU,” which means “sensitive but unclassified.” The email will be released to the public in full on May 13, 2015. However, the State Department’s inspector general will later conclude that the email should not have been made public without redactions. Furthermore, in August 2015, an unnamed government official familiar with the investigation into Clinton’s emails will tell CBS News that at least the part of the email containing current military intelligence should have been marked classified at the time. Additionally, because that information originated from the military, the State Department did not have the right to declassify it at the time it was sent or later. The unnamed official will say that this kind of mistake is not unusual for State Department officials when they discuss information from multiple sources, but the difference is that this email is stored on Clinton’s private server, which can be easily hacked or monitored. (CBS News, 8/19/2015) (US Department of State, 5/13/2015) In 2015, Fox News will claim that the email contained intelligence from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), which oversees satellite imagery. Furthermore, “all three agencies confirmed to the intelligence community inspector general that the intelligence was classified when it was sent four years ago by Abedin to Clinton’s private account, and remains classified to this day.” (Fox News, 8/26/2015) Even though the email will be made public in full in May 2015, it will be reclassified as “secret” in September 2015. (The New York Times, 9/30/2015)
May 15, 2011: Senator John Kerry’s email to Clinton with classified details about a recent meeting he had with two Pakistani generals. Mere hours earlier, Kerry (D) met with Director General Ahmad Pasha, who is head of the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence agency, and Chief of Army Staff Ashfaq Kayani, who is the head of Pakistan’s military. Kerry writes, “During a long dinner with [the generals] to discuss the major issues between our two countries and in the region, I specifically sought their views.” But almost all of the rest of his 17-page email will later be redacted, and will be deemed “secret.” (Politico, 2/29/2016)
May 16, 2011: Could “secret” emails to Clinton be related to Pakistan’s knowledge of bin Laden’s location? On May 15, 2011, Senator John Kerry (D) emailed Clinton with details about a recent meeting he had with Pakistani generals Ahmad Pasha and Ashfaq Kayani, and his email will later be deemed “secret,” the middle level of classification. The next day, Clinton aide Jake Sullivan emails Clinton with the comment: “Cameron called me, hysterical, -” The rest of the sentence is redacted, then Sullivan adds, “This is likely what Kerry is calling about.” Clinton replies to Sullivan, “Can you get me facts (such as they are) before I talk [with] Kerry?” These two emails will also later be deemed “secret,” due to the redaction in Sullivan’s brief comment. (US Department of State, 2/13/2016) It is not known who Cameron is. However, at the time, the US ambassador to Pakistan is Cameron Munter. (The Asia Times, 5/11/2012) Intriguingly, Osama bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on May 2, 2011, just two weeks earlier. Furthermore, in 2014, an article in The New York Times will claim that the US had direct evidence that Pasha, who is also head of the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence agency, knew of Bin Laden’s presence there. The information is said to come from a “senior United States official.” (The New York Times, 3/19/2014) In 2015, famed journalist Seymour Hersh will similarly claim that both Pasha and Kayani had been told of the planned US attack on bin Laden well in advance, and once they realized the US was going to kill him no matter what, they helped make sure the attack would succeed. (London Review of Books, 5/21/2015)
June 2, 2011: Chinese hackers are targeting Gmail accounts of senior US officials, but top Clinton aides keep using Gmail account for work. Google Inc. publicly announces that hackers based in China are targeting the email accounts of senior US officials and hundreds of other prominent people. The attacks are on users of Google’s Gmail email service. If successful, the hackers are able to read the emails of their targets. (The Wall Street Journal, 6/2/2011) Clinton’s chief of staff Cheryl Mills conducts government work through her Gmail account. Philippe Reines, Clinton’s senior advisor and press secretary, has a government account and a Gmail account, and uses both for work. However, there’s no evidence Mills or Reines stops using Gmail for work after this news report. (Judicial Watch, 9/14/2015) (Politico, 10/5/2015) Furthermore, sometime this month, Mills indicates in an email that there was an attempt to hack her email: “As someone who attempted to be hacked (yes I was one)…” (CBS News, 9/30/2015)
A key paragraph from Blumenthal’s June 8, 2011, email, containing details of a secret meeting of rebel leaders in Sudan from just the night before. (Credit: US Department of State)
June 8, 2011: Sid Blumenthal sends an email to Clinton that appears to contain very recent classified information from the NSA. In 2015, the email will be released to the public without any redactions, apparently by accident since the redactors assumed that Blumenthal, a private citizen without any security clearance at the time, would not have highly classified information. The email contains a detailed account of very current events in Sudan, especially about a coup that is being plotted by top generals there. According to a later account by John Schindler, a former NSA counterintelligence officer, “Mr. Blumenthal’s information came from a top-ranking source with direct access to Sudan’s top military and intelligence officials, and recounted a high-level meeting that had taken place only 24 hours before. To anybody familiar with intelligence reporting, this is unmistakably signals intelligence, termed SIGINT in the trade. In other words, Mr. Blumenthal, a private citizen who had enjoyed no access to