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Was Hillary Clinton’s Email Hacked? The Case
If you were Vladimir Putin, or President Xi of China, what would you do if you had the entire archive of Hillary Clinton’s emails, classified and unclassified, “deleted” and not, in your hands? What value to you would that be in your next round of negotiations with the president of the United States?
Unencrypted Email
Hillary Clinton traveled to 19 foreign locations during her first three months in office, inlcuding China, South Korea, Egypt, Israel, Palestine, and a meeting in Switzerland with her Russian counterpart. During that period of time her email system was unencrypted. She transmitted data over wireless networks in those countries, networks almost certainly already monitored 24/7 by intelligence and security officials. To say her email was not collected is to say the Russian, Chinese, Israeli and other intelligence services are complete amateurs.
They are not complete amateurs.
A System Wide Open to MonitoringWhile FBI director James Comey said his investigators had no “direct evidence” that Hillary Clinton’s email account had been “successfully hacked,” both private experts and federal investigators, according to the New York Times, “immediately understood his meaning: It very likely had been breached, but the intruders were far too skilled to leave evidence of their work.”
Comey described a set of email practices that left Clinton’s systems wide open to monitoring. She had no full-time cyber security professional monitoring her system. She took her BlackBerry everywhere she went, “sending and receiving work-related emails in the territory of sophisticated adversaries.” Her use of “a personal email domain was both known by a large number of people and readily apparent… Hostile actors gained access to the private commercial email accounts of people with whom Secretary Clinton was in regular contact.”
The FBI director was generous in his assessment. See, no hacking was really necessary.
But No Hacking was Really NeededOnline security company Venafi TrustNet has the world’s largest database of digital certificates and associated metadata, allowing it to go back in time and identify how digital certificates were used in the past, a kind of forensics capability for IT security. Here’s what they found on the clintonemail.com server, and it is not good.
Using non-intrusive Internet scanning tests routinely performed throughout by IT security teams (meaning foreign intelligence agencies have them too), Venafi learned the Clinton server was enabled for logging in via web browser, smartphone, Blackberry, and tablet. That automatically makes it vulnerable to interception, as the information Clinton was sending and receiving abroad was traveling via other nations’ web infrastructure and open-air cellular networks.
Clinton’s email log-in page was also on the web, meaning anyone who stumbled on it could try and log in, or employ the standard array of password hacking and brute force attacks against it, much like they did with your Gmail account that was hacked.
The Clinton email setup also was initially running a standalone Microsoft Windows Server, which is very vulnerable to attack, with at least 800 known trojans/spyware in existence that can steal keys and certificates. If the credentials on the server were compromised in those first three months, then the next years of encryption might have meant nothing.
How could someone have gained access to the credentials? Clinton’s most recent digital security certificate was issued by GoDaddy. Her domain’s landing page was at one time hosted by Confluence Networks, a web firm in the British Virgin Islands.
No Smoking Gun?If anyone had picked up Clinton’s emails from the airwaves or in transit over the Internet (as we know, via Snowden, the NSA does), while they were encrypted, or had acquired the encrypted versions and used the resources of a state security apparatus to decrypt them, there would of course be no forensic evidence to find. Persons working at NSA-like levels actually breaking into systems expend significant energies hiding their intrusions, and such high level “hacks” have been known to stay hidden for years.
Sure, if the standard is a “smoking gun,” there is none. But such proof is rarely available in the world of global espionage, and decisions and conclusions are made accordingly on a daily basis.
Clinton’s email was extremely vulnerable, and her decision to run it off a private server put at significant risk the security of the United States. This is not a partisan attack or a conspiracy; it is technology.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Hillary Clinton, Her Email and a Body Blow to the Freedom of Information Act
Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey announced that his agency is recommending no charges against Hillary Clinton for her use of an unclassified personal email server while secretary of state. Comey offered that “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring a case against Clinton.
The implications of these statements, and what happened before and after the announcement, represent what most likely represent the virtual end of the 2016 election cycle. Come November votes will be counted but the single, major, unresolved issue standing in the shadows behind Clinton is now resolved in her favor.
The director of the FBI labeled the leading contender for the presidency and her staff as “extremely careless” in their use of email, and this is generally seen as positive news by her supporters, the new standard now being not under indictment. Comey also stated that some 110 emails were classified ( at least 24 as Top Secret; one was found to be marked classified on Clinton’s server) when they were transmitted and received, an action that appears to be now inconsequential under national security laws. A New York Times tally found more than 2,000 classified emails.There was no electronic connection between the Federal government’s classified systems and Clinton’s unclassified server. This indicates that on 110 separate occasions Clinton and/or one of her correspondents retyped information from a classified format. This means any classified markings (i.e., “Top Secret”) were removed in the process. “This classified information never should have been transmitted via an unclassified personal system,” Steve Linick, the State Department inspector general, said in a statement signed by him and I. Charles McCullough III, the inspector general for the intelligence community.
The Inspectors General for the Intelligence Community have stated that some of the classified documents were marked at the highest levels to protect sources and methods used to spy on North Korea via satellite. Emails contained the names of CIA officials. There is no evidence, nor did Comey suggest, that these actions were inadvertent, accidental, occasional, incidental, or other than intentional. It was Clinton’s decision to create the email system that allowed these events to take place. Clinton herself, given her decades of experience in government, clearly could recognize highly classified material, marked or unmarked. Standard Form 312, signed by Clinton and every other security clearance holder in the government, specifically notes that the laws apply to both marked and unmarked classified material. The legality of retroactive classification has been tested at the level of the Supreme Court.)
While Director Comey maintains there was no intent, or gross negligence, by Clinton to violate the law, it is difficult to reconcile those actions and that statement.
