Huma Abedin’s April warning from the FBI
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PAUL SPERRY
FBI agents in April confronted Huma Abedin with an email she received in 2010 warning her that her Yahoo email account — where she’d “routinely” stored State Department messages, including ones containing classified information — might have been compromised. The revelation is contained in a summary of the FBI’s interview with Abedin, conducted on April 5.
Abedin told agents “she was not sure that her email account had ever been compromised,” according to notes of the interview, conducted as part of the FBI’s investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s unsecured and unauthorized home email server. Abedin served as Clinton’s deputy chief of staff and is currently vice chair of her presidential campaign.
The answer wasn’t comforting to agents who feared classified government material had been hacked. Yahoo is notoriously vulnerable to hacking. In 2014, for example, a half-billion Yahoo accounts had been hacked in the biggest data breach in history.
Worries mounted this month when investigators found 650,000 emails on a laptop Abedin shared with her former-congressman husband, Anthony Weiner, a suspect in an interstate child pornography case. Reportedly, many of the messages were from Abedin’s humamabedin@yahoo.com and other accounts.
Investigators believe thousands of those messages were sent to or from the private server that Clinton used for State business, and are reviewing them to see if they contain classified information.
As The Post first reported last week, Abedin told investigators in her April 5 interview that she “routinely forwarded emails from her state.gov account to either herclintonemail.com or her yahoo.com account so that she could print them.” She explained that “it was difficult” to print from the State printer, so she printed the documents at home.
Before she had divulged that information, agents had confronted Abedin with several sensitive government emails she forwarded to her personal accounts, including one dealing with Pakistan.
It doesn’t appear as if the FBI ever even followed up on the revelation. The bureau never seized her massive personal stockpile of State emails until last weekend — and only after New York agents investigating Weiner informed headquarters of their coincidental discovery.
Weiner didn’t have the security clearance to have access to such potentially classified information.
Nor did more than a dozen other people who came into contact with the Clinton email archive, which contained at least 2,093 currently classified emails and at least 193 that were classified at the time they were sent.
Before reviewing the new stash of emails, the FBI in its initial investigation found that at least 32 classified email chains transited both Clinton’s and Abedin’s personal accounts. One was classified Top Secret/SCI, while nine were classified as Secret when sent.
Abedin got a Top Secret clearance in 2009. It’s a felony for persons trusted with such security clearance to remove classified information from government control and send and store it on an unauthorized computer system.
It’s also a felony to provide classified material to anybody without proper clearance.
FBI Director James Comey has testified that as many as 10 individuals who maintained Clinton’s private server did not have the requisite security clearance to handle such classified information. In addition, Clinton directed at least three Williams Connolly lawyers without security clearance to sort through more than 60,000 of her emails.
“Did Hillary Clinton give non-cleared people access to classified information?” House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz asked Comey in July, to which the top G-man replied, “Yes.”
Now add Abedin’s husband to the list.
With the Weiner revelation, the limits of the classified spillage are anybody’s guess. If the famously reckless Weiner had access to such information, anybody could have it. What state secrets are out there for anyone to see?
These are serious security breaches, yet neither Clinton nor Abedin has been prosecuted for her gross negligence. Maybe that will change now. Maybe if Weiner cooperates with investigators against his wife (to save his own neck), Abedin in turn might be compelled to cooperate with them against her boss.
We can only hope justice at some point in this long-running scandal will prevail.
Paul Sperry, a former DC bureau chief for Investor’s Business Daily and Hoover Institution media fellow, is author of “Infiltration.”
Paul Sperry, a former DC bureau chief for Investor’s Business Daily and Hoover Institution media fellow, is author of “Infiltration.”
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