It will remain publicly unknown until the video is leaked to Fox News in October 2016.

A photo capture of Clinton as she appears in the 2010 cybersecurity video. (Credit: Fox News)

In the video, Clinton says that employees have a “special duty” to recognize the importance of cybersecurity. “The real key to cybersecurity rests with you. Complying with department computing policies and being alert to potential threats will help protect all of us.”

According to a later account by Fox News, “Clinton goes on in the video to underscore the important work the State Department Bureau of Diplomatic Security and IT department were doing to guard against cyber-attacks. She warns hackers try to ‘exploit’ vulnerabilities and penetrate department systems. She then urges staffers to log onto the internal cybersecurity awareness website or subscribe to their ‘cybersecurity awareness newsletter.’”

Representative Jason Chaffetz (R), chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, will later find the video ironic, given Clinton’s own security issues with her private email server. He will say, “Hillary Clinton needs only to look into the mirror to find the biggest cybersecurity risk.”

Clinton spokesperson Brian Fallon will say, “This is not new. It has been widely reported that during Clinton’s tenure the State Department issued these kinds of warnings about possible cybersecurity to employees. These warnings were more than appropriate given that it was subsequently confirmed that State’s email was hacked.” (Fox News, 10/22/2016)

(Dept of State/FOIA release, 9/03/2019)

Cheryl Mills forwards an Agence France Presse article to Hillary Clinton on January 22, 2010, titled “Trafficking Fears as Haiti Children Go Missing.”

Clinton responds, “As predicted.”

One week later on January 29, 2010, Clinton friend, Laura Silsby,  is arrested in Haiti for suspected child-trafficking.

Clinton Emails/Wikileaks

Laura Silsby, left, leaves a courthouse in Port-au-Prince, Monday, May 17, 2010. (Credit: Esteban Felix/The Associated Press)

“In the first week of February, former President Bill Clinton accepted an expanded role as special envoy for Haiti, on behalf of the United Nations, to lead the coordination of international earthquake recovery and reconstruction efforts. One of Clinton’s first tasks in Haiti, however, was to put out the fire of a child abduction scandal involving American citizens.

On January 29, 2010, less than three weeks after the earthquake, Haitian authorities arrested ten U.S. Baptist missionaries for attempting to take 33 children by bus across the border into the Dominican Republic without proper documentation. A week later, the missionaries were charged with child kidnapping and criminal association. While the missionaries claimed good intentions and ignorance of Haitian laws, Haitian prosecutors argued that there had been intentional wrong doing. In the course of a month, President Clinton brokered the release of all the missionaries, except for the group leader, Laura Silsby.

Suspicions about Silsby’s intent to smuggle or traffic the children to the Dominican Republic further increased, when on March 19, 2010, Silsby’s legal advisor, Jorge Torres-Puello, an American-Dominican living in the Dominican Republic as a fugitive was arrested and accused of human trafficking. U.S. authorities revealed that Torres-Puello was “linked to a network that trafficked in Haitian and Central American children and [was]wanted in the United States, El Salvador and Costa Rica.” (Read more: Shani R. King/Harvard Human Rights Journal/2012)

“Hillary has a long history of interest in Ms. Silsby. Wikileak emails dating back till at least 2001 have been found in her archives discussing Laura’s NGO. Laura had claimed she planned to build an orphanage in the Dominican Republic, but authorities in the country said she never submitted an application for this purpose. They instead located to Haiti.” (Wikileaks, 2/12/2010), (Wikileaks, 2/17/2010), (Michael Smith News, 11/04/2017)

“Judge Bernard Saint-Vil has dropped kidnapping charges against all 10 American missionaries detained for trying to take children out of the country after the Jan. 12 earthquake. But the only missionary still in jail, Laura Silsby, the group’s leader, still faces a charge of organizing the illegal transportation of 33 children in the chaos after the disaster, the judge said Monday. The charge carries a maximum penalty of three years in prison. Judge Saint-Vil did not explain his decision.” (New York Times, 4/26/2010)

“The last of 10 Americans detained while trying to take 33 children out of Haiti after the Jan. 12 earthquake was freed Monday when a judge convicted her but sentenced her to time already served in jail.

Laura Silsby, the organizer of the ill-fated effort to take the children to an orphanage being set up in the neighboring Dominican Republic, returned to her cell briefly to retrieve belongings before quickly heading to the Port-au-Prince airport.” (Read more: Idaho Press-Tribune, 5/17/2010)

Contrary to reports in the media, the crowd-sourced investigation labeled by some as “Pizzagate” did not begin with internet sleuths digging through the Wikileaks  Podesta Files releases looking for pizza parlors and encoded language discussing human trafficking. It began with the shocking discovery that Hillary and Bill Clinton provided assistance to convicted child trafficker, Laura Silsby, resulting in a reduced sentence for child trafficking.

Silsby was arrested at the Haitian border attempting to smuggle 33 children out of Haiti without documentation. Her sentence and charges were reduced after an intervention by Bill Clinton. In the aftermath of Silsby’s arrest, her originally retained lawyer Jorge Puello was arrested in connection with an international smuggling ring accused of trafficking women and minors from Central America and Haiti. The revelation of this news in November was either ignored by the Western media or attacked by Clinton controlled publications.

