Report: Huma Abedin Email Includes Classified Intel From 3 Agencies
(Newsmax) – There was one email found among those on Hillary Clinton’s server that was sent from her aide Huma Abedin that included classified information from three different federal agencies, Fox News is reporting.
That email is what caused the FBI to launch its investigation into Clinton’s server, Fox News learned. The email was sent in April 2011 and included classified intelligence from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA).
This is a violation of an executive order signed by President Barack Obama in 2009, which defines rules for “classifying, safeguarding and declassifying national security information.” It specifically says that only the intelligence agency where the classified information was sent is able to declassify it.
However, the State Department released the email in May as part of the documents relating to the 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
The three agencies confirmed with the inspector general that is tasked with probing the intelligence community that when that intelligence was sent by Abedin to Clinton’s private email account that it was indeed classified and that it still is.
The Clinton campaign has said that the email on the private server kept at Clinton’s home is not classified and that whether or not something is classified is a matter of opinion.
“What you’re seeing now is a disagreement between agencies saying, ‘You know what, they should’ve.’ And the other saying, ‘No they shouldn’t.’ That has nothing to do with me,” Clinton said last week.
Last Wednesday, State Department spokesman John Kirby said that the federal agency is getting a second opinion on the status of the emails’ classification from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
“We’ve asked the Director of National Intelligence for another assessment of those two, the two that the ICIG had determined should have been classified – or at least portions of which should have been classified top secret. So we’ve asked the DNI to look at that and we’ll see what happens,” Kirby said.
However, a source told Fox News that once an agency determines that something is classified that it is “non-negotiable,” and there is no appeals process in place.
Fox News is also reporting that the Under Secretary Patrick Kennedy, who was involved in the controversy surrounding the Benghazi attack, is running interference on Capitol Hill regarding the email controversy.
Kennedy reportedly visited lawmakers in July and argued that the Abedin email along with another one sent in 2012 by another Clinton aide, Jake Sullivan, are not classified. The under secretary argued that the information in the emails was already public.
However, one source said that it was odd that Kennedy wanted to discuss the matter in a secure facility for classified information, or a SCIF, while arguing that the Abedin email was not classified.
The source also said that Kennedy cited a report from the Irish Times in 2011 as evidence, but that the details were not comparable. Kennedy also said that someone from the CIA agreed with his conclusion. But Fox notes that the CIA was not the agency that sent the email.
http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/huma-abedin-email-report-classified/2015/08/26/id/672026/
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