The story of Hillary Clinton’s emails was already strange, but now it gets even more strange! Now we hear that “Guiccifer,” a notorious Romanian hacker, was extradited to the U.S.
The extradition is concerning for Hillary Clinton’s election 2016 campaign. An intelligence source close to the case said Guccifer’s extradition “is not a coincidence.” There could be grave consequences in store for Ms. Clinton.
The FBI’s criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email use was nearing the end, we thought. This development was a big surprise.
What could a notorious Romanian hacker possibly have to do with Hillary’s personal emails? The link is Clinton confidante Sidney Blumenthal.
Apparently Guccifer was able to access Mr. Blumenthal’s email account. Blumenthal frequently advised the former secretary of state. The official investigation turned up this piece of information, something we would never have known if the FBI had not been on the case. On Friday, The Washington Post revealed it had learned the new information was obtained through Ms. Clinton’s emails.
Guccifer’s real name is Marcel Lehel Lazar. This is a feather in the cap of law enforcement and cyber security experts assisting the investigation.
This is a big problem, not only for Hillary Clinton, but for anyone considering subverting the rules for their own purposes. There is now proof that her email server was compromised by a third party. And it wasn’t a foreign power, which was the original worry, it was an individual without the resources of an intelligence service such as Russia, China, North Korea or Iran. It is likely some or all of them were also trying to hack the private Clinton server.
Romania had already investigated, caught, tried and sentenced Guccifer. He was serving a seven-year sentence for hacking crimes committed there. He also apparently hacked Colin Powell’s website and email, including correspondence with CIA director, George Tennet and Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage. He also had emails from Senator Lisa Murkowski and members of the Rockerfeller family.
Romania handed Lazar over to U.S. authorities from a prison in Arad, Romania. Now he faces a nine-count federal indictment on computer hacking charges. He is expected to be in the U.S. for 18 months, Fox News reports.
The federal indictment runs to 15-pages. That indictment tells us that Lazar “specialized in gaining unauthorized access to the online accounts of high-profile individuals.” One of those high profile individuals was Sidney Blumenthal. The Clinton ally is identified as “Victim 5,” Blumenthal is “a journalist and former presidential advisor who was the true owner of an AOL account with sub-accounts known to the grand jury.”
This isn’t the first time we heard about the Blumenthal-Clinton email connection. In early 2013, there were investigations into the attack in Benghazi, Libya, that resulted in the deaths of four Americans. At that time, news outlets published excerpts of email exchanges between Blumenthal and Hillary Clinton about Libya. Those exchanges covered the time after the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack.
Guccifer had open access to those exchanges. Speaking to a Romanian reporter in 2015, while he was in prison, he said “I used to read Clinton’s memos for six or seven hours and then do the gardening.”
If that wasn’t embarrassing for Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration, which obviously knew about the use of the private server, the fact is that Lazar has no programming skills at all. He merely guessed the passwords of prominent public figures after reading their biographies.
What we obviously know now, and the Obama Administration knew all along, is that then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton deliberately chose to bypass the Department of State’s secure system, to utilize a private, unsecured server in her home and to use a private email address for her government business.
The first word that comes to mind is “Idiot.”
And Hillary Clinton thinks she can be president of the United States! She remains under federal criminal investigation by the FBI as her campaign for president continues.
The final phase of the probe began with the FBI arranging interviews with Clinton’s former staff and Hillary herself.
It will be interesting to discover whether any new information can be revealed about the Benghazi attacks in September, 2012 and White House assertions afterwards that the attack was triggered by a video?
Oh what a tangled web they weave!
