www.zerohedge.com The State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security has finally finished sifting through millions of emails from Hillary Clinton’s controversial ‘basement server’ – many of which were classified, and/or blind-copied to a Gmail address bearing the name of a Chinese company according to intelligence community inspector general (ICIG) Frank Rucker.
While State Department investigators began contacting former officials around 18 months ago, the probe actually began under President Obama. In recent weeks, the State Department has contacted approximately 130 officials whose emails which went through Clinton’s special server have been retroactively classified and may now pose potential security violations, according to the Washington Post.
“This has nothing to do with who is in the White House,” said a senior State Department official. “This is about the time it took to go through millions of emails, which is about 3Âœ years.”
The flood of letters which began in August read “You have been identified as possibly bearing some culpability” regarding “security incidents,” according to the report.
The list of State officials being questioned includes prominent ambassadors and assistant secretaries of state responsible for U.S. policy in the Middle East, Europe and Central Asia. But it also includes dozens of current and former career bureaucrats who served as conduits for outside officials trying to get important messages to Clinton.
In most cases the bureaucrats and political appointees didnât send the emails directly to Clinton, but passed them to William Burns, who served as deputy secretary of state, or Jake Sullivan, the former director of policy planning at the State Department. Burns and Sullivan then forwarded the messages to Clintonâs private email. –WaPo
President Trump’s opponents will likely take WaPo‘s editorialized cue and accuse the president of targeting political adversaries – like the Obama administration did with the IRS. Note how WaPo is lying in order to bolster the new narrative behind the Clinton email revival – claiming that Trump “used multiple levers of his office to pressure the leader of Ukraine,” when the leader of Ukraine announced on Wednesday “Nobody pushed me” to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden – nor did he know about $400 million in US military aid Trump paused prior to a July 25 phone call.
To many of those under scrutiny, including some of the Democratic Partyâs top foreign policy experts, the recent flurry of activity surrounding the Clinton email case represents a new front on which the Trump administration could be accused of employing the powers of the executive branch against perceived political adversaries.
The existence of the probe follows revelations that the president used multiple levers of his office to pressure the leader of Ukraine to pursue investigations that Trump hoped would produce damaging information about Democrats, including potential presidential rival Joe Biden. –WaPo
So while the State Department said they are bound by law to adjudicate any violations, former Obama administration officials say the probe is a ‘remarkably aggressive crackdown.’Â