US intelligence for over a decade when he sent that email, somehow got hold of SIGINT about the Sudanese leadership and managed to send it, via open, unclassified email, to his friend Ms. Clinton only one day later.” It appears the information is taken from four different NSA reports, all of them classified “top secret.” At least one is issued under the GAMMA compartment, which is a SAP, a “special access program” considered more classified than even “top secret.” In 2016, current NSA officials will say they have no doubt Blumenthal’s information came from recent NSA reports. One unnamed official will say, “It’s word-for-word, verbatim copying. … In one case, an entire paragraph was lifted from an NSA report” that was classified “top secret.” On the basis of this and other emails, Schindler will conclude that Blumenthal “was running a private intelligence service for Ms. Clinton.” Schindler will ask, “How Mr. Blumenthal got hold of this Top Secret-plus reporting is only the first question. Why he chose to email it to Ms. Clinton in open channels is another question. So is: How did nobody on Secretary Clinton’s staff notice that this highly detailed reporting looked exactly like SIGINT from the NSA?” (The New York Observer, 3/18/2016)
June 9, 2011: Clinton forwards a Blumenthal email to an aide instead of flagging it for containing obviously classified information. Sid Blumenthal’s email sent a day earlier appears to contain very recent classified information, including details of a secret meeting of rebellious Sudanese generals that took place just one day earlier. Although Blumenthal is a private citizen, he marked the top of the email “CONFIDENTIAL” and mentioned getting intelligence from a “particularly sensitive source” in Sudan who is speaking in “strict confidence.” Instead of flagging the email as containing possibly classified information, Clinton merely forwards it to her aide Jake Sullivan with the comment “fyi” – meaning “for your information.” (US Department of State, 1/7/2016) (The New York Observer, 3/18/2016)
June 17, 2011: Clinton encourages aide Jake Sullivan to remove the indentifying heading from a secure fax and “send nonsecure.” She grows impatient as she waits for “talking points” about a sensitive matter. Sullivan emails her, “They say they’ve had issues sending secure fax. They’re working on it.” Then Clinton emails him, “If they can’t, turn into nonpaper w no identifying heading and send nonsecure.” Clinton spokesperson Brian Fallon will later claim, “What she was asking was that any information that could be transmitted on the unclassified system be transmitted. It is wrong to suggest that she was requesting otherwise. The State Department looked into this and confirmed that no classified material was sent through a non-secure fax or email.” There has been no official comment from the State Department on this exchange yet. (The Washington Post, 3/27/2016) Senator Charles Grassley (R), chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, will later call the exchange between Clinton and Sullivan “disturbing.” He will say, “It raises a host of serious questions and underscores the importance of the various inquiries into the transmittal of classified information through her non-government email server.” (CNN, 1/8/2016) Clinton will later claim that in this case the talking points were “never sent” to her in a non-secure fashion. “This is another instance where what is common practice – I need information, I had some points I had to make and I was waiting for a secure fax that could give me the whole picture, but oftentimes there is a lot of information that isn’t at all classified. So whatever information can be appropriately transmitted unclassified often was. That’s true for every agency in the government and everybody that does business with the government.” (The Hill, 1/10/2016)
June 28, 2011: State Department employees are warned not to do government work on private email accounts due to a hacking threat. A department cable issued under Clinton’s signature orders all employees to “Avoid conducting official Department business from your personal email accounts” because it has been discovered that hackers are targeting the personal emails of government employees. (The Washington Post, 3/10/2015) This comes in response to reports that Gmail accounts of government workers had been targeted by “online adversaries.” However, Clinton herself ignores the warning and continues to use her unsecure BlackBerry and her private server. (The Washington Post, 3/27/2016)
July 14, 2011: Blumenthal tells Clinton about a company he’s invested in helping Libya’s rebels when he would need Clinton’s approval. Libya is in the middle of a civil war which lasts most of 2011. Sid Blumenthal emails Clinton about a security company called Osprey Global Solutions, headed by retired Army Major General David Grange. Blumenthal tells Clinton about Osprey’s attempt to get a contract to give “field medical help, military training, organize supplies and logistics” to Libyan rebels currently fighting Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi. He writes, “Tyler, Cody, and I acted as honest brokers, putting this arrangement together through a series of connections, linking the Libyans to Osprey and keeping it moving.” Blumenthal is a private citizen, journalist, and Clinton Foundation employee at the time. “Tyler” is Tyler Drumheller, who worked for the CIA until 2005. “Cody” is Cody Shearer, a longtime friend of Clinton. Blumenthal, Drumheller, and Shearer formed a business relationship to help Osprey. Clinton’s State Department would have to give its approval to a deal between this company and the Libyan rebels. (Yahoo, 10/8/2015)
July 26, 2011: Clinton jokes about Chinese hackers but doesn’t take steps to combat the hacking. In June 2011, Google Inc. publicly warned that hackers based in China were targeting the Gmail email accounts of senior US officials. (The Wall Street Journal, 6/2/2011) On this day, Clinton shows awareness of the problem through a joke. Another State Department official sends Clinton an email, and some confusion results about the official’s two email accounts. Clinton writes, “I just checked and I do have your state but not your Gmail – so how did that happen. Must be the Chinese!” (US D artment of State, 9/3/2015)
