EXCERPT / Josh Gerstein, Politico / 08/25/15
Hillary Clinton’s personal attorney David Kendall says he had a “top secret” security clearance granted by the State Department in order to review information related to the House Benghazi investigation, but a senior Republican senator insists that clearance didn’t give the lawyer authority to hold Clinton’s most sensitive emails.
For weeks, Republican lawmakers such as Senate Judiciary Committee Chuck Grassley have raised questions and demanded information about Kendall’s authority to access portions of Hillary Clinton’s emails that the State Department has determined are classified. State officials previously confirmed that Clinton’s attorneys had a clearance but did not name the lawyers.
In a new letter to Grassley, Kendall says he got a Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information clearance from the Justice Department in November 2013 and a Top Secret clearance from the State Department about a year later.
Kendall says his Williams & Connolly law partner, Katherine Turner, also got a Top Secret clearance from State in December 2014. “These State Department security clearances remain active. We obtained them in order to be able to review documents at the Department of State, to assist former Secretary Clinton in preparing to testify before the House Select Committee on Benghazi,” Kendall wrote.
Kendall's letter adds more detail to public knowledge about the clearances for Clinton’s lawyers, but it is unlikely to silence complaints from Clinton’s critics about mishandled classified information. Clearances, especially Top Secret ones, are normally granted in connection with specific matters and do not entitle recipients to all information classified at that level, absent an agency’s determination that an individual has a “need to know.”
Kendall called issuance of the State Department clearances “unrelated” to the roughly 30,000 emails Clinton turned over to her former agency from her personal server and account last December. “As I am sure you are aware, it was not until nearly six months later, that the first email in this group was retroactively classified as ‘Secret,’” Kendall wrote.
In a letter Tuesday to Secretary of State John Kerry, Grassley said Kendall’s clearance was inadequate because the intelligence community recently determined that at least two messages on Clinton’s server contained information classified at the “TS/SCI” level. The State Department disputes those classifications and has requested a review by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
“Neither Mr. Kendall nor Ms. Turner have a security clearance at a sufficient level to be a custodian of TS/SCI material. Thus, it appears Secretary Clinton sent TS/SCI material to unauthorized persons,” Grassley wrote. On Tuesday, the senator’s office released his letter as well as Kendall’s.
MORE AT http://www.politico.com/story/2015/08/hillary-clinton-lawyer-top-secret-clearance-121736
Kendall was writing this in August 2015 - same month the FBI now reports that the hacking of the DNC computer system started and the DNC refused to allow the FBI access to investigate the hacking.
The Dems desperately want to pin it on the Russians which is possible but maybe they knew the hacker and the hacker’s real job was to clean up/plant/remove evidence on their behalf as well as give Hillary plausible deniability if the data manipulation was discovered by the FBI. “Us? Lil ol us? No, WE did not destroy evidence, WE were the victims. The Russians did it.” And the hackers did a few halfhearted attempts on the GOP system to insure the cleanup/hacking would not be connected to the actual scandal.