Some of President Barack Obama’s email was captured by Russian hackers last year when they breached the White House’s computer system, The New York Times reported Saturday night.

The fact that the hacking was widespread and had penetrated the White House was previously known. What wasn’t known until now was whether the hackers had obtained any emails from or to the president.

“There is no evidence that the president’s email account itself was hacked, White House officials said. Still, the fact that some of Obama’s communications were among those retrieved by hackers has been one of the most closely held findings of the inquiry,” the paper said.

But, there was no question that the hack represented a huge, likely unprecedented, blow to national security.

“This has been one of the most sophisticated actors we’ve seen,” one senior American official briefed on the investigation told the Times. The incident is being taken so seriously that officials met on a nearly daily basis for several weeks after it was discovered.

The hackers also penetrated deeply into the State Department’s unclassified system, the Times reported, but they don’t appear to have captured email off of highly secure classified servers. Whether they got email from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who is running for president, is not known. They also apparently did not penetrate the closely guarded servers that control the message traffic from Obama’s BlackBerry, which he or an aide carries constantly, according to the Times.

But they did get access to the email archives of people inside the White House, and perhaps some outside, with whom Obama regularly communicated. From those accounts, they reached emails that the president had sent and received, according to officials briefed on the investigation, the Times reported.

Being unclassified does not mean the system didn’t contain important, often secret information important to national security. One example: the president’s schedule. The system also contains schedules, email exchanges with “ambassadors and diplomats, discussions of pending personnel moves and legislation, and, inevitably, some debate about policy,” the Times reported.

http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/russian-hackers-get-obama/2015/04/25/id/640760/