Did Russia read Hillary Clinton's emails? Robert Gates says the odds are 'pretty high.'

Clinton email account was hacked by Russia, other countries.

(Image credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

published 22 January 2016

The personal email account Hillary Clinton used for business purposes during her tenure as secretary of state was almost certainly hacked by countries like Russia or Iran, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday.

"One of your colleagues, Mike Morell, said on this program, or actually agreed with my assertion that almost certainly, Russians, Chinese and Iranians had compromised the home brew server of the former secretary of state," radio host Hugh Hewitt said. Gates, who served under Presidents Obama and George W. Bush, said he agreed with that assessment, adding that "the odds are pretty high" that Clinton's communications were accessed by unfriendly nations.

Gates' remarks come on the heels of the revelation that Clinton's private system processed information "of a higher level of classification than 'top secret'" which was never supposed to leave secure government servers.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.