Hillary Clinton’s earliest statements, that no classified information traversed her server, later changed to “no marked” classified information (the statement itself irrelevant) did not appear to be addressed by the FBI in the context of perjury or obstruction. In addition, Josh Rogin of the Washington Post reports Clinton’s lawyers deleted all e-mails they did not produce to the State Department and then cleaned devices in such a way to preclude forensic recovery.The standards applied in the Clinton case are at extreme variance from how classified information violations elsewhere in the government are applied. Space precludes listing examples in detail, but the cases of CIA officer John Kiriakou (served three years in Federal prison for exposing a single, unmarked unclassified business card with the name of a CIA employee) and TSA air marshall Robert Maclean (fired for exposing a text retroactively classified) stand out. Even David Petraeus, who transmitted classified information via his Gmail account to his mistress, received some minor legal punishment and was forced to resign.
There is simply no precedent to the Clinton decision. One wonders if the millions of U.S. government civil employees, military personnel, and contractors will be held to what appear to be lesser standards than previously held. That certainly wasn’t the case of Marine Major Jason Brezler, who shared classified information with colleagues in Afghanistan in to warn them about a Taliban conspirator, and was forced out of the service in response.
Director Comey spoke broadly. He did not, for example, directly address the 18 USC 1924, which states “Whoever… becomes possessed of documents or materials containing classified information of the United States, knowingly removes such documents or materials without authority and with the intent to retain such documents or materials at an unauthorized location shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for not more than one year, or both.” This is the statute under which David Petraeus was prosecuted. It is difficult to reconcile the text of that law with the fact that classified documents resided on a server (for part of the time) at a private company, connected to the internet. A private SPAM filtering service apparently also had access to the classified emails.
An important issue not addressed by the FBI is the effect Clinton’s actions had on the Freedom of Information Act.During her entire tenure as Secretary of State and for some time afterwards, State maintained it had no email records to produce in response to requests. Those statements — while technically true in that State did not control and could not search Clinton’s personal server — blocked journalists, activists, citizens, and for a time, Congress, from documents they were lawfully entitled to. The State Department says it will now require 75 years to release all of the documents currently under request.
The State Department’s own Inspector General found these actions to be in contravention of the Federal Records Act, and presents what might be seen as chilling preview of press relations and the public’s right to know for the next four years.
In addition, Clinton deleted about half of the emails from her personal server without oversight. It is unclear whether or not any of those would have been responsive to Freedom of Information Act requests, or contained additional classified information. The FBI did say emails it found in others’ Inboxes, ones not turned over by Clinton, the State Department, were work related. Clinton had previously claimed she turned over all work-related emails.
In the Clinton case, we are also left with unanswered questions about the timeline of events. Bill Clinton met with Attorney General Loretta Lynch on June 28, according to both, to make small talk about grandchildren. On July 1 Lynch announced she would accept Director Comey’s recommendation on the email case. On July 2 the FBI interviewed Clinton for several hours. On June 3, the New York times stated Clinton is considering keeping Lynch in her administration if she wins in November. On July 5 President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton flew together on Air Force One to their first scheduled campaign. Only hours later Comey made his announcement, meaning that whatever Clinton said on Sunday was evaluated and processed in less than two days following a year of active investigation. The appearance of impropriety alone remains damaging to the image of our nation.
Few believed, right or wrong, that Hillary Clinton would face criminal charges over her handling of classified material. Yet the many unanswered questions and issues not addressed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation remain. It seems unlikely that even if the majority of voters in November see the issue put to rest, that Republicans in Congress will feel the same come January.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Clinton Says She Was ‘Unaware’ She Was Sending Classified Material on Email Server
She never, through the year and a half that the email saga played out, claimed she did not realize she was transmitting highly classified government secrets through her private email server. Until now.
A quick recap of Clinton’s explanations about all that classified material on her personal email server, because she has a couple of new ones now.
— For six some years she hid the fact that she used a personal email server at all;
— When first outed, she said unambiguously there was no classified at all;
— After the first reports that highly classified data was sent and received, she changed her line to “nothing marked classified.”
Now that the FBI has declined prosecution stating Clinton had no “intent” to send and receive all sorts of classified data, marked and unmarked, Hillary has adopted a brand new excuse: why, golly gosh, she just didn’t know it was classified! She is also throwing some of her staff under the bus for good measure.
On Friday, Clinton said she did not realize she was transmitting highly classified government secrets through her private email server while U.S. secretary of state.
Instead, Clinton shifted the blame onto her former colleagues at the State Department, saying in television interviews she followed their lead on whether or not information was classified. “They, I believe, did not believe they were sending any material that was classified, they were pursuing their responsibilities,” she said in an interview with MSNBC.
She did not address the findings by the Federal Bureau of Investigation that she herself sent information on topics classified at the highest levels of classification.
Her newest excuse is obviously tailored to match what the FBI said. It holds no water.First of course is that with her decades of government experience, it is expected that Clinton would know highly classified data from unclassified. Some of the documents that passed through her server were at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level, and appear to have discussed information obtained via satellite spying on North Korea. Others discussed the names of CIA officials, including at least one who was undercover as a Defense Attache abroad. Some documents were clearly marked classified as Clinton saw them on her Blackberry.
You may not have had a clearance for decades like Hillary, but it seems even a lay person would know that is not run-of-the-mill stuff. At the very least, you might have asked someone to check into it. Clinton’s newest excuse, essentially an ignorance defense, seems a weak qualification for the presidency.
In addition, by statute, Clinton was the senior classification officer for the Department of State. Of course most of that job was delegated, but delegation does not remove responsibility. Indeed, as president she will delegate most of her work, and blaming problems on underlings is a clear sign of poor leader.
I know, I know, you’ll vote for her anyway.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Clinton Discussed Top Secret CIA Drone Info, Approved Drone Strikes, Via Her Blackberry
A new report in the Wall Street Journal reveals emails in which then-Secretary of State Clinton approved CIA drone assassinations in Pakistan from her unsecured Blackberry.
