Trump Claims China Hacked Hillary Clinton's Email Server, Mocks Russian Involvement

UPDATE: 3.50 a.m. EDT - China’s Foreign Ministry has responded to Trump’s claims that it hacked Clinton's email by saying the allegations are "nothing new." During a daily news briefing in Beijing, Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said China is a champion of cybersecurity and it opposes all forms of hacking attacks, Reuters reported.

Original story:

President Donald Trump on Tuesday night tweeted about an alleged hacking of Hillary Clinton’s email server by China and mocked Russia's involvement in it. He called it “a very big story” as the correspondence contained classified information. The president, however, did not provide any evidence.

“Report just out: “China hacked Hillary Clinton’s private Email Server.” Are they sure it wasn’t Russia (just kidding!)? What are the odds that the FBI and DOJ are right on top of this? Actually, a very big story. Much classified information! ” he tweeted.

In 2015, Clinton admitted to using unsecured private server and email accounts for official business during her tenure as secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.

A report Tuesday claimed that a Chinese company hacked Clinton’s emails and managed to forward them to a third party in real time. During his presidential campaign in 2016, Trump said he hoped Russia would find the thousands of missing emails from Clinton’s server.

According to the report published by the Daily Caller, the Washington D.C.-based Chinese company was able to insert a code into the former Democratic presidential candidate’s private email server's programming and make copies of the emails. Officials from the Intelligence Community Inspector General's (ICIG) office found that all her emails were forwarded to a “foreign entity.”

These claims were first made by Rep. Louie Gohmert, a Texas Republican, at a July 12 House Committee on the judiciary hearing of Clinton email investigation. Though he did not reveal the identity of the entity, he said it was unrelated to Russia.

According to a former intelligence officer, who was briefed on the matter, two officials with the ICIG, identified as investigator Frank Rucker and lawyer Janette McMillan, met FBI agents repeatedly and warned them about the Chinese intrusion.

Among the FBI officials was Peter Strzok, who was fired earlier this month after he was discovered sending anti-Trump texts to his co-worker Lisa Page.

Gohmert said in July that ICIG officials told Strzok and three other top FBI officials about finding an “anomaly” on Clinton’s email server but to no avail. The former intelligence officer too confirmed the claims saying ICIG “discovered the anomaly pretty early in 2015.”

“When the ICIG did a very deep dive, they found in the actual metadata — the data which is at the header and footer of all the emails — that a copy, a ‘courtesy copy,’ was being sent to a third party and that third party was a known Chinese public company that was involved in collecting intelligence for China,” the former intelligence officer said.

“The ICIG believe that there was some level of phishing. But once they got into the server something was embedded,” he said. “The Chinese are notorious for embedding little surprises like this.”

He, however, declined to name the company and said, “We do know the name of the company. There are indications there are other ‘cutouts’ that were involved. I would be in a lot of trouble if I gave you the name.”