I. Hillary Clinton Intervened Politically on Behalf of Laura Silsby

Laura Silsby is the former director of The New Life Children’s Refuge. Emails from her organization can be found in Wikileaks’ Hillary Clinton Email Archive discussing the NGO before her arrest. Silsby’s organization also appears in Clinton’s emails, soliciting donations for their “ministry.” The Refuge was founded by Silsby and Charisa Coulter, both attendees of the Central Valley Baptist Church in Meridian, Idaho. Silsby was reported to have a history of bad debts and unpaid wages.

Laura had claimed she planned to build an orphanage in the Dominican Republic, but a State Department diplomatic cable revealed that authorities in the country said she never submitted an application for this purpose. They instead located to Haiti.

On January 29, 2010, Silsby was arrested with nine other American nationals attempting to steal 33 children from the country, most of whom were not even orphans and had families according to some reports. CNN reported on February 9, 2010 that this was not the first time Silsby had attempted to traffic children out of Haiti. Haitian police acting on a tip had intercepted Silsby in an earlier, separate attempt to remove 40 children out of the country. She was turned back at the Haitian border. For a brief period, Haitian authorities were considering adding a new kidnapping charge based on this evidence.

Hillary and Bill Clinton took an extraordinary interest in Silsby’s case from the moment she was arrested and almost immediately stepped in on her behalf. The Harvard Human Rights Journal stated that one of Bill Clinton’s first acts as special envoy for the United Nations in Haiti “was to put out the fire of a child abduction scandal involving American citizens.” On February 7th, 2010, The Sunday Times reported that Bill Clinton had intervened to strike a deal with the Haitian government, securing the release of all co-conspirators except for Silsby. Prosecutors ultimately sought a six-month sentence in Silsby’s case, reducing charges for conspiracy and child abduction to mere “arranging irregular travel.” A shockingly light penalty given the circumstances of her arrest, which would likely not have been possible but for the intervention of the Clintons in Silsby’s case.

On February 9th, 2010 Hillary Clinton consulted with Counselor Cheryl Mills and other attorneys in an email discussing the U.S. Government’s “options” regarding the arrested Americans. The heavily redacted memo attached to that email does not reveal what these “options” consisted of. However, the State Department’s American Citizens Services is only authorized to offer lists of local, English speaking attorneys to Americans arrested or detained abroad. To go beyond that authorization is a severe violation of protocol and is illegal. Additional emails reveal that the State Department was involved with making statements on the Silsby scandal and preparing to assist Silsby’s co-conspirators with their return to the United States, although this is consistent with State Department protocol in these situations. (Read more: Disobedient Media, 1/25/2017) 

Jorge Puello (Credit: public domain)

On February 11th, the New York Times reported that Silsby’s original lawyer, Jorge Puello, was suspected of leading an international human trafficking ring involving women and minors. According to the Harvard Human Rights Journal, Puello was ultimately arrested in an investigation being lead by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) in connection with the ring. He was wanted in the United States, El Salvador and Costa Rica for his involvement with a network trafficking Central Americans and Haitians.

At the time of his arrest, his wife was already imprisoned in El Salvador and “faced charges of presumed sexual exploitation of minors and women.” Puello was ultimately sentenced to three years in federal prison for “alien smuggling.” Another surprisingly light sentence given the original charges he was sought for. It it not known at this time whether or not Laura Silsby was associated with Puello’s criminal enterprise. (Read more: Disobedient Media, 1/25/2017) 

(…) The head of the Salvadoran border police, Commissioner Jorge Callejas, said in a telephone interview that he was investigating accusations that a man with a Dominican passport that identified him as Jorge Anibal Torres Puello led a human trafficking ring that recruited Dominican women and under-age Nicaraguan girls by offering them jobs and then putting them to work as prostitutes in El Salvador.

Mr. Puello said he did not even have a passport. When Mr. Callejas was shown a photograph taken in Haiti of Mr. Puello, Mr. Callejas said he thought it showed the man he was seeking. He said he would try to arrest Mr. Puello on suspicion of luring women into prostitution and taking explicit photographs of them that were then posted on Internet sites. “It’s him, the same beard and face,” Mr. Callejas said in an interview on Thursday. “It has to be him.”

Judge Saint-Vil also said he thought that the photo of the trafficking suspect in a Salvadoran police file appeared to be the same man he had met in court. He said he intended to begin his own investigation into whether a trafficking suspect had been working with the Americans detained in Haiti.

“I was skeptical of him because he arrived with four bodyguards, and I have never seen that from a lawyer,” the judge said in an interview. “I plan to get to the bottom of this right away.”

The judge said he would request assistance from the Department of Homeland Security to look into Mr. Puello’s background. A spokesman for the department said American officials were playing a supporting role in the investigation surrounding the Americans, providing “investigative support as requested.”

An Interpol arrest warrant has been issued for someone named Jorge Anibal Torres Puello, according to the police and public documents.

There were questions about whether Mr. Puello, the adviser, who said the Central Valley Baptist Church in Idaho had hired him to represent the Americans, was licensed to practice law. Records at the College of Lawyers in the Dominican Republic listed no one with his name.

Mr. Puello said he had a law license and was part of a 45-member law firm. But his office in Santo Domingo turned out to be a humble place, which could not possibly fit 45 lawyers. Mr. Puello’s brother Alejandro said that the firm had another office in the central business district, but he declined to provide an address.

Mr. Puello said in the interview that he had been representing the Americans free of charge because he was a religious man who commiserated with their situation. “I’m president of the Sephardic Jewish community in the Dominican Republic,” he said. “I help people in this kind of situation. We’re not going to charge these people a dime.”

