RUTHFULLY YOURS

Hackers linked to Vladimir Putin’s Russia tried to gain access to Hillary Clinton’s insecure private email account at least five times while the Democrat presidential candidate served as U.S. secretary of state.

The disturbing revelation comes months after retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn said the chances Clinton’s private email account was hacked were “very high.” At the time the former top Obama administration intelligence official implied Clinton should have been fired as the nation’s top diplomat.

“As a military officer, if I said I was doing something for convenience’s sake to the soldiers that I was leading and it was solely for my convenience instead of their, you know, their welfare, I should be relieved of duty. I would expect to be fired,” Flynn said.

“You know, it’s one of those things where if it doesn’t feel good it probably isn’t. And this one doesn’t feel good to me.”

“China, Russia, Iran, potentially the North Koreans,” were involved in hacking Clinton’s email.

Evidence of the Russian hacking attempts came in the form of Clinton emails from four years ago that were made public last week.

Clinton received the five infected emails which had been made to look like speeding tickets, over a four-hour period on Aug. 3, 2011.  The emails asked recipients to print out hard copies of the attached tickets, an act that would have let hackers take control of their computers.

As some observers have noted, foreign intelligence services pay good money to obtain a target’s email address.  Although it hasn’t been established that these Russian hackers worked for the Russian government, these criminals knew Hillary’s email address while information-technology experts at the State Department were left in the dark about the email address by their own boss.

It is unclear what if any anti-malware software was installed on Clinton’s server that she kept in the basement of one of her homes in Chappaqua, N.Y., not too far from a house owned by radical philanthropist and heavy Democrat donor George Soros.

Security experts who analyzed the malware-infected email in 2011 said that infected computers would send information from victims to at least three Internet servers outside the U.S., including one server in Russia.

Given Hillary’s technological incompetence and the cavalier approach to national security evidenced by her use of an insecure private “home brew” Internet server for her official State Department email, it’s anyone’s guess whether the nation’s then-top diplomat clicked on the malware-infected email attachments.

Remember that Clinton has worn her lack of tech-savvy as a badge of honor.  This is a supposedly smart person who needed instructions to use a fax machine, which isn’t exactly a new technology.

When she was asked previously if her Internet server, now in Department of Justice custody, had been wiped clean, she mocked the questioner. “Like with a cloth or something?”

“I don’t know how it works digitally at all,” she added.

Clinton also previously made an incredibly insensitive, tone-deaf joke making light of her email improprieties that compromised U.S. national security and for all we know may very well have gotten American operatives abroad or their allies killed.

At a dinner in Iowa, Clinton quipped: “By the way, you may have seen that I recently launched a Snapchat account,” she said gently shaking her head in an I’m-so-clever kind of way.

“I love it. I love it. Those messages disappear all by themselves,” she said grinning to hoots and hollers from the adoring crowd of Democrats.

As I wrote previously, this wisecrack crystallizes the Hillary Clinton approach to everything. She is manipulative and dishonest. She is irredeemably arrogant and regards herself as above the law. She is contemptuous of the critically important high office she held. She is disdainful of the rule of law and doesn’t give a farthing’s cuss about national security if it stands in the way of her personal advancement.

Although Mrs. Clinton has long maintained she never received or sent classified information through her hacker-friendly Internet server, mountains of messages have been found to contain classified “top secret” information.

As part of the State Department document dump of 6,300 additional page of Clinton’s emails last week, the agency upgraded the classification level of portions of 215 of Clinton’s emails, department spokesman John Kirby said.

Almost all of the emails were deemed “confidential,” the lowest level of classification. Three emails were changed to “secret,” a mid-tier level for information that if made public could still result in serious damage to U.S. national security.

“The information we upgraded today was not marked classified at the time the emails were sent,” Kirby said. “It has been subsequently upgraded.”

Many of the new released emails are from the period when the so-called Arab Spring erupted and Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces. The State Department aims to make public all the remaining emails by January.

With the first Democratic Party primary elections set for January, Hillary better hope something big happens in world news in coming months to take the focus off her various growing scandals.