House Science, Space, and Technology Committee chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) has ordered three information technology companies to provide written material about components they supplied for Hillary Clinton’s private email server. Letters dated 22 August were sent to the CEOs of Datto, SECNAP Network Security, and Platte River Networks. Smith included in them subpoenas for documents concerning data backup, threat assessment, and other products “to understand the policy consequences of Secretary Clinton’s use of a private server and email account.”
Lamar Smith (R-TX) and Ron Johnson (R-WI)
Smith was joined in signing the letters by Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. The congressmen questioned whether the security of Clinton’s private email server as secretary of state met cybersecurity standards prescribed by NIST, an agency over which the Science Committee has jurisdiction.
The Office of Management and Budget requires nonnational security federal information systems to incorporate NIST’s cybersecurity, but it is unclear whether Clinton’s server was considered a national security system. According to James St. Pierre, deputy director of NIST’s information technology laboratory, NIST resources help agencies decide whether their systems are related to national security, but the agencies must make their own determinations. A State Department official said the agency can’t speak to the security of the server because it was personal and thus not managed by the federal government.
The subpoenas order the three CEOs to furnish requested documents by 9 September. “The companies have direct and unique knowledge of her private server and email account,” Johnson said in a statement. A Science Committee spokesperson said the panel “is looking to gain more information in this effort to make a better assessment as to whether there was any fault from the companies.”
Although the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s probe of the server, which did not result in criminal charges, “is instructive for the Committees’ examination, it does not substitute for the Committees’ fact-finding,” the two lawmakers wrote in the letters. They added that “this effort, undertaken concurrently with a federal criminal investigation [by the FBI], has a different focus than the criminal inquiry and derives from different authority.”
But in a 22 August letter to Smith and Johnson, Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX) and Senator Thomas Carper (D-DE), the ranking minority members of the two committees, said the three companies had already turned over “all relevant information” to the FBI and made their employees available for interviews with the bureau. The letter asserted that the firms had provided services to Clinton only after she left her position as secretary. “Sadly, it appears that your investigations have less to do with legitimate oversight and more to do with trying to damage a presidential candidate in the heat of an election season,” the two lawmakers wrote. They also claimed that confidential information that was voluntarily provided by one of the companies to Sen. Johnson’s staff had been made public.
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