Security Protocols Were Disabled on Hillary Clinton's Server

“We were attacked again so I shut it down for a few min."

6.23.2016

IT staffers at the State Department disabled security features on Hillary Clinton's email server in 2010 due to difficulties sending and receiving emails.

Anti-virus software was turned off after Clinton and aide Huma Adebin experienced problems sending emails, it was revealed Wednesday in documents released under court order to Judicial Watch, the conservative advocacy group suing the State Department for access to public records from Clinton’s tenure as secretary.

State staffers were desperate to resolve the problem, according to their own emails to each other.

“This should trump all other activities,” a senior technical official, Ken LaVolpe, told IT employees in a Dec. 17, 2010, e-mail.

Some staffers warned of the dangers involved with disabling the security features: “We view this as a Band-Aid and fear it’s not 100 percent fully effective,” Thomas W. Lawrence cautioned.

Mere weeks after the security features were removed, another aide had to shut down the system out of fear the server was being hacked. “We were attacked again so I shut it down for a few min," he wrote.

That's comforting.