Top Secret/SAP MessagesThe timing and location of these strikes are considered Top Secret/SAP [special access program], in that revealing such data could allow the targeted humans to escape, and embarrass U.S. ally Pakistan, whom many believe is tacitly allowing the United States to conduct such military operations inside its sovereign territory.
At specific issue are 22 emails that were on Clinton’s private server. These messages were not publicly released, withheld entirely. However, the broad contents were leaked to the Journal by anonymous congressional and law-enforcement officials briefed on the FBI’s investigation.
Clinton’s RoleClinton’s role in approving the drone kills stems from concerns by lower State officials that the attacks’ timing and location might interfere with broader diplomatic engagement. So, from 2011 on, the State Department had a secret arrangement with the CIA, giving it a degree of say over whether or not a drone killing would take place.
Then-Ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Munter reportedly opposed certain covert operations that occurred during especially sensitive points in the U.S.-Pakistani relationship. As he later described the process “I have a yellow card. I can say ‘no.’ That ‘no’ goes back to the CIA director. Then he has to go to Hillary. If Hillary says ‘no,’ he can still do it, but he has to explain the next day in writing why.”
Clinton allegedly objected only to “one or two” attacks out of thousands.
Clinton Says None of That is TrueAs regards these emails, Clinton has said “the best we can determine” is that the emails in question consisted solely of a news article about drone strikes in Pakistan. “How a New York Times public article that goes around the world could be in any way viewed as classified, or the fact that it would be sent to other people off of the New York Times site, I think, is one of the difficulties that people have in understanding what this is about.”
However, the Wall Street Journal states the e-mails were not merely forwarded news articles, but consisted of informal discussions between Clinton’s senior aides about whether to oppose upcoming CIA drone strikes in Pakistan. When a potential strike was imminent, or if it occurred during a weekend or holiday when State Department staffers were away from government computers, the covert operation was then debated openly over unsecured wireless networks that anyone with a modicum of knowledge could intercept.
As a matter of speculation, the Russian and Chinese embassies in Washington DC likely employ people with a modicum of knowledge about wireless communications.
A Matter of Personal ConvenienceOne official said “If a strike was imminent, it was futile to use the high side [classified communications], which no one would see for seven hours.”
There is no built-in delay in classified communications. The official is likely referring to an unwillingness by Clinton’s staff to return to the office to conduct classified business on the proper system. Since there has been no suggestion or evidence that CIA officials also used unclassified systems to discuss drone strikes, one can assume they were willing to be at the office when U.S. national security issues mattered.
During Clinton’s tenure between January 2009 and February 2013, the CIA conducted 294 drone strikes that killed 2,192 people, at least 226 of whom were civilians.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Newly Released Clinton Email Was Marked Classified When It Hit Clinton’s Unclassified Server
When her use of an unclassified email server first broke in March 2015, Hillary Clinton’s earliest statements were that no classified information was sent or received.
She quickly changed her standard reply to say nothing sent or received was marked classified at the time. As recently as Wednesday of last week, she told reporters, “nothing that I sent or received was marked classified. And nothing has been demonstrated to contradict that. So it is the fact. It was the fact when I first said it. It is the fact that I’m saying it now.”(The statement is itself an outright lie. Some information — the names of CIA undercover personnel, imminent drone strikes, details on U.S. NSA sources and methods, for example — is inherently classified and does not need to be marked to restate that. In addition, many suspected classified documents that were marked as such were simply retyped minus the marker when they were sent to Hillary. Leaving the marker off does not “declassify” information, and is in fact a national security crime.)
Marked ClassifiedHowever, even Clinton’s statement that nothing was marked classified has now been proven a lie.
One of her just-released emails carries a clear classification marking known as a portion marking. That marking was on the email when it was sent directly to Clinton’s account.” Nothing done retroactively, though retroactive classification is a standard tool used throughout the government and validly changes a document.
Portion marking is used when a document contains paragraphs of various levels of classification. Paragraph one may be marked as (U) for unclassified, paragraph two as (S) for secret and so forth.
The Clinton email in question has a paragraph marked (C), which means it is classified at the confidential level. The text refers to a phone call with Malawi’s first female president.
Everything after that (C) was fully redacted before it was publicly released by the State Department. One can only guess that someone sending Clinton the information via an unsecured device forgot to delete the (C), and then in the clearance process at State the (C) portion marker was overlooked. Accidents do happen. People make mistakes.
So, you want a smoking gun? You got it.
For Hillary Supporters:It does not matter whether the classification was a high or low level one. You simply cannot include any classified information on an unclassified system. To do so is a violation of law. It does not matter if, in your opinion, whether or not he material should have been classified, or was over-classified. Clinton could have declassified it following standard procedures but did not do so (see, because you can retroactively classify something, you can also retroactively declassify something.)
But what is most significant here is that Clinton lied. Stone cold lied. There was marked classified on her unclassified server. And that does matter.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Voters: 50 Percent Say Clinton Should Keep Running Even If Indicted
In a statement I never expected to see in print, half of voters said in a survey a presidential candidate should continue to run for America’s highest office even if she is indicted for national security crimes.
For those who want historical markers to look back on, charting decline in civilization and deviations from reality, well, there’s a good one.The latest Rasmussen Reports survey, taken in late May, finds most voters (65%) believe Hillary Clinton is a lawbreaker, but half of all voters also say a felony indictment shouldn’t stop her campaign for the presidency.
Among Democratic voters, 71% believe Clinton should keep running even under indictment. Nearly half say it will have no impact on their vote. It is unclear that, in theory, that any of those surveyed understand a candidate indicted in the fall of 2016 could face trial/impeachment while in office in 2017.
Those surveyed are saying that even if the FBI releases a report saying their lengthy investigation shows there is enough evidence to bring Clinton before a grand jury, that does not matter to them.
