Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta was included on an email thread warning against using personal addresses for handling “sensitive” information in 2008, but apparently kept the information he received in his personal Gmail account as late as this year.
The November 2008 emails were exchanged between members of President Obama’s transition team. They included future White House chief of staff Denis McDonough and Daniel Tarullo, who was appointed two months later to serve on the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors.
The Nov. 3 warning from McDonough came two days after Tarullo distributed a memo on financial and housing issues calling for actions that included “discreet, and generally noncommittal, consultations with foreign governments.”
McDonough replied, “I was struck by the memo partly because it was first I had heard of it but much more because it was a sensitive doc bumping around on public email addresses.
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“There is a very real threat to the security of our documents (particularly sensitive ones like the one you worked up), and we need to protect them by at least encrypting them,” McDonough wrote.
Tarullo expressed his surprise. “I had never heard anything like this from either the campaign or the pre-transition effort and, in fact, have been receiving things of equal or greater sensitivity for some time from both sources. You guys are presumably much more likely to be made aware of such issues, so when the economic side of the transition gets named, you should probably get in touch with them to give guidance on this.”
“I know I’m like a broken record on this, but I think we should arrange a briefing on the cyber threat for all associated with your effort,” McDonough wrote. “We have a real security threat on our stuff here. I would gladly work up something with our techie. We’ve developed a lot of expertise in this, unfortunately.”
Podesta retained both the memo and the exchange in his personal Gmail account. Several indicators have suggested the account was breached in March 2016, and more than 45,000 messages illegally obtained from Podesta’s inbox have been published by WikiLeaks over the last month.
