Retired Gen. Michael Hayden, who has run the nation's spy agencies in the past, said Wednesday he would have "moved heaven and Earth" to get his hands on the emails of a foreign minister had that person used a private server like Hillary Clinton did while she was secretary of state.
"What would I have done as the director of the NSA against a foreign minister who had done that?" the former National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency director told
MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program.
"I'd move heaven and Earth to access the private email account of a foreign minister, and I'd really go after an email account in which the official and the unofficial emails were co-mingled. You put a very juicy target out there."
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The news that the Denver-based company that maintained Clinton's "home-brew" private email account was a
"mom and pop shop" was especially stunning, said Hayden, considering the sensitive nature of the Clinton files, said Hayden.
The Daily Mail revealed this week that the company, Platte River Networks, until recently operated its business from a converted loft apartment where servers were housed in a bathroom closet.
Hayden said Wednesday it would not have been difficult for spies, NSA or otherwise, to access the server.
"They do this all the time against better defended targets than we saw in the loft in the apartment in Denver," said Hayden.
But the "fundamental sin," said Hayden, wasn't only the use of a private server, but the decision itself to allow Clinton to co-mingle her personal, private emails with her government accounts.
"There's a big gray area that exists even in the unclassified government email accounts," said Hayden. "But you're firewalled against most wrongdoing there by the fact you're using a government account that has some protections to it."
But once you remove the protections afforded by the government system, communications are wide open, said Hayden, and he's "stunned that her staff allowed her to do that in 2009, given the unhappy outcome that this guaranteed, once you started doing that."
Even without worrying about the legal implications, he continued, the actions were "stupid and dangerous" to "her, to the Republic, and to American secrets, but I don't even think it was legal."
Hayden pointed out that he did not have a smartphone himself until he left government "because of the sensitivity of the information I would put on there, even if it were unclassified."
And to a foreign intelligence agency, the emails would have been "attractive targets," but a government server would have protected even what Clinton believed to be "unclassified emails, rather than this role of the dice for some private company."
Further, Clinton has asserted that none of the emails she sent were marked classified, but Hayden said that as a public figure, "when you are using an unclassified forum, you have got to filter what it is you say."
"She created an environment in which people could only communicate with her through this one medium," said Hayden, adding that he also cannot back Clinton's claims that other secretaries had used private emails as well.
"The fact of the matter is, when we first learned of the private server, that was incomprehensible for anybody with my kind of background in government," said Hayden.
But even though the server that has been surrendered has been "wiped" clean of information, Hayden said that there are many circumstances in which the data can be restored.
"The NSA has gone after servers that have been captured in raids overseas that the target thought it was wiped, and the NSA has been able to retrieve the data," said Hayden.
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