A top aide to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton found herself
in hot water in 2013 with the agency’s security and law enforcement arm
when she lost classified information while accompanying her boss on a
diplomatic trip to Moscow, an incident that the FBI revisited earlier
this year when it probed Clinton’s own problems handling sensitive data.
Monica Hanley, Clinton’s “
confidential assistant”
at the state department, was reprimanded and given “verbal counseling”
by Diplomatic Security after she left classified material behind in the
Moscow hotel, FBI documents show. The FBI spoke to Hanley, 35, in
January as a part of its investigation into Clinton’s handling of
top-secret and classified information when she was Secretary of State.
“Diplomatic Security takes exposure of classified
information very seriously,” said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy
research at the Center for Immigration Studies, who formerly worked for
the State Department. “Part of their job is to look for classified
material that people have left out. You can lose your security clearance
if you’re caught more than once, and that means you might lose your
job. It’s a big deal.”
During her trip with Clinton to Russia,
Hanley was given a “diplomatic pouch” that held Clinton’s briefing book and schedule
for her Russian trip. Hanley brought the pouch and its contents into
the Russian hotel suite, which she shared with Clinton, but she left
behind some of those classified documents, the FBI report revealed.
Diplomatic Security, which protects the Secretary of
State in the U.S. and abroad as well as high-ranking foreign dignitaries
and officials visiting the United States, found the classified document
in that suite during a routine sweep after Clinton and Hanley left the
hotel. Agents subsequently informed Hanley “the briefing book and
document should never have been in the suite.”
Despite having top secret clearance and being one of
just three people working for Clinton with access to the top-secret
communication room called a Sensitive Compartmented Information
Facility, or SCIF, in Clinton’s residences in Washington and New York,
Hanley had other lapses with State Department records.
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After Clinton’s longtime friend Sidney Blumenthal was
the target of an email hack in the spring of 2013, Clinton’s email
company, Platte River Network, advised Clinton to change her personal
email address, because he had been frequently corresponding with Clinton
and her aides. Because Clinton did not want to lose her old emails,
Hanley was given an extra Apple MacBook from President Bill Clinton’s
Harlem, N.Y., office, and directed to transfer over all four years of
Clinton’s emails. She completed the virtual process from her own
apartment, which she said took several days because of the volume.
Hanley made another backup of the emails on a thumb
drive, but the FBI report said that is lost. “Hanley also recalled
transferring the emails to a thumb drive but could not recall what
happened to the thumb drive,” the report stated.
The laptop remained in Hanley’s apartment. Hanley
moved at least once, and brought the MacBook with her to her new
apartment, but she never recovered the thumb drive, the FBI report said.
After Hanley left the State Department in 2014, she
realized she still had the laptop in her desk drawer, and she mailed it
back to Platte River Network with directions to migrate the emails back
to Clinton’s existing server and return the MacBook to Clinton’s current
aide.
When the FBI first contacted Hanley in November,
2015, to schedule an interview, she reached out to Clinton’s current
aide to ask for the whereabouts of the laptop, but the assistant told
Hanley “she did not recall receiving it from Platte River Network.” Also
missing were all of Clinton’s emails sent and received between January
and March 2009, the FBI report showed.
The entire Clinton team used unsecured BlackBerry
phones to communicate and Clinton also used her iPad to review email and
news reports. Several of Clinton’s old BlackBerry phones that Hanley
purchased also were not turned over to the FBI.
Justin Cooper, a longtime aide to Bill Clinton who
also played a key role in setting up Hillary Clinton's email system,
told FBI agents that he took Clinton’s discarded phones and would either
break them in half or smash them with a hammer but there was no
accounting of the number of phones discarded or where they were located.
While critics note Clinton’s hardware wasn’t
safeguarded, neither were her emails. When Clinton's server and email
system went down during a storm, Hanley created a gmail account for
Clinton to use while Clinton was in Croatia. Hanley, like other State
Department employees, often used unsecured private email accounts
instead of their State Department email, allegedly because the wireless
connection in the plane they traveled in didn’t sync with the State
Department account.
The Inspector General, who at the direction of
Congress, looked into whether Clinton and her team mishandled classified
information, referred the case to the FBI because it determined
classified and top secret documents were part of the record. The State
Department subsequently designated 22 of the messages from Clinton’s
account as “top secret,” which means they could cause “exceptionally
grave” damage to national security if they are disclosed.
But on July 5, FBI director James Comey announced
that the FBI had closed its investigation into Clinton’s use of a
personal email system during her time as Secretary of State without
recommending charges against anyone involved. The Attorney General
immediately accepted the FBI’s recommendation not to prosecute. The FBI
released 189 pages of its report on the investigation last Friday.
