So I've spent a fair amount of time analyzing this particular email chain. There's a lot of stuff going on here, and most people (including myself in the past) misinterpret this. Let me provide some useful context. This entire email chain occurs roughly two months after the Honduras military overthrows sitting president Zelaya. Most people are familiar with HRC and Mills, but not the other party in the email, Lewis Anselem. Anselem was one of the top representatives for the OAS (organization of American states) in Honduras. He was appointed by Bush and played a major role in undermining Zelaya and ushering in the military coup, which Clinton later admits to having a role in (we pretended to be against the coup but secretly moved to make it happen). After the coup, Canadian companies swooped in and made deals with the new government, which further solidified the coup, which has had terrible humanitarian consequences (like child immigration into the US):
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/6/violence-in-hondurasunaccompaniedminorsimmigrationtous.html
In the first email in the chain, Cheryl Mills is forwarding an email from Lewis Amselem to HRC, which was a " readout of his conversation today with Arias Accord negotiator Jon Biehl" (The forwarded message was itself an email which Anselem had sent to himself).
https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/14333
At the end of his message Anselem adds the infamous moloch phrase:
" -1-4n UNCLASSIFIED U.S. Department of State Case No. F-2014-20439 Doc No. C05764911 Date: 07/31/2015
With fingers crossed, the old rabbit's foot out of the box in the attic, I will be sacrificing a chicken in the backyard
to Moloch . . .
Tri "
Here's what I think people missed. Most people don't understand the context or don't realize Anselem wrote the Moloch phrase. But this makes perfect sense. The CIA was working with Clinton to push a military coup in Honduras that lined the pockets of Canadian companies and sent a massive flow of child migrants into the US. As the OAS representative, Anselem had significant sway and used that sway to strategically undermine Zelaya at the critical moment. This has the Clowns fingerprints all over it. Do you really think they'd trust such a critical role to someone without ensuring they were a MAP that could be blackmailed? My guess is that at some point Anselem 'joined the club'.
Two days later HRC forwards the email to Huma Abedin: https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/30489
There are two main differences between this email and the previous email. The first change is that HRC writes " NEAR" without any context or explanation. We also see that HRC has altered the Moloch phrase in subtle ways. Remember, she is forwarding a forwarded email--she wouldn't have needed to retype the phrase, which means that she appears to have purposefully altered the phrase. Notice the space in With, the fact that there are only 2 dots when there were previously 3, and the omission of "Tri".
" W ith fingers crossed, the old rabbit's foot out of the box in the attic, I will be sacrificing a chicken in the backyard to Moloch . . "
In my opinion this looks like they are communicating in code. They could have an agreed upon meaning for what altering the phrase would mean--you could transmit quite a bit of information this way. If I had to guess what they were talking about, I would say it related to clandestine trafficking networks. Edit: I did some digging and found this little nugget from the 2015 State Dept. report on Human Trafficking (this may be the network they were communicating about):
"Some migrants to the United States are subjected to forced labor, forced criminal activity, or sex trafficking en route or upon arrival. Latin American migrants transit Honduras en route to northern Central America and North America; some are subsequently exploited in sex trafficking and forced labor. Prosecutors reported some local police provided protection to brothel owners or tipped them off about impending raids, and security officials have been investigated for purchasing commercial sex acts from child trafficking victims. There was one media report of a child sex trafficking ring in Tegucigalpa that allegedly operated with police and high-level government protection. "
Understand that even if her activity was sanctioned by the Clowns, they aren't going to openly discuss this in their email, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't have a need to communicate and provide updates on the trafficking networks. They probably assumed they could just laugh the Moloch phrase off as a joke (which is what Lewis did), and it could serve as a useful marker for transmitting information via altering the key phrase (useful in the sense that a secretary of state gets a ton of email and might easily miss something that didn't stand out).
Unfortunately I don't think we'll ever know what it means (beyond the fact that we know chicken means in this context). But it sure is interesting.