But other lawyers for the detainees said that the families had wired Mr. Puello $12,000 to pay for the Americans’ transportation out of Haiti if they were released, and that they had been told by Mr. Puello in a conference call late Tuesday that he needed an additional $36,000. Mr. Puello said that he had not participated in a conference call.

One lawyer for the families said that Mr. Puello had told him that he was licensed to practice law in Florida, but the lawyer said he had checked and found no such record. Mr. Puello said in the interview that he had never said he was licensed in Florida.

Mr. Puello said that he had been born in Yonkers, N.Y., and that his mother was Dominican. He said that his full name was Jorge Puello and that he had no other names. But then in a subsequent interview he said his name was Jorge Aaron Bentath Puello. He said he was born in October 1976, and not in October 1977, which the police report indicates is the birth date of the suspect in the Salvadoran case.

The report said the police had found documents connected to the Sephardic Jewish community in a house in San Salvador where the traffickers had held women. (The New York Times, 2/12/2010)

A secret NSA map obtained exclusively by NBC News shows the Chinese government’s massive cyber assault on all sectors of the U.S economy, including major firms like Google and Lockheed Martin, as well as the U.S. government and military. (Credit: NBC News)

“China’s cyber spies have accessed the private emails of “many” top Obama administration officials, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official and a top secret document obtained by NBC News, and have been doing so since at least April 2010.

The email grab –- first codenamed “Dancing Panda” by U.S. officials, and then “Legion Amethyst” –- was detected in April 2010, according to a top secret NSA briefing from 2014. The intrusion into personal emails was still active at the time of the briefing and, according to the senior official, is still going on.

In 2011, Google disclosed that the private gmail accounts of some U.S. officials had been compromised, but the briefing shows that private email accounts from other providers were compromised as well.

The government email accounts assigned to the officials, however, were not hacked because they are more secure, says the senior U.S. intelligence official.

The senior official says the private emails of “all top national security and trade officials” were targeted.

The Chinese also harvested the email address books of targeted officials, according to the document, reconstructing and then “exploiting the(ir) social networks” by sending malware to their friends and colleagues.

The time period overlaps with Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email account while Secretary of State from Jan. 21, 2009 to Feb. 1, 2013. The names and ranks of the officials whose emails were actually grabbed, however, were not disclosed in the NSA briefing nor by the intelligence official.” (Read more: NBC News, 8/10/2015)

Laura Graham and Bill Clinton (Credit: Getty Images)

Twitter sleuth @15poundstogo uncovers a State Dept FOIA email dated May 17, 2010, written by longtime Clinton acquaintance and former employee, Bob Bash who worked as a senior consultant with James Lee Witt Associates. The email states Mr. Witt had a personal conversation with Bill Clinton about Smartmatic voting machines and Haiti’s elections. Bash follows up with an email in the hopes of furthering the discussion on behalf of Mr. Witt and Smartmatic.

Bash addresses the email to Laura Graham,  a senior executive at the Clinton Foundation. Graham surfaced in Wikileaks emails for sending nearly 150 messages to Clinton’s top aides at the State Department over a two-year period, despite Clinton agreeing to keep State Department and Foundation business separate.

Graham forward’s the email to Cheryl Mills stating Bill Clinton cannot “engage on this issue” (except he already spoke to Mr. Witt about Haiti and Smartmatic machines).

I never heard of Smartmatic before tonight. But here’s something on it from the State Department’s foia records: pic.twitter.com/sIXT2ieTYB

— Brennan’sOrangeJumpsuit (@15poundstogo) November 15, 2020

State Department/Link

Aside from the deal for Haiti, there is also speculation about the “successful” election in the Philippines:

Wait, was it *THIS* successful Phillipines election that Cheryl Mills was supposed to tell Hillary Clinton about?https://t.co/lhicuBpP0w

— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) December 17, 2020

“The parent company of *Cambridge Analytica* said in 2010 that it was not only involved in the Philippine presidential elections, it also boasted that it ‘successfully won the election FOR their candidate.'”

No! It couldn’t be THIS election!https://t.co/6V9TtwwI2b

— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) December 17, 2020

“And almost two-thirds of the candidates in Haiti’s presidential election have called for the country’s election to be scrapped amid allegations of FRAUD”…

Oh, no, not HAITI too! What are the odds??https://t.co/YWstKS2tmN pic.twitter.com/gaIeBU8MHC

— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) December 17, 2020

Less than two years later, on November 19, 2012, Smartmatic publishes this press release:

“The government of Haiti announces it is partnering with Smartmatic to continue efforts toward the modernization, consolidation and upgrading of the country’s civil and identity registry system.

(…) One key aspect of this project is the fact that Smartmatic will transfer all the required technology knowledge to Haiti as the process unfolds. In the near future, the Caribbean nation will possess not only a state-of-the-art civil identity registry system, but all the technology and know-how for its continued development.

“We at Smartmatic are focused on our projects having a significant social value for citizens in the countries where we operate. We firmly believe this will improve the quality of life of Haitians”, stated Antonio Mugica, Smartmatic’s CEO.

(…) The project will begin immediately with a one-year implementation phase, in which Smartmatic is to deploy 700 registration units to biometrically capture face photographs and the full 10 fingerprints from Haitian citizens. Of these, 600 units will be distributed across the national territory, and the remaining 100 among foreign missions abroad. Additionally, Smartmatic will provide associated services, such as project management, technical support, capacity building, to create the necessary infrastructure for Haiti to have a world-class national biometric enrollment platform.

