The Hill article titled Russian hackers stole DNC’s research on Trump reveals that, “Two separate Russian government hacking groups that did not appear to be working together infiltrated the DNC’s systems.”  “… hackers also targeted the campaigns of Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee; and Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee; as well as several GOP political action committees.”

But according to the Associated Press article titled Russian hackers breached Democratic Party’s computers, “Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state raised questions of how well her personal system was protected from intrusions; her campaign has said there’s no evidence it was breached.” [emphasis ours]

Unquestionably the Clinton private email server was targeted.   Unquestionably Clinton ordered that some and maybe all its content was erased; better yet from her viewpoint if it had been securely wiped.

Clinton is not stupid.  It seems reasonable that her effort to delete information on the server was to have also hidden  any evidence of a hostile breach as well.  The absence of evidence of hostile penetration bolsters her case which first professed there was no classified information on the server.  Evidence of hostile penetration increases the likelihood that valuable intelligence had been gleaned from her email traffic.

It is a fallacy that only classified information has value.  Open-source information, unclassified information, that reveals thought processes, personal weaknesses, chronic illnesses, behavioral disorders, medications, and personal desires and failures can often be of as much value as information with seemingly stratospheric classifications and compartments.

Some of our earlier posts on the Clinton email server issue explained the importance of the damage assessment being conducted by the Intelligence Community.

As much as Hillary Clinton hopes that little or none of the classified and compartmented information on her unlawful private email server will be retrieved by the Intelligence Community investigators, she also hopes that any evidence of outside penetration by other nations’ intelligence services will have been obliterated by her actions.  That’s part of the plan to conceal the damage her illegal use of the private email server has done to national security.  She hopes …