State Dept.: No reason to believe alleged Clinton hacker
The State Department on Thursday said it could not verify claims by a Romanian hacker who said he broke into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private server.
“We don’t have any reason to believe that it might be true,” spokesman Mark Toner told reporters, declining to comment further on the hacker’s claims.
{mosads}“I’m going to refrain from comment specifically on an issue that is being looked at and investigated by other entities.”
On Wednesday, the hacker “Guccifer” told Fox News and NBC he had easily accessed Clinton’s personal server at her New York home after breaking into the email of her longtime ally Sidney Blumenthal.
“For me, it was easy,” he bragged to Fox from a Virginia jail where he is being held on other charges. The hacker, whose real name is Marcel Lehel Lazar, was extradited to the U.S. from Romania earlier this year.
The Democratic front-runner’s presidential campaign swiftly denied his claims Wednesday, saying there was “absolutely no basis to believe” them.
“It is unfathomable that he would have gained access to her emails and not leaked them the way he did to his other victims,” it added.
It’s unclear whether the State Department would be aware if Clinton’s machine had been broken into. Multiple officials have claimed they were unaware of her setup, which was maintained at her home throughout her tenure as the nation’s top diplomat.
Clinton’s server is currently at the center of an investigation by the FBI and federal inspectors general as to whether she or anyone else at the department mishandled classified information.
Separately, a judge earlier this week gave the go-ahead for a conservative watchdog organization to begin taking depositions in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit about the server. Clinton has not yet been called to answer questions under oath in that lawsuit, though she may be in the future.
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