In what I hope is a statistical anomaly, eight percent say indictment makes them more likely to vote for the former first lady.
Just to make this as clear as possible, Hillary Clinton is the only presidential candidate in the history of the United States to be running while under an FBI investigation for national security crimes that could reach as high as the Espionage Act. About 65% of American voters already believe she broke laws, ahead of the FBI results and when asked before the State Department Inspector General’s report was released.But they’ll vote for her anyway. I am rarely at a loss for words, but this time I just don’t know what to say anymore.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Hillary Clinton Emailed Names of U.S. Intelligence Officials, Unclassified
You can look at the source documents yourself. This is not opinion, conjecture, or rumor. Hillary Clinton transmitted the names of American intelligence officials via her unclassified email.
From a series of Clinton emails, numerous names were redacted in the State Department releases with the classification code “B3 CIA PERS/ORG,” a highly specialized classification that means the information, if released, would violate the Central Intelligence Act of 1949 by exposing the names of CIA officials.
How FOIA WorksThe Freedom of information Act (FOIA) requires the government to release all, or all parts of a document, that do not fall under a specific set of allowed exemptions. If information cannot be excluded, it must be released. If some part of a document can be redacted to allow the rest of the document to be released, then that is what must be done. Each redaction must be justified by citing a specific reason for exclusion.
But don’t believe me. Instead, look at page two of this State Department document which lists the exemptions.
Note specifically the different types of “(b)(3)” redactions, including “CIA PERS/ORG.” As common sense would dictate, the government will not release the names of CIA employees via the FOIA process. It would — literally — be against the law. What law? Depending on the nature of the individual’s job at CIA, National Security Act of 1947, the CIA Act of 1949, various laws that govern undercover/clandestine CIA officers and, potentially, the Espionage Act of 1917.
Names of CIA, NSA Officials Mentioned, Now RedactedYet Hillary’s emails contain at least three separate, specific instances where she mentioned in an unclassified email transmitted across the open Internet and wirelessly to her Blackberry the names of CIA personnel. Here they are. Look for the term “(b)(3) CIA PERS/ORG” Click on the links and see for yourself:
There are also numerous instances of exposure of the names and/or email addresses of NSA employees (“B3 NSA”); see page 23 inside this longer PDF document.
Why It Matters— These redactions point directly to violations of specific laws. It is not a “mistake” or minor rule breaking.
— These redactions strongly suggest that the Espionage Act’s standard of mishandling national defense information through “gross negligence” may have been met by Clinton.
— There is no ambiguity in this information, no possible claims to faux-retroactive classification, not knowing, information not being labeled, etc. Clinton and her staff know that one cannot mention CIA names in open communications. It is one of the most basic tenets taught and exercised inside the government. One protects one’s colleagues.
— Exposing these names can directly endanger the lives of the officials. It can endanger the lives of the foreigners they interacted with after a foreign government learns one of their citizens was talking with the CIA. It can blow covers and ruin sensitive clandestine operations. It can reveal to anyone listening in on this unclassified communication sources and methods. Here is a specific example of how Clinton likely compromised security.
— These redactions show complete contempt on Clinton’s part for the security process.
BONUS: There is clear precedent for others going to jail for exposing CIA names. Read the story of John Kiriakou.A Personal Aside: I just remain incredulous about these revelations seeming to mean nothing to the world. They’re treated in the media as almost gossip.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
The New State Department Report on Hillary’s Email, and Why it Matters
The State Department Inspector General’s (IG) investigation report leaked out a day early on May 25 makes a number of significant points. These matter, and need to be considered by anyone voting in November.
What’s in the IG Report— Neither Clinton nor any of her senior staff would participate in the IG’s investigation.
— Clinton never sought approval, legal or technical, for her unprecedented private email system.
— IT staffers and others at State warned her against it.
— Had she sought approval, the State Department would not have granted it.
— Clinton violated Federal Records laws.
— Clinton did not turn over all of her work-related emails. Several (unclassified) were quoted in the IG report that had never been released.
— Clinton violated State Department policies and guidelines in place at the time, even as the State Department enforced those on the rank-and-file.
— IT staff at the State Department who raised concerns internally were falsely told the server was approved and ordered to not discuss it further.
— Clinton’s use of a non-standard email account caused many of her emails to not reach their recipients inside State, and ended up instead in Spam.
— State Department staffers not in Clinton’s inner circle aware of her private email address could not communicate with the head of their agency.
— His State Department bosses did not know their employee, Bryan Pagliano, was simultaneously working directly for Clinton maintaining her private server.
— The server came under severe enough hacker attacks that its administrator had to physically unplug it to prevent intrusions.
The question of classified material handling is, by agreement, being left by State to the FBI, and is thus not addressed in the IG report.
All of that is in the report. I’ve read the whole thing, and if you do not believe my summary, above, or wonder what specific laws and regulations are being cited, you can also read the whole thing and learn for yourself.
What Matters— For the first time, a set of actual facts of Clinton’s actions and decisions have been laid out by an independent, government entity. The IG was appointed by Obama and his report is dispassionate. No one can realistically claim this is a hit job. Sources are cited and laws footnoted.
— Clinton did break Federal Records laws and violate State Department regulations that her organization held others to.
— Despite repeated promises of transparency and cooperation, neither Hillary nor any of her senior staff would agree to participate in the IG’s investigation. Former Sectaries of State Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and Madeleine Albright did participate fully and voluntarily in the investigation. Clinton alone did not.
— Clinton never sought approval, and ignored advice to stop what she was doing. She ran the server with no oversight. With no oversight, the only check on Clinton was Clinton herself.
— That lack of oversights extended to potential destruction of evidence. It was Clinton alone who determined which emails to turn over to the State Department as “work related” and which to delete, some 30,000. It was Clinton who made the decision to then try and wipe the server clean. It is unclear whether or not the FBI can forensically retrieve and review those 30,000 deleted emails.