In December 2014, HaitianTruth.org writes:

SMARTMATIC deployed a new Identity Management System with a biometric component that recorded the citizens’ 10 fingerprints and generated a 14-digit NIN.

About the system implemented by SMARTMATIC Since November 2018, a myriad of misleading and inconsistent reports has been published on Haiti’s National Identification Management System. The so-called experts cited in these reports claimed that the old system deployed by SMARTMATIC could still work for many years, and therefore, should not be replaced. This is totally false because since the Venezuelan company put this system into production in December 2014, which cost 53.5 million U.S dollars to the Haitian State. The only evaluation, made by an external expert, was conducted by a consultant from UNDP in January 2017.

The UNDP’s Expert spent 2 weeks at ONI assessing the system and, in his conclusions, he established that the citizen’s data in the identification system put in place by SMARTMATIC are inconsistent and unreliable due to mostly caused by a partial unplanned data migration from the two(2) fingerprints (old system from OAS) to the ten (10) fingerprints (new system from SMARTMATIC). It was then, therefore, recommended to replace this system. (Haitian Truth.org, 9/22/2019)

Bill Clinton makes a cool half a million after giving a speech to Renassaince Capital on June 29, 2010. (Credit: public domain)

“In December 2015, The Wall Street Journal reported that Hillary Clinton opposed the Magnitsky Act while serving as secretary of state. Her opposition coincided with Bill Clinton giving a speech in Moscow for Renaissance Capital, a Russian investment bank—for which he was paid $500,000. “Mr. Clinton also received a substantial payout in 2010 from Renaissance Capital, a Russian investment bank whose executives were at risk of being hurt by possible U.S. sanctions tied to a complex and controversial case of alleged corruption in Russia.

Members of Congress wrote to Mrs. Clinton in 2010 seeking to deny visas to people who had been implicated by Russian accountant Sergei Magnitsky, who was jailed and died in prison after he uncovered evidence of a large tax-refund fraud. William Browder, a foreign investor in Russia who had hired Mr. Magnitsky, alleged that the accountant had turned up evidence that Renaissance officials, among others, participated in the fraud.” The State Department opposed the sanctions bill at the time, as did the Russian government. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov pushed Hillary Clinton to oppose the legislation during a meeting in St. Petersburg in June 2012, citing that U.S.-Russia relations would suffer as a result.

The Wall Street Journal report continued, “A few weeks later [June 29, 2010], Bill Clinton participated in a question-and-answer session at a Renaissance Capital investors conference. He was paid $500,000. After the appearance, Mr. Clinton received a personal thank-you call from Vladimir Putin, then the Russian prime minister, the government news agency TASS reported.”

A spokesperson for Hillary Clinton denied the connection between her stance against the bill and Bill Clinton’s paid speech, but the conflict of interest is undeniable. During the presidential election, the Clinton campaign even took measures to stop a story reporting the link. An email released by Wikileaks from a Clinton Campaign [staffer]  and Chair John Podesta in May 2015 noted, “With the help of the research team, we killed a Bloomberg story trying to link HRC’s opposition to the Magnitsky bill to a $500,000 speech that WJC gave in Moscow.” (Read more: The Observer, 7/13/2017)

Justin Cooper (Credit: Alex Wong / Getty Images)

According to a September 2016 FBI report, Justin Cooper, a Bill Clinton aide who is helping to manage Clinton’s private server, contacts a Secret Service agent at some point during Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state. It is not clear when this happens, but apparently it is not long after the server begins to be frequently targeted by brute force hacking attacks around the middle of 2010.

Cooper will be asked about this in a September 2016 Congressional hearing shortly after the FBI report is published. He will say, “when we first experienced some of the repeated failed login attempts, I reported them to the Secret Service. … There was an instance where we shared some logs with [them]. … The Secret Service looked at logs from the server and made some recommendations to [server manager Bryan] Pagliano about the possible origins of those failed logins and some techniques he might use to mitigate that problem.” (The Secret Service agent will give advice on improving the server’s security that will not be followed.)

However, when Cooper is asked by Representative Blake Farenthold (R), “Did you turn over the logs and notifications that you received to the FBI, the emails of brute force attacks?” Cooper will say the FBI was not contacted.

Representative Jody Hice (Credit: Twitter)

Additionally, when Representative Jody Hice (R) will ask if Cooper consulted with any other “department or agency in the government,” Cooper will say, “No. No consultations of that type.” He will also specifically mention the State Department wasn’t consulted. (US Congress, 9/13/2016)

It’s possible that Pagliano contacted others, but the FBI will interview both Cooper and Pagliano in its investigation and then will mention only the contact with the Secret Service in its final report.

The number of hacking attacks steadily grows through the rest of Clinton’s time in office. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

Blake Farenthold (Credit: Bill Clark / Congressional Quarterly)

Bryan Pagliano, the manager of Clinton’s private server while she is secretary of state, will be interviewed by the FBI in December 2015. According to an FBI report, he will claim that the server suffered no known security breaches. However, “he was aware there were many failed login attempts, which he referred to as brute force attacks. He added that the failed attempts increased over the life of the [server], and he set up the server’s logs to alert [Justin] Cooper when they occurred. Pagliano knew the attempts were potential attackers because the credentials attempting to log in did not match legitimate users on the system. Pagliano could not recall if a high volume of failed login attempts emanated from any specific country.”