August 24, 2011: Clinton’s email about her phone call to the head of NATO will later be deemed “secret.” Clinton aide Jake Sullivan sends Clinton an email entitled “Rasmussen call.” Every word of his several lines of text will later be redacted. Then Clinton responds to him with three lines of text, which also will later be completely redacted. Although nothing is known about the content, other emails from the same day indicate that Clinton calls NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen. Clinton’s email to Sullivan will later be deemed “secret,” the middle level of classification. It also will be redacted in part due to the National Security Act of 1947, though why that is so remains unclear. (US Department of State, 1/29/2016) (US Department of State, 10/30/2015) NATO is in charge of the US-dominated bombing campaign in Libya at the time. (The Los Angeles Times, 10/21/2011)
September 23, 2011: According to a State Department official, Clinton engages in Middle East negotiations using her unsecure BlackBerry. On this day, Clinton, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, and European Union High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Catherine Ashton meet in United Nations headquarters in New York City. The four of them work out a joint statement regarding an Israeli-Palestinian peace plan proposed by President Obama. In a 2013 speech, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman will discuss what happens between Clinton and Ashton: “They sat there as they were having the meeting with their BlackBerrys transferring language back and forth between them and between their aides to multitask in quite a new fashion.” Sherman will comment that, “Things appear on your BlackBerrys that would never be on an unclassified system, but you’re out traveling, you’re trying to negotiate something, you want to communicate with people – it’s the fastest way to do it.” (The Hill, 1/26/2016) (United Nations, 9/23/2011)
October 19, 2011 – October 20, 2011: Blumenthal sends Clinton an email that obviously contains classified information, but Clinton doesn’t flag it as such.Clinton confidant and private citizen Sid Blumenthal sends another email with his latest intelligence about the civil war in Libya. He marks the email “URGENT INTEL” and “CONFIDENTIAL,” and starts the email with this warning: “SOURCE: Sources with direct access to the Libyan National Transitional Council, as well as the highest levels of European Governments, and Western Intelligence and security services.” However, despite the obvious signs the email contains classified information, Clinton doesn’t flag the email, and merely replies the next day, “Tnx [Thanks] again.” She also forwards the email to her aide Jake Sullivan with the note “More from Sid.” (US Department of State, 1/7/2016) (US Department of State, 1/7/2016)
2012: Clinton’s private server is vulnerable to a hacker attack described in a government warning. The Homeland Security Department’s Computer Emergency Readiness Team issues a warning about remote access attacks, that would allow hackers to take control of computers. The warning notes that “An attacker with a low skill-level would be able to exploit this vulnerability.” In 2015, The Associated Press will report that Clinton’s private email server could have been vulnerable to a hostile takeover by this very type of attack. Clinton’s server appears to have lacked encrypted protections, and could accept commands from the computers over the Internet. Marc Maiffret, who founded two cybersecurity companies, will later comment, “That’s total amateur hour. … Real enterprise-class security, with teams dedicated to these things, would not do this.” (The Associated Press, 10/13/2015)
April 25, 2012: Clinton asks if an email contains classified information, despite a lack of classification markers. Clinton aide Jake Sullivan emails Clinton information from a blog promoting Islamic jihad, saying it is “pretty interesting.” Clinton forwards the email to State Department spokesperson Philippe Reines while also asking Sullivan, “If not classified or otherwise inappropriate, can you send to the NYTimes reporters who interviewed me today?” Politico will later comment, “The email suggests Clinton may have known some of the messages that came to her were classified, as she had to ask her staff whether the content was or was not guarded at such a level for national security reasons.” (Politico, 2/29/2016)
June 7, 2012: An email thread provides a murky glimpse into Clinton’s classified work with Pakistan. On this day, Clinton takes part in a series of emails with Jake Sullivan, her top foreign policy aide. All the emails in the thread are classified a “secret,” which is a medium ranking below “top secret.” The entire exchange is later redacted, except for the subject line: “Khar–where we are.” Several days earlier, Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar had requested that the US apologize for the death of 24 Pakistani troops in a NATO airstrike, so the emails presumably discuss how the US should react. (The Washington Post, 3/5/2016) Further emails in the chain will also be deemed “secret,” but in one of them, a mysterious comment Clinton makes to Sullivan will be declassified: “I’m even more determined to do this and have some ideas I want to discuss [with] you.” (US Department of State, 2/13/2016)
July 6, 2012: Clinton’s emails contain classified discussions about US drone strikes. An email sent to Clinton from her aide Jake Sullivan on this day will later be deemed “secret,” the medium level of US classification. The email contains the text of an Associated Press article titled “US drone strike kills 4 militant in Pakistan.” The article will not be redacted at all, but Ambassador Richard Hoagland, deputy chief of mission for the US Embassy in Islamabad, made some comm