Simply put, what she did wasn’t supposed to be done.
Why It Matters— Hillary Clinton lied when she claimed her actions were approved. She lied when she said there were no regulations in place at the time of her server decisions. She lied when she said she broke no laws. She lied when she said this all was a Republican hit job. She lied when she said she would cooperate with any investigation.
— Hillary Clinton covered up her actions for four years as Secretary, then another two years after she left office, and only admitted to anything after it hit the news last year.
— Hillary Clinton asks voters to trust her with the most important job in America. She has not shown she is trustworthy.
— Hillary Clinton asks to be America’s leader. She did not lead her State Department, and she showed contempt for its rules. She did not lead by example.
— Hillary Clinton made clear by her actions that she believes rules that apply to others do not apply to her.
— Hillary Clinton by her actions succeeded in hiding all of her official emails from the Freedom of Information Act for six years in open contempt for that process and the American people.
— Hillary Clinton purposefully and willfully created a system that exempted her from the oversight applied to every other government employee.
— Hillary Clinton alone in the entire U.S. government conducted 100% of her official business on a private email server.
Defense?The other shoe has yet to drop. Though the Inspectors General from the intelligence community have stated unequivocally that Clinton did handle highly classified material on her unsecured server, the FBI report on the same matter has not yet been released.
For those who wish to defend Clinton with the “but everybody did it” argument, Condoleezza Rice did not send any emails on any unsecured system at all. Powell and Albright sent a handful in the early days of the web. All of them cooperated in the State IG investigation. None of them ran a fully private system for four years and most importantly, none of them are asking us to trust them now running for president.
If your support is whittle down to a sad Hillary is down to “well, she’s not Trump,” do be careful what you wish for. She’s not Trump, but she is all of the above.
For those who wish to defend Clinton by saying “she’s not indicted,” well, actual criminality is a pretty low bar to set for the most important job in America. Also, the FBI has yet to release its report which may point to actual national security violations.
And lastly, it is not about crime per se, but about trust and judgement.
BONUS: If Bernie Sanders will not discuss any of this publically, he does not want to be president.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Who’s the April Fool: Trying Out the Hillary Defenses
“So, you know why I pulled you over, ma’am, right?”“Oh, I have no idea at all officer,” Hillary said.
“You were speeding. Clocked you right here.”“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Hillary said.
“Well, you did. You broke the law, you did something unsafe, you endangered others, you set a poor example for your whole organization, you compromised security.”
“Well, everybody does it,” Hillary said.
“No, they don’t. Most people drive safely.”
“Well, my predecessors at least did it,” Hillary said.
“Maybe once or twice on AOL, but for four years on your scale in the 21st century? And so what? Wrong is wrong. ‘Everybody does it’ is an excuse for five-year-olds.”
“Um, there was no law against it at the time,” Hillary said.“Yes there was. Your own State Department, as well as common sense, was clear on that. Exposing classified material is against the law.”
“OK. I just did it for my own convenience,” Hillary said.
“That’s no excuse. Your convenience is not the deciding factor, especially where important things are concerned.”
“You’re just picking on me because my name is Hillary,” Hillary said.
“No, I’m talking to you because you did something wrong.”
“This is all just partisan stuff,” Hillary said.
“No, it is not. The FBI is not partisan, nor the Justice Department. Neither are two Inspectors General.”
“Well, I didn’t know there was anything wrong at the time, the road wasn’t marked,” Hillary said.
“Speeding is speeding. There’s a school over there. Someone with your years of driving should know what the speed limit is. Even if it is not posted, it is pretty clear what the right thing to do is. That’s it, isn’t it? Even if things fall just short of criminal, there is the right thing and the wrong thing.”
“But why does it matter?” Hillary said.“It matters because of judgement. We have to trust you. We can’t monitor you all the time, and we can’t have someone in your position falling back on excuses, and then new excuses when those fall through. Someone in your position needs to be held to higher standards than simply ‘not currently indictable.’ You want to be a leader, you have to do it better than others, not try and slip by on excuses. You want to represent us, want us to trust you with our nation and indeed our lives. You have to be more, be better, set an example far beyond where you are now.”
“Hah, hah, I’ll just later wipe my driving record clean, with a rag!” Hillary said.
“And you can’t laugh it off. Madam, this is very serious business and if you think it is only about
emailspeeding, you are far from qualified todrivelead.”“None of that matters,” Hillary said as she sped away, flipping her middle finger at the law.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Intel Agencies: Clinton Emails Match Top Secret Documents
Clinton supporters, erroneously, make much out of the idea that of the many, many emails that passed through her private server, none were “marked” classified. They claim that, when in fact thousands of those same emails are indeed now marked classified, that is just after-the-fact Washington squabbling.
So this new information — that America’s intelligence agencies now say the contents of some of those unmarked emails match the contents of their own classified documents — is a big deal. It also suggests just how Clinton’s unclassified server came to be loaded up with classified material.
Several agencies have told Congress that Hillary Clinton’s home server contained some emails that should have been treated as TOP SECRET because their wording matched sections of some of the government’s most highly classified documents. These reports are the first formal declarations by intel agencies detailing how they believe Clinton violated government rules when highly classified information in at least 22 email messages passed through her unsecured home server.
So how this all work?There is no physical connection between the U.S. government’s unclassified and classified systems; you absolutely cannot email a document from the dark side to the light. Properly configured, classified systems should not allow for removable media, to lessen the chance for information transfer (one of the reasons Chelsea Manning was able to smuggle out so much classified was because his computer was not properly set up, and included a DVD burner. We still don’t know how Ed Snowden got his documents out.)
