A tense standoff between Sudanese forces and South Sudanese militants over an oil-rich border region appears to have been the subject of a set of possibly-classified talking points that Hillary Clinton asked her foreign policy adviser, Jake Sullivan, to strip of their headers and send to her via “nonsecure” means.
Clinton’s request, which she made in a June 17, 2011 email, has touched off a debate over whether she violated federal law by ordering Sullivan to send the sensitive information — which he intended to send via secure fax — to the then-secretary of state’s personal email account.
Clinton herself downplayed the email during an interview on CBS on Sunday. But the Democratic presidential candidate stopped short of denying that the talking points contained classified information. And the State Department has said that it is not sure if the talking points contained classified information. The agency searched Clinton’s emails for a follow-up message from Sullivan but did not find such a record. (RELATED: Bob Woodward: Hillary’s Latest Email Flap Shows She Wanted To ‘Subvert The Rules’)
But a review of email traffic from Clinton and her top aides conducted by The Daily Caller suggests that the talking points that Clinton sought did not involve a mere mundane matter. They likely did not contain information about yoga routines, recipes, or her daughter Chelsea’s wedding — email topics Clinton has cited in the past to portray her email exchanges as boring and uneventful.
Instead, she appears to have been negotiating with leaders in Sudan and South Sudan to settle a dispute over the oil-rich Abyei border region of the disputed South Kordofan territory.
On May 19, 2011, rebels affiliated with South Sudan’s rebel forces, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), reportedly attacked a convoy made up of Sudan president Omar al-Bashir’s Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and members of the United Nations Mission in Sudan.
Al-Bashir sent additional troops to the region the next day touching off a month-long standoff that threatened to delay South Sudan’s plans for independence, which were planned for the next month.
The State Department, African Union, and United Nations intervened to negotiate a resolution to the standoff.
The sensitive nature of the crisis was underscored by one June 15 email Princeton Lyman, the special envoy to Sudan, sent to a group of State Department officials, including Sullivan, apprising them of developments in the region. The bulk of the email is classified as confidential. It is unclear if any of that information was included in the talking points Sullivan was preparing for Clinton.
On June 16, Sullivan emailed Clinton: “Still inching toward an Abyei deal.”
He also stated that State Department staff were asking that Clinton might call both Salva Kiir, South Sudan’s vice president at the time and a leader of the SPLA, and Nafie al Nafie, al-Bashir’s assistant.
As Clinton’s email traffic shows, at 5:51 p.m. on June 16, 2011 Sullivan forwarded Clinton an email from Matthew Spence, who then worked at the National Security Council. The email is redacted, but Sullivan added a note to Clinton telling her, “you’ll get tps this eve.”
“Tps” is a reference to talking points.
Clinton emailed Sullivan at 7:52 a.m. the next morning, “I didn’t get the TPs yet.”
Sullivan responded eight minutes later to say that he was checking on them. At 8:17 a.m. he wrote: “They say they’ve had issues sending secure fax. They’re working on it.”
That’s when Clinton ordered him to do something that may be a violation of federal law. (RELATED: Bombshell Emails Shows Hillary Instructed Adviser To Strip Markings From Sensitive Talking Points)
“If they can’t, turn into nonpaper w no identifying heading and send nonsecure,” she wrote at 8:21 a.m. Some observers have maintained that Clinton’s order violated 18 USC 793, a federal statute which makes it illegal to cause classified information to be improperly transferred.
Other email traffic shows that Clinton was seeking the talking points just minutes before she was scheduled to talk to Salva Kiir.
“And kiir is now locked for 830 am,” one Clinton aide wrote.
Sudan and South Sudan announced a cease-fire on June 21 and promised to pull forces out of the disputed region. South Sudan achieved its independence the next month, as scheduled.
Other observers have theorized that the talking points pertained to calls Clinton had scheduled on the day in question with Maryland Sen. Ben Cardin or Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov. But emails show that Clinton’s scheduler told her that her call with Lavrov was “locked in” for 8 a.m., before she asked Sullivan for the talking points. Other emails show that Clinton was still trying to reach Cardin later in the day.
TheDC has not officially confirmed that the talking points related to Sudan, but the clues point in the direction of Sudan. Neither Matthew Spence, now an official with the Defense Department, Jake Sullivan, nor the State Department responded to questions sent over the weekend about the subject-matter of the talking points.
If, as it appears to be the case, Clinton sought talking points for her conversation with Kiir, it is likely that the two covered extremely sensitive and secretive information that was not public at the time.
On June 8, 2011, Clinton’s longtime friend and off-the-books intelligence provider, Sidney Blumenthal, sent her a memo entitled “Sudan intel.”
The document, which Blumenthal labeled “confidential,” made an explosive allegation — that al-Bashir’s regime had partnered with two leaders within the SPLA — Gen. Peter Gadet and Gen. George Athor — to stage an attack in South Kordofan in order to justify entering the disputed oil-rich territory.
“According to these very sensitive sources, the fighting in Abyei in mid-May 2011 came after SPLA dissidents, under the influence of the SAF staged operations against representatives of the Khartoum government, giving Bashir a reason to send between 500 and 1,000 SAF troops to the region,” Blumenthal wrote.
SPLA forces, led by Salva Kiir, reacted to that deception “by ambushing” al-Bashir’s forces later in May, killing 22 soldiers, according to Blumenthal.
“Bashir then used this attack as an excuse to overturn the Abyei Protocol of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), sending in up to 5,000 troops to take control of the district,” Blumenthal stated.
Clinton forwarded the memo to Sullivan, asking “Did you share this info?”
To Blumenthal, she responded “Problems everywhere! Thx.”
One mutual friend of Blumenthal and Clinton is Joseph Wilson, who served as ambassador to Gabon and São Tomé and Príncipe during the Bill Clinton White House.
A contributor to the Clinton Foundation and an endorser of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, Wilson had business contacts all over Africa, including Sudan. He was brought on as vice chairman of Jarch Capital Management in Jan. 2007. The New York-based investment firm specializes in natural resources investments, especially in war-torn African nations. The company had business interests in South Sudan, where it was seeking to tap the oil reserves there.
In Dec. 2007, Peter Gadet, the SPLA general who partnered in secret with al-Bashir’s army, was brought on as an adviser for Jarch.
Blumenthal’s memo presents another potential security problem for Clinton, according to former National Security Agency analyst John Schindler.
In an article for the Observer, Schindler first drew attention to the Blumenthal memo. Based on his knowledge of NSA intelligence and syntax, Schindler says he believes that Blumenthal’s report may have contained what is called SIGINT, or signals intelligence, which is gathered by intercepting phone calls, emails, etc. According to Schindler, Blumenthal may have gleaned his information from the National Security Agency, whose information is classified because of its highly sensitive nature.