Hillary pollster sued for sneaking on e-mail

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s chief strategist is being accused of illegal eavesdropping in a civil lawsuit that alleges he and his polling firm monitored the personal e-mails of a former associate who started a rival company.

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s chief strategist is being accused of illegal eavesdropping in a civil lawsuit that alleges he and his polling firm monitored the personal e-mails of a former associate who started a rival company.

Mitchell E Markel, a former vice-president at polling firm Penn, Schoen & Berland, claims in the suit that the firm began monitoring all messages sent from his personal Blackberry device nearly a month after he resigned and become president of his new business.

The suit claims the founder of the firm, Mark Penn, who is Clinton’s strategist, knew and approved of the monitoring, which the suit says violates federal wiretapping laws.

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Penn, Schoen & Berland, a firm that has helped elect clients like former president Clinton and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, is accused of hacking into Markel’s Blackberry and rigging his e-mail accounts to send blind carbon copies of his e-mails to another account it had set up.

The suit says the Blackberry Markel used was always his own, never the property of his former employer. “Through this unlawful interception scheme, defendants clandestinely received confidential and proprietary information of Markel’s company… including pricing, strategy…,” the suit says.

Howard Rubin, an attorney for Penn, Schoen & Berland, disputed the claim that the e-mails were private or that the firm engaged in unauthorised monitoring.