A Russian spy was moving closer to Hillary Clinton as she began serving as Barack Obama's secretary of state before the FBI shut down the spy ring in 2010, The Hill reported exclusively on Sunday.
Spy-turned-model Anna Chapman made most of the headlines when the Russian spy ring was busted back then, but another female spy named Cynthia Murphy posing as an American accountant also attracted a great deal of FBI attention for trying to access Clinton's inner circle, according to The Hill's report.
Murphy and Chapman were part of the same sleeper spy ring that spent a "great deal of time collecting information and passing it on" to their handlers inside Russia’s SVR spy agency, according to FBI records, per The Hill.
"This group was well on their way to penetrating foreign policy circles," then-FBI counter intelligence assistant director Frank Figliuzzi told ABC News in 2011. "They had befriended a friend of a sitting Cabinet official. They wanted to get their hands on the most sensitive data they could get their hands on, but we took this thing down before classified information changed hands."
That Cabinet official appeared to be Clinton, according to FBI documents quoted in The Hill's story. Murphy, who was living with her husband and children in New Jersey, reported to her handlers via an electronic message in February 2009 that she had access to a major Democrat, FBI records said, per The Hill.
"Murphy had several work-related personal meetings with (a prominent New York-based financier, name omitted) and was assigned his account," one FBI record from the case read, per The Hill. "The message accurately described the financier as 'prominent in politics,' 'an active fund-raiser' for (a major political party, name omitted) and a 'personal friend' of (a current Cabinet official, name redacted)."
Figliuzzi, who is now retired, told The Hill that Murphy could not risk getting a State Department job because of its vetting, so she sought a private sector job where "she could get next to people who had the jobs who could get the information she wanted from State."
By 2010, Figliuzzi told The Hill, Murphy had gotten close enough to the department to pose a security concern to Clinton and there was fear that Chapman could flee country, leading to the decision to shut down the ring.
"In regards to the woman known as Cynthia Murphy, she was getting close to Alan (Patricof, a New York financier) and the lobbying job," Figliuzzi told The Hill. "And we thought this was too close to Hillary Clinton. So when you have the totality of the circumstance, and we were confident we had the whole cell identified, we decided it was time to shut down their operations."
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