Given these restrictions, the way anyone can move information from one system to the other is what’s called “sneakernet,” after the athletic shoes. You print out a marked, classified document, and then retype the parts you like into the unclassified system. You of course do not add the marking — TOP SECRET — because that would be like robbing a bank and then sticking a sign on your chest saying “Attention Cops, I’m the Guy Who Just Robbed a Bank.” Including the classification markings would be admitting to a crime.
So that is why Clinton’s emails had no classification marking on them even though the contents of those emails contained information that was indeed classified at the time it was transmitted. That is why the emails are a big deal, no matter what smokescreen Hillary wants to throw up.As secretary of state, Clinton had access to America’s most sensitive information, the same things on her server now with their classification restored.
If the Department of Justice allows it that no one goes to jail over this, then someone should go to jail over that.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Questions for Clinton
I’ll begin today a new series, called “Questions for Clinton,” in which I’ll compile a set of questions Congressional Committees, media and the FBI should ask the former Secretary of State when they have a few free moments before the election.The questions will be factual, and non-partisan under normal people’s definitions** of these terms.
**Normal people excludes anyone who has decided without further thought that there is nothing to see here, that asking questions itself is a partisan attack, and that “everybody does it” is a valid explanation for whatever happens. If you are not willing to examine or re-examine these issues, there is nothing for you to see here. Enjoy being ignorant, you’ve earned it, so click here.
Today’s QuestionsMadame Secretary, please read the September 1 exchange below, between State Department spokesperson Mark Toner and the media. Here are the questions:
1) Who at the State Department, highest level, authorized your private email server. You stated it was permitted under State Department rules. Who made that determination and when? Was the determination ever reevaluated during your four years in office? If it is in writing, please produce the document. If it was not in writing, please explain why not.
2) Was there concern/opposition/protest/raising of issues within the State Department over your use of a private email server? What is the highest level that voiced that concern, and the highest level that received the concerns? How were those questions responded to? Did anyone in the State IT or State Information Security structure know about your server? How and when were they informed, or did they discover it on there own?
3) A person you placed into a State Department job, Bryan Pagliano, also at the same time administered your private server. Were his bosses’ at State aware of this? What was their reaction? Did they raise any concerns? If they were not informed, why not? As you are aware, State employees are required to report and vett any outside employment. Did he? If not, why not?
4) In March you stated the private server was simply because you did not wish to carry multiple devices, though obviously you did. You then stated in September the reason there was a private server was because as you took office you were simply too busy with matters of foreign affairs to focus on how email was processed. Which is it? Why have you offered two different explanations separated by six months of additional disclosures?
5) Your IT administrator from your 2008 presidential campaign was Bryan Pagliano. You had him hired by the State Department after you became Secretary of State, as a GS-15 civil service employee in his job as a special advisor and deputy chief information officer at the State Department. He earned around $140,000 per year from 2010-2012. You also paid him personally, on the side, to continue managing your private server from 2009 to 2013. Pagliano still works at the State Department, albeit now as a private contractor.
Was the job “special advisor and deputy chief information officer” created for him, or did it exist prior to him filling it? Who were his predecessors and what was their pay rate? Exactly and specifically, what were his duties? What is his contractor job now at State? Do you feel it may create some sort of conflict of interest, given the issues around your use of private email, that Pagliano still has access to the State Department computer networks where information concerning your situation is being processed?
6) If you do not know the answers, why not? Who will answer these questions for us if you cannot?
The Press ExchangeQUESTION: But do you know who signed off on her having a private server?
MR TONER: Who signed off on her? I don’t, no.
QUESTION: I mean —
QUESTION: Did anybody?
MR TONER: Again, I’m not going to answer that question. I’m not going to litigate that question from the podium.
QUESTION: So you’re saying that nobody signed off on her having a private server?
MR TONER: No. I’m saying – look, everyone – there were – people understood that she had a private server. I think we’ve talked about that in the past.
QUESTION: What level was that knowledge? How high did that go up in this building?
MR TONER: I mean, you’ve seen from the emails. You have an understanding of people who were communicating with her, at what level they were communicating at, so —
QUESTION: Was there anybody in this building who was against the Secretary having her own private server?
MR TONER: I can’t answer that. I can’t.
QUESTION: And just —
MR TONER: I mean, I don’t have the history, but I also don’t have – I don’t have the authority to speak definitively to that.
QUESTION: But —
MR TONER: Again, these are questions that are appropriate, but appropriate for other processes and reviews.
QUESTION: But not the State Department? She was the Secretary of State and —
MR TONER: No, I understand what you’re asking. But frankly, it’s perfectly plausible – and I talked a little bit with Arshad about this yesterday – is for example, we know that the State IG is – at the Secretary’s request – is looking at the processes and how we can do better and improve our processes. And whether they’ll look at these broader questions, that’s a question for them.
[….]
QUESTION: So last opportunity here: You don’t know who signed off on Secretary Clinton having her own server?MR TONER: Again, I don’t personally, but I don’t think it’s our – necessarily our responsibility to say that. I think that that’s for other entities to look at.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Clinton Says She Was ‘Not Thinking’ (When She Set Up Email Server)
Let’s play a game, shall we? I’ll write down some things Hillary said and did, and you mark which ones are the kinds of things that suggest “presidential.”You know, the stuff you need from a world leader when the sh*it hits the fan at 3am and crucial decisions need to be made. Short-decision time frames, long-term consequences kinda stuff.
For added fun, I’ll restrict myself to only Hillary’s latest remarks on her server.
Here’s the money shot up front: Hillary said “You know, I was not thinking a lot when I got in. There was so much work to be done. We had so many problems around the world,” Clinton said. “I didn’t really stop and think what kind of email system will there be?”— “I was not thinking a lot when I got in.” How’s that for a president’s explanation for, well, anything? Generally speaking, you want yer president to be thinkin’ all the time.
