Clinton aide Huma Abedin’s reaction to email hacking: ‘omg’
Top Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin was shocked to learn that a hacker tried to gain access to Clinton’s private email server while she was secretary of state — writing “omg” upon being alerted to the attempted intrusion, newly released FBI records show.
But Abedin waited nearly 24 hours after learning about the cyber attack before warning other key State Department staffers not to email “anything sensitive” to their boss, the records show.
A Jan. 9, 2011, email chain shows that Abedin was informed of the incident by Justin Cooper, a longtime aide to former President Bill Clinton who for a time had responsibility for the server inside the Clinton family home in Chappaqua, New York.
“I had to shut down the server,” Cooper wrote shortly before 3 a.m., according to the records.
“Someone was trying to hack us and while they did not get in i didnt want to let them have the chance to. I will restart in the morning.”
At 7:05 a.m, Abedin responded with a three-letter response: “omg.”
But it wasn’t until 6:30 a.m. on Jan. 10, 2011, that Abedin sounded the alarm in an email to Chief Staff Cheryl Mills and Director of Policy Planning Jacob Sullivan, the records show.
“Don’t email hrc anything sensitive. I can explain more in person,” Abedin wrote.
The emails were contained in 277 pages of documents that were added to the FBI’s online “vault” of public information within the past three days, according to the Daily Mail, which first reported their release.
The trove of records also contains five pages of hand-written notes summarizing a March 2, 2016, FBI interview of Cooper, who had neither a government security clearance nor expertise in cyber-security.
Cooper described how Clinton had a secure room known as “SCIF” — an acronym for sensitive compartmented information facility — in both her Chappaqua home and another in Washington DC.
Clinton’s server was located in the basement of the Chappaqua home, but the notes of Cooper’s interview suggest extremely lax security for both SCIFs.
“Open door — not always secured, sometimes when HRC not @ residence was not closed. (both resid,” the notes say.
“No understanding of when open/closed.”
The notes also say there were safes in the SCIFs, along with home computers and “no secure computers.”
In 2016, records released by the FBI infamously revealed that Cooper admitted he twice “destroyed Clinton’s old mobile devices by breaking them in half or hitting them with a hammer.”
Gloss