The FBI report will explain, “A brute force attack is a trial-and-error method used to obtain information, such as a password… In a brute force attack, passwords may be attempted manually or automated software can be used to generate a large number of consecutive guesses as to the targeted information.” (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

Cooper, a Bill Clinton aide who helped Pagliano manage the server, will be asked about brute force attacks in a September 2016 Congressional hearing. He will respond, “I can’t say with any specificity how many had happened. They happened with some limited frequency over the period of, I’d say the last two and a half years, while she was in office. But we had developed systems to tamper these down.”

Representative Blake Farenthold (R) will ask Cooper that if the brute force attacker managed to enter the correct user name and password, “you wouldn’t have been notified, would you? You would have thought it was Mrs. Clinton or some legitimate user actually getting in?”

After further questioning, Cooper will admit that he only looked at failed attempts and didn’t check for related successful log-ins. (US Congress, 9/13/2016)

After Bryan Pagliano sets up Clinton’s new private server in January 2009, he sets up Internet Protocol (IP) filtering on the firewall, once a firewall is established in late March 2009. Pagliano will later tell the FBI that he tried to review the firewall log files once a month.

The US Secret Service Badge (Credit: public domain)

At some point, Justin Cooper, a Bill Clinton aide who is helping Pagliano manage the server, puts Pagliano in contact with a US Secret Service agent. The timing of this is not clear. However, in a September 2016 Congresssional hearing, Cooper will say it happened after Clinton’s server started to get frequent “brute force” hacking attacks, and that begins around the middle of 2010.

This agent recommends that Pagliano should also perform outbound filtering of email traffic. According to a September 2016 FBI report, “Pagliano further considered, but ultimately did not implement, a Virtual Private Network (VPN) or two-factor authentication to better secure administrative access to the server system by him and Cooper.”

The FBI report will explain: “‘VPN’ is a private network that runs on top of a larger network to provide access to shared network resources, which may or may not include the physical hard drives of individual computers… VPN offers an additional layer of security by encrypting the data traveling to the private network before sending it over the Internet. Data is then decrypted when it reaches the private network. … ‘Two-factor authentication’ is a method of confirming a user’s claimed identity by utilizing a combination of two different components…” (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016) (US Congress, 9/13/2016)

Clinton speaks in New York, while then Congressperson Anthony Weiner looks on in 2000. (Credit: Reuters)

Huma Abedin, Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, writes to Clinton in an email, “OK I will [redacted] just FedEx secure cell phone from [Washington] DC. Anthony leaving office to bring me to airport now so hopefully will make it just in time.”

Four hours later, Clinton responds, “Maybe one of Anthony’s trusted staff could deliver secure phone?”

“Anthony” is a reference to Anthony Weiner, who is both Abedin’s husband and a member of Congress at the time. He will resign one year later, due to a sex scandal.

The Associated Press will later comment, “The emails show the degree of trust Clinton had for Weiner before he was hit by scandal.”

It is unclear where Clinton is on this day. State Department schedules list no public events for her between July 27, 2010 and August 2, 2010. But the Associated Press will also note, “The use of secure cell phones is commonplace among State Department staff when traveling to countries with advanced cyber-espionage capacities, such as China or Russia.”

These emails will be released in November 2016. They were not part of the 30,000 work-related emails Clinton turned over in December 2014, even though they are clearly work-related. It will be one of thousands of emails deleted by Clinton that were later recovered by the FBI.

After the release, State Department spokesperson Mark Toner will say it is unclear how the phone might have been delivered, or if it was at all. He will suggest that, in theory, sending a secure phone through FedEx could have been appropriate if the necessary safeguards were taken. “In 2010, secure cell phones were available to State Department employees, and they could be configured in such a way as to render them suitable for transport. When configured in this manner, the device would be inoperable until paired with additional components.” (The Associated Press, 11/3/2016)

Dexter Filkins (Credit: Alex Wong / Getty Images)

Matt Lussenhop, a press officer at the US embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, sends an email to over a dozen other US officials. The email is sent to Clinton aide Jake Sullivan, who emails it to Clinton. Lussenhop’s email concerns an article that New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins is about to get published. Filkins contacted the embassy in Kabul to get quotes for his story, which alleges that Muhammed Zia Salehi, an aide to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, is on the payroll of the CIA. The email is two paragraphs long, but the first paragraph will later be completely redacted and deemed classified at the “secret” level, the level below “top secret.” (US Department of State, 2/29/2016)

The article will be published in the Times two days later, on August 25, 2010. (The New York Times, 8/25/2010)

Matt Lussenhop (Credit: public domain)

In Clinton’s July 2016 FBI interview, she will be asked about this email. According to the FBI, “Clinton stated she did not remember the email specifically. [She] stated she was not concerned the displayed email contained classified information [redacted] but stated she had no reason to doubt the judgment of the people working for her on the ‘front lines.'”  (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

Salehi was arrested by Afghan police in July 2010, one month before the Times article about him, due to a US government wiretap on him as part of an anti-corruption case. But he was released the next day on the orders of Karzai. In 2013, Foreign Policy will confirm that not only was Salehi working for the CIA, but he actually was an intermediary who was giving secret CIA cash payments to Karzai. (Foreign Policy, 5/4/2013)

Given that this is one of a small number of emails Clinton will be asked about in her FBI interview, as well its classification at the “secret” level, it stands to reason that Lussenhop confirmed Salehi’s CIA connection.