— Hillary, as Secretary of State, just did not want to pause from resolving all the world’s problems to consider what email system to use. So, instead of having Huma get her a password via one phone call (maybe there already was one on a yellow sticky under the keyboard) to use the existing State Department system already installed in her office and maintained by an existing staff, it seemed somehow better to create and use a fully independent system that she set up and paid for separately. Is such prioritizing, followed by such justifying, presidential?Dissenting opinion: Great leaders sweat the details. Image this conversation with Hillary on Day One: “Look people, we have a lot of work ahead. You, make plans to bomb Libya. You, get me Putin on the hot line. I’ll get personally right on downloading the latest Outlook patches. There’s a new Javascript vulnerability I’m focused on.”
— “They may disagree, as I now disagree, with the choice that I made. But the facts that I have put forth have remained the same.” Except those “facts” keep changing and growing. Week by week there are new facts to be discussed. That drip drip drip of confidence lost in one’s leader (check the damn polls, people), how presidential is that?
— Clinton seems to have a pattern of hiring people into public, taxpayer-paid roles (see Bryan Pagliano, her server guy, and Huma, her body man, to begin) while at the same time paying them as her private staff. Conflict of interest much? Public good versus personal employer good? Is that kind of thinking presidential?
BONUS:
Basically, the Clinton campaign now has left exactly three “positive” themes to promote:Vote for me because I am non-male (better hope Elizabeth Warren stays out of the race);
Vote for me or you’ll end up with one of those Republicans (better hope Sanders quits and Biden stays out of the race);
Vote for me because as of today nothing indictable has come up (better hope the FBI works really slowly).
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Hillary’s Server Arrested (Satire)
In shocking news, Hillary Clinton’s server was arrested and is now in an FBI detention facility in an undisclosed location.
After initial confusion that the “server” was the State Department political appointee moonlighting as Clinton’s sysadm, and later false reports that the “server” was actually a Mexican “intern” named Raoul hired by the former Secretary of State to paint her toenails and fetch her cool drinks at the tinkle of a small sterling silver bell, sources at the Justice Department clarified that the arrest was for the actual hardware itself.
“I can confirm,” said a Department of Justice spokesperson, “that today at 4 am agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation slapped the cuffs on a beige 1998 Gateway 486 computer box, running a Chinese bootleg copy of Windows 95. The hardware was arrested alongside a 2400 baud modem. The modem and 512k of the computer’s 640k worth of memory are fully cooperating with law enforcement to help us prosecute the PC itself. We are charging the PC with numerous violations of national security laws focused on wanton disregard for the protection of classified information and making repeated false statements to the public in an attempt to cover up those violations.”
The very unusual development — arresting and charging an inanimate object instead of a person — came about only after Justice officials realized Hillary Clinton could never be arrested or prosecuted for any crime whatsoever due to her status as the Chosen One.
“Look,” said one source now in the Witness Protection Program, “Hillary could murder another person on live TV, claim she was the victim of partisan politics and a smear campaign, and walk away. Look at the trail of bodies already behind her if you don’t believe me. Under those circumstances, you think we’re gonna get away popping her for some boring old emails about drone strikes? Jeez, the American people have been ignoring drone strikes and foreign affairs for a decade anyway.”
“At the same time,” the official continued, “what was done here was so egregious, illegal and detrimental to the security of the United States that we felt we sorta had to do something. Especially after we hung Petraeus out to dry over much less. We first considered a really snarky Facebook post, and then The House of Clinton offered us up our choice of several staffers to arrest, but even we felt that was unfair. So, we arrested the computer itself.”
Clinton herself had no comment other than to tell the inquiring reporter to “your family will be dead by nightfall.”
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Reply to ‘Hillary Committed No Criminal Act’
Sorry this post is so short, but it does not seem to need to be longer.Many supporters of Hillary Clinton say that since she committed no criminal offense, the whole thing about her private email server containing classified material is just partisan sniping.
So as a public service, let’s see if we can sort that out.
The Law
18 USC 1924, which is a law, is titled “Unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or material.”
The text of the law says, inter alia, “Whoever, being an officer… of the United States, and, by virtue of his office, employment, position, or contract, becomes possessed of documents or materials containing classified information of the United States, knowingly removes such documents or materials without authority and with the intent to retain such documents or materials at an unauthorized location shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for not more than one year, or both.”
The law does not require the possessing person to “know” the information is classified.
This is the statute under which David Petraeus was prosecuted for keeping classified information at home.
The Classified
Two Inspectors General stated Clinton’s email server, located part of the time at her home in New York, and part of the time at a commercial server farm in Colorado, held classified data. Neither site was an authorized location. We’ve long-since established that classified is classified whether it is marked or not. It does not matter who sent the emails; they were on Hillary’s server and thumb drives, making her the “possessor.”
Up to 305 Clinton emails might have classified data, and that out of only five percent of 30,000 messages reviewed. There may be backups available of the 30,000 some messages Clinton deleted.
The Conclusion
Clinton’s possession of classified information on a personal server appears to be a violation of 18 USC 1924. So is transferring that information to the thumb drives held by her lawyer (himself unauthorized to possess high-level classified information.)
There it is. No partisan remarks. No right-wing attacks. Just facts. As a non-lawyer, what am I missing?
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Clinton’s Evolving Email Defense Does Not Hold Water
Have you noticed that Clinton’s explanations/excuses/defenses about her private email server and the classified information it held never seem to last very long, and are typically replaced in a week or two with something new?
Back in March the message was unambiguous: there was no classified material on her server. Then, after two Inspectors General said there indeed was classified material, the line was it was classified retroactively (as if that matters; see below). That soon fell to a line that the classified information was unmarked as such (as if that matters; see below). The newest is that well, Clinton herself did not send any of the classified emails. So, once again wrapped in new shiny paper, there’s nothing to see here, folks, let’s move along to the issues that really matter. I’ll tackle that as well, below.No one has better summed up the official Clinton Child’s Treasury of Excuses better than Senator Dianne Feinstein, who somewhat randomly released a statement “in response to allegations” regarding Clinton’s emails.
