EmailGate: Hillary Ally Obtained Above-top-secret NSA Reports From Her ‘Unclassified’ Emails

As national security analyst John Schindler noted, Hillary’s email scandal – or “EmailGate” as he tongue-in-cheekily calls it – also raises serious questions about her commitment to keeping sensitive information out of the hands of well-connected supporters. Pointing to Sid Blumenthal, Schindler recounts how the notorious Clinton partisan seemed to come into possession of classified information that, by remarkable coincidence, appeared in the former Secretary of State’s emails:

“Which leads to a troubling matter: What the FBI did not mention in its big data dump on EmailGate.

As I told you in this column back in January, Hillary emails included very highly classified intelligence from NSA. In early June 2011, the secretary of state received a long email from her longtime friend and factotum Sid Blumenthal regarding Sudan. This was an astonishingly detailed assessment of high-level political and military machinations in that country, specifically inside information about coup plotting.

This explosive information was timely and deep in the weeds on Sudanese happenings. It’s difficult to see how Blumenthal—a lawyer and Washington fixer, no sort of Africa hand or James Bond—got his hands on such juicy intelligence. As I’ve noted, ‘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.’ How did Sid obtain this amazing scoop for Hillary?

If Hillary Clinton becomes our next president, we can be certain that her trusty sidekick Sid Blumenthal will have an important role in her White House.

Not to mention that, in terms of verbiage and format, Blumenthal’s email read exactly like classified NSA reporting, as anybody acquainted with our SIGINT would immediately recognize. As one veteran agency official told me back in January, Blumenthal’s email was NSA information with ‘at least 90 percent confidence.’

Which was no coincidence, since an NSA investigation subsequently determined that Blumenthal’s Sudan assessment was derived from their reporting—in some cases verbatim. As I reported in March, NSA concluded that Blumenthal’s Sudan report came from four different agency SIGINT reports, all classified Top Secret/SCI. Then it got worse:

At least one of those reports was issued under the GAMMA compartment, which is an NSA handling caveat that is applied to extraordinarily sensitive information (for instance, decrypted conversations between top foreign leadership, as this was). GAMMA is properly viewed as a SIGINT Special Access Program, or SAP, several of which Clinton compromised in another series of her ‘unclassified’ emails.

NSA had no doubt that Blumenthal somehow got his hands on some of their ‘crown jewels’ information. ‘It’s word-for-word, verbatim copying,’ an agency official of them explained. ‘In one case, an entire paragraph was lifted from an NSA report’ that was classified Top Secret/SCI. To add to the mystery, Sid emailed Hillary his ‘personal’ assessment on Sudan only hours after some of those classified NSA reports were issued.

Somehow Sid Blumenthal—who in 2011 was not working for the U.S. government in any capacity and had not held security clearances in a decade—was reading above-top-secret NSA reports just hours after they appeared in tightly restricted GAMMA channels.”

Source: Observer