The FBI on Thursday defended its inclusion of a Chicago Muslim cleric tied in the past to the terrorist groups Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood in a group that recently visited the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) and FBI headquarters.

Ross Rice announces his retirement from the FBI on September 27, 2012. (Credit: public domain)

Ross Rice, FBI spokesman in Chicago, acknowledged in an interview that Kifah Mustapha, imam of the Mosque Foundation in Bridgeview, Ill., was named as an unindicted co-conspirator during a Hamas funding trial six years ago.

However, Mr. Mustapha “has never been convicted of a crime and never charged with a crime,” Mr. Rice said.

“If we thought he was a security risk, we wouldn’t have included him” in the FBI’s Citizens Academy program, Mr. Rice said.

Mr. Mustapha took part in the six-week program at the FBI’s Quantico, Va., facility, which included a three-day visit to Washington, where a group of 30 people, including the cleric, visited the NCTC and FBI headquarters, Mr. Rice said.

Mr. Mustapha is listed in court papers as one of more than 240 unindicted co-conspirators, including people and organizations, that were named in the 2004 terrorism-funding trial of the Dallas-based charity Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development.

The Justice Department charged the group and its top officials with illegally funding the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, which has carried out bombing attacks in Israel. The NCTC website states that Hamas was behind “high-profile terrorist attacks” against civilians in Israel.

The foundation and five former leaders were found guilty in November 2008 of giving more than $12 million to Hamas. The investigation and trial also produced large numbers of documents from the group and its affiliates that disclosed a covert plan by the Muslim Brotherhood to subvert the U.S. government and create an Islamic state.

The list of co-conspirators identified Mr. Mustapha as among 53 people who were members of the U.S. branch of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee, a group set up to funnel funds to Hamas. Another document identified him as the Holy Land Foundation’s agent in Illinois.

Mr. Mustapha was named a Muslim chaplain for the Illinois State Police in December, but was dismissed in June after failing a background check that disclosed his past ties to the Holy Land Foundation.

State police spokesman Sgt. Isaiah D. Vega confirmed that Mr. Mustapha is no longer a chaplain.

“Due to information revealed during the background investigation, Sheik Kifah Mustapha’s appointment as a volunteer ISP chaplain was denied,” he said, declining to comment further because the matter is the subject of a lawsuit.

The Muslim advocacy group Council on American-Islamic Relations, also identified as a co-conspirator.

Mr. Rice said Mr. Mustapha was “an employee” of the Holy Land Foundation, but that his participation in the FBI outreach program was welcome.

“His application was reviewed and vetted by our office,” Mr. Rice said. “He is a very influential leader of the Palestinian community here and imam of the largest mosque and was a welcome addition.”

Mr. Mustapha declined to comment on the visits or whether he has any link to Hamas.

An NCTC spokesman referred questions to the FBI, and an FBI headquarters’ spokesman referred questions to Mr. Rice.

The visits were first reported by Andrew Breitbart’s website Big Peace, which included a photograph of Mr. Mustapha and 18 other people inside the NCTC.

Sheikh Kifah Mustapha (third from left) as well as other top Muslim terrorist operatives tour the National Counterterrorism Center.  A Department of Homeland Security official said Mustapha is on “the highest watch list they have.” (Photo Credit: Breitbart via FBI)

A video of Mustapha asking for donations:

Mr. Rice said that during the recent Washington visit, Mr. Mustapha was escorted the entire time as he visited the NCTC headquarters near Tysons Corner in Northern Virginia and the FBI headquarters building.

“He’s very sympathetic to the mission of the FBI and has pledged his support,” Mr. Rice said.

A former FBI agent said Mr. Mustapha several years ago was listed in the FBI’s database as a member of Hamas. “This is a known senior Hamas guy,” the former agent said of Mr. Mustapha.

Asked if Mr. Mustapha is listed by the FBI as a Hamas member, Mr. Rice said, “not that I’m aware of.” (Read more: Washington Times, 9/30/2010)  (Archive)

Adam Waldman (Credit: public domain)

“Waldman began working for Deripaska in 2009 to help the billionaire with visa issues, according to lobbying disclosures filed under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

The State Department revoked Deripaska’s visa in 2006 because of concerns about ties to Russian organized crime.

Deripaska pays Waldman $40,000 per month plus expenses for the contract, which is still active. He has yet to obtain a U.S. visa.

(…) In Oct. 2010, Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, hired Waldman as part of the campaign to help Deripaska as well as to serve as his legal counsel in Washington, D.C.

Waldman’s FARA disclosures show that his work for Lavrov involves engaging “in correspondence and meetings with U.S. policymakers” as well as acting “as counsel” to the Russian diplomat “on political and legal matters as requested, including issues related to diplomatic matters.”

(Credit: efile.fara.gov)

Adam Waldman FARA filing for work for Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

Waldman received no compensation from Lavrov, according to FARA filings.

One of Waldman’s filings includes a Sept. 15, 2010 letter sent by Lavrov thanking him for his work for Deripaska.

“A persistent state of limbo regarding Mr. Deripaska’s ability to travel freely between our two countries has become an impediment to the promotion of mutually advantageous contacts between the business communities of the two countries,” Lavrov wrote.

FARA records show that the relationship between Waldman and Lavrov was terminated on May 31, 2017. (Read more: The Daily Caller, 2/09/2018)  (Archive)

(Credit: public domain)

“Before the Obama administration approved a controversial deal in 2010 giving Moscow control of a large swath of American uranium, the FBI had gathered substantial evidence that Russian nuclear industry officials were engaged in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering designed to grow Vladimir Putin’s atomic energy business inside the United States, according to government documents and interviews.

Federal agents used a confidential U.S. witness working inside the Russian nuclear industry to gather extensive financial records, make secret recordings and intercept emails as early as 2009 that showed Moscow had compromised an American uranium trucking firm with bribes and kickbacks in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, FBI and court documents show.

They also obtained an eyewitness account — backed by documents — indicating Russian nuclear officials had routed millions of dollars to the U.S. designed to benefit former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation during the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government body that provided a favorable decision to Moscow, sources told The Hill.

The racketeering scheme was conducted “with the consent of higher level officials” in Russia who “shared the proceeds” from the kickbacks, one agent declared in an affidavit years later.

Rather than bring immediate charges in 2010, however, the Department of Justice (DOJ) continued investigating the matter for nearly four more years, essentially leaving the American public and Congress in the dark about Russian nuclear corruption on U.S. soil during a period when the Obama administration made two major decisions benefiting Putin’s commercial nuclear ambitions.

The first decision occurred in October 2010, when the State Department and government agencies on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States unanimously approved the partial sale of Canadian mining company Uranium One to the Russian nuclear giant Rosatom, giving Moscow control of more than 20 percent of America’s uranium supply.” (Read more: The Hill, 10/17/2017)

Annie Medaglia (l) of the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center, moderates a June 1 discussion with Todd Foley of the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE); Amos Hochstein of the US State Department; and Adnan Z. Amin of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). (Credit: Larry Luxner/Atlantic Council)

(…) Between his visits to Congress (and well-connected think tanks) to apprise decision makers of Putin’s energy antics, [Amos] Hochstein was Biden’s right-hand man meeting with numerous world leaders. He frequently flew to Ukraine (and other nations) with Biden to work out energy deals.

But Hochstein had a secret.

Time and again, Biden’s advisor failed to mention that he had witnessed Putin’s energy strategy firsthand. Hochstein communicated Putin’s energy dominance strategy in the oil and gas sectors very effectively, but he never mentioned Russia’s attempts to corner the global uranium market. It was something he had assisted personally.

While working as a U.S. lobbyist in the private sector, Hochstein had advised Rosatom’s subsidiary: Tenex.

Hochstein became a revolving door extraordinaire early in his Beltway career. As he weaved in and out of the private sector, his positions (and profits) rose substantially. From 2001 to 2007, Hochstein worked in various capacities at Washington lobbying powerhouse Cassidy & Associates. In 2006, then-Governor Mark Warner (D-Va.) hired Hochstein to serve as a senior policy advisor. Hochstein purportedly left Cassidy in January 2007 to join Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd’s presidential campaign, according to a press release by the firm. …

Yet, Hochstein continued to work for Cassidy’s deep-pocketed foreign clients, even while he was employed by Governor Warner and Senator Dodd’s presidential campaign. In 2006, Russian nuclear corporation Tenex asked Doug Campbell (unaware that he was an FBI operative) to find a Beltway lobbying powerhouse to help further their interests.

By March 2006, Campbell found himself meeting with Hochstein, who ensured that Tenex hired Cassidy & Associates. Cassidy claimed that Hochstein left the firm in January 2007, but Hochstein continued to meet with Putin’s top nuclear officials throughout 2007 and 2008 while he was working with powerful Democrats.

Did Warner and Dodd know that Hochstein was simultaneously serving Russian interests? Hochstein’s public bios make no mention of his work on behalf of Tenex, although he does acknowledge returning to Cassidy in August 2008 (and remaining there until 2011).

Before long, he was directly advising Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, her successor John Kerry, and finally Vice President Biden (and even President Obama). His LinkedIn profile is meticulously manicured to show no overlap between his public and private sector gigs, but, in fact, Hochstein advised multiple public officials and simultaneously worked to advance foreign interests while on the payroll of Cassidy.

According to the Obama White House’s visitor records, Hochstein visited more than 150 times between December 2010 and September 2016, including several trips to the Situation Room. His first visits occurred while he was still working with Cassidy.” (Read more: Just the News, 7/13/2020)  (Archive)

On November 4, 2010, a longtime Biden family friend from Delaware, Kevin Justice, had a meeting in D.C. with the Office of the Vice President. At the time, Justice was the president of a construction company called HillStone International. A couple of weeks after the meeting, HillStone hired James as an executive vice president, despite the fact that James had no experience in the housing construction industry.

Do you notice the pattern?

(This deal is thoroughly documented in Breitbart News Senior Contributor Peter Schweizer’s book Profiles in Corruption.)

James’s company profile touted his only experience that really mattered: “James Biden was the finance chairman of his . . . brother’s bid for a U.S. Senate seat in Delaware and successfully enlisted the support of national unions, political leaders and financiers across the country.”

James joined HillStone at a fortuitous time: the firm was negotiating a massive contract in war-torn Iraq to build 100,000 homes. This was part of a $35 billion, 500,000-unit project, as Schweizer reported in Profiles in Corruption. HillStone also got a $22 million construction contract from the U.S. State Department. The company’s founder, David Richter, told investors at a private meeting that it really helps to have “the brother of the Vice President as partner.” For the years James worked with HillStone, the firm “accumulated contracts from the federal government for dozens of projects, including projects in the United States, Puerto Rico, Mozambique, and elsewhere.”

Yes, Mozambique… and “elsewhere.”

On February 14, 2023, the Daily Mail reported that James Biden admitted in legal filings that he was hired by Hill International, the parent company of HillStone, to “negotiate with Saudis over a secret $140 million deal” because of his relationship to Vice President Joe Biden, who at the time was leading delegations to Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal (right) meets with Vice President Joe Biden in Riyadh on October 27, 2011. ((Credit: AFP via Getty Images)

The case documents reveal that on at least two occasions, “Jim told a former senior U.S. Treasury official working as a private investigator” that he was “often sent to meetings to represent Hill because ‘of course, the [Biden] name didn’t hurt.’” Hill CEO Irvin Richter further confided “that he selected Biden because KSA [the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia] would not dare stiff the brother of the Vice-President who would be instrumental to the deal.”

Jim’s wife, Sara, also claimed in official affidavits that “Joe and his brother ‘told each other everything.’”

Lamentably, this influence peddling is as legal as it is flagrant.

In the system Joe Biden built, influence peddling is legal for anyone willing to put in a little effort to find one of any number of loopholes. (Read more: Breitbart, 10/22/2023)  (Archive)

An email sent or received by Clinton on this day has the subject title ‘‘MbZ call – 7:15am.” Very little is publicly known about its content, such as who sends or receives it, because it will not be included in the over 30,000 work-related emails Clinton will give to the State Department in December 2014. But the FBI will recover the email through other means and ask Clinton about it in her July 2016 FBI interview.

Clinton gestures as she delivers a statement about WikiLeaks on November 29, 2010. (Credit: Yuri Gripas / Reuters)

According to the FBI summary of that interview, “Clinton stated she recalled the time period of the WikiLeaks disclosures because it was a difficult time for State. She spent long hours on the phone with foreign diplomats addressing the WikiLeaks disclosures and ensuring no one was in danger as a result of the disclosures. Regarding the specific email, Clinton did not know why it was not in the approximately 30,000 emails produced to [the] State [Department] and, based on its content, would expect it to be considered work-related.” (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

From Clinton’s comments, it can be surmised the email deals with the disclosure of 250,000 State Department cables by WikiLeaks, which actually takes place two days later, on November 28, 2010.

Ironically, Clinton makes a public speech on November 29, 2010, that contradict her private reassurances to foreign diplomats that no one was endangered by the leaks. She says, “The United States strongly condemns the illegal disclosure of classified information. It puts people’s lives in danger, threatens our national security, and undermines our efforts to work with other countries to solve shared problems… So whatever are the motives in disseminating these documents, it is clear that releasing them poses real risks to real people, and often to the very people who have dedicated their own lives to protecting others.” (US Department of State, 11/29/2010)

An honor guard outside the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. (Credit: Wang Zhao/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images)

“The Chinese government systematically dismantled C.I.A. spying operations in the country starting in 2010, killing or imprisoning more than a dozen sources over two years and crippling intelligence gathering there for years afterward.

Current and former American officials described the intelligence breach as one of the worst in decades. It set off a scramble in Washington’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies to contain the fallout, but investigators were bitterly divided over the cause. Some were convinced that a mole within the C.I.A. had betrayed the United States. Others believed that the Chinese had hacked the covert system the C.I.A. used to communicate with its foreign sources. Years later, that debate remains unresolved.

But there was no disagreement about the damage. From the final weeks of 2010 through the end of 2012, according to former American officials, the Chinese killed at least a dozen of the C.I.A.’s sources.

Still others were put in jail. All told, the Chinese killed or imprisoned 18 to 20 of the C.I.A.’s sources in China, according to two former senior American officials, effectively unraveling a network that had taken years to build.

Assessing the fallout from an exposed spy operation can be difficult, but the episode was considered particularly damaging. The number of American assets lost in China, officials said, rivaled those lost in the Soviet Union and Russia during the betrayals of both Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, formerly of the C.I.A. and the F.B.I., who divulged intelligence operations to Moscow for years. (New York Times, 5/20/2017)

“Judicial Watch announced today that the State Department provided a previously hidden email which shows that top State Department officials used and were aware of Hillary Clinton’s email account.

On December 24, 2010, Daniel Baer, an Obama State Department deputy assistant secretary of state, writes to Michael Posner, a then-assistant secretary of state about Clinton’s private email address:

Baer: “Be careful, you just gave the secretary’s personal email address to a bunch of folks …”

Posner answers: “Should I say don’t forward? Did not notice”

Baer responds: “Yeah-I just know that she guards it pretty closely”

Mr. Posner had forwarded Clinton’s email address, which was contained in an email sent to State Department senior leadership, about WikiLeaks.

It appears the State Department produced this email in 2016 in redacted form, blacking out Clinton’s personal email address and the discussion about Clinton’s wanting to keep her email address closely guarded.

Judicial Watch sought the email after a former top Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) State Department official testified to Judicial Watch about reviewing it between late 2013 and early 2014.

The testimony and the email production comes in discovery granted to Judicial Watch on the Clinton email issue in a FOIA lawsuit (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:14-cv-01242)). Clinton also faces potential questioning under oath in this lawsuit.

Despite a recent court order requiring production of the email, the DOJ and State Departments only produced it 10 days ago after Judicial Watch threatened to seek a court order to compel its production.

“Judicial Watch just caught the State Department and DOJ red-handed in another email cover-up – they all knew about the Clinton email account but covered up the smoking-gun email showing this guilty knowledge for years,” stated Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.” (Read more: Judicial Watch, 9/30/2019)