Let’s break Feinstein’s statement down.
The Dog Ate My Homework
Feinstein: First, none of the emails alleged to contain classified information were written by Secretary Clinton.
Here’s your talking point, somnolent media. It’s someone else’s fault.
Of course, the Inspectors General were only allowed by the State Department to review 40 emails, four of which contained classified. So there are still some 30,000 left to look into to see if Clinton herself did respond to, forward or write any of them.
Next is that the classified emails, no matter who wrote them, ended up in an insecure system because Clinton chose to do things that way in contravention of all good practice and rationality, if not actual law and regulation.
She was the prime mover behind the lapses in security. And after all, the cops bust the owner of the crackhouse, not just the ‘heads inside. The “buck stops where” is the question. Clinton continues to claim total ignorance of the contents of her own email to this day. Is all that presidential?
Lastly, no matter who wrote the emails, once Clinton saw them they became her responsibility to act on and secure. In real life, failure to report and secure classified found in an unsecure situation is also a violation of national security law. With that access comes responsibility. Remember, if you see something, say something!
I Didn’t Know, Honest, SirFeinstein: Second, none of the emails alleged to contain classified information include any markings that indicate classified content.
There is no allegation. The Inspectors General of the State Department and the Intelligence community said the emails contain classified material.
What everyone who has ever held a security clearance knows, and what the media, from left to right, cannot grasp is this: the information itself is or is not classified. The markings are there to show you what level of secure handling is required.
I’ll try again for the slow learners at CNN.
You are handed a piece of paper marked TOP SECRET//SI//TK/NOFORN (explained here). On the paper are written the negotiating positions of the Chinese Foreign Minister, whom you will meet tomorrow. The paper says these were obtained via a spy satellite listening in on the Minister in his inner office via electronic emissions.
Now, cut off the part of the paper that says TOP SECRET//SI//TK/NOFORN. Does the sensitivity of the information change at that moment? Of course not.
If you have lived in a remote cabin all your life, you may not grasp the sensitivity of knowing your opponent’s positions a day ahead of time and the sensitivity that this information was derived by some of America’s most secret sources and methods. But if you have spent your entire life in government, you damn well know that that information is not unclassified, whether it shows up in your email unmarked or otherwise.
It really, really is that simple. Marked or unmarked, pro-active or retro-active, Clinton knew she was dealing with highly classified information on an unclassified system she herself set up and continued to use.
Everything ElseRetroactive classification means that something was classified when it was issued. The markings were applied later, but that does not relieve the holder of the information of the legal burden of protecting the information. Government employees have lost their jobs over this concept, and gone to jail. This has been confirmed as legal as high as the Supreme Court. See Department of Homeland Security v. Robert MacLean for the most recent case. Legally, citing retroactive classification is not a defense.
“Everybody does it.” No they don’t. No other government employee, never mind Cabinet-level official, has created her own private email server in the history of the United States. If Jeb Bush had a private server as governor of Florida, that is not a charm point for him, but he also did not handle America’s most sensitive information, or any classified information at all. John Kerry and Condi Rice said they do not send official emails outside of the State Department system. Madeleine Albright said she may have sent a few back in the dawn of the Internet 14 years ago via AOL or Yahoo, and no one has suggested she sent anything classified. Colin Powell as Secretary of State said he sent a handful of emails on his AOL account, and no one has claimed there was any classified involved.
Besides, “everybody does it” is an excuse that teenagers use when they’re caught smoking behind the school.
Now, as for that “let’s get back to the issues” meme that many Clinton supporters like to go to.
No one can anticipate what will happen during the four (or eight…) years of a presidency. So while experience matters significantly, judgement and trust matter perhaps even more. Those are the things that will see success or failure when the unexpected arises one night at 3 am.
Lastly, I think also the point needs to be made that if the only standard we apply to candidates’ wrongdoings is if it is not criminal and illegal, it does not matter, sets a pretty low bar. I’d like to vote for a president who, in addition to not being a convicted criminal, is also somewhat honest, with good judgement and who at least feigns putting the nation’s interests before his/her own.
If one cannot see that, at a minimum, Clinton exercised horribly bad judgement and cannot be trusted to protect America’s secrets, and if one cannot see that those are indeed issues for an election, then, well, I just don’t know what else to say here.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Classified at State: Double-Standards, or No Standards at All?
My thanks to The Examiner, OPSEC Team, The Hill and Daily Kos for their articles noting the discrepancy between how the State Department treated my non-disclosure of classified materials on an unclassified system, and Hillary Clinton’s actual disclosure of classified materials on an unclassified system. There seem to be double-standards being applied.
Wait, what?My first book, We Meant Well
embarrassed the State Department by pointing out the failure of State’s efforts in Iraq. In retaliation for this, the State Department used its security bureaucracy infrastructure to push me into retirement after they failed to prosecute me, and then failed to fire me.
Here’s what they didIn October 2011 I wrote this blog post, which linked to an alleged State Department confidential cable on the Wikileaks site. The document in question was and still is online for all the world to see. State has never acknowledged publicly its authenticity or its classification.
I merely linked to it.
Based on that link, the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security conducted a full investigation into my ability to continue to hold the Top Secret security clearance I had held without incident for 23 years. They concluded I was no longer to be trusted.
In fact, they said:
The SUBJECT is me. SBU stands for Sensitive But Unclassified, a made-up level of classification the State Department routinely assigns to all of its unclassified information to allow it to withhold documents from journalists and others as required. DS/ICI/PR is the State Department Office of Diplomatic Security, Professional Responsibility Division.
The investigation into my supposed misdeeds around classified materials included Diplomatic Security running the “hacker” program WGET against this blog, and amassing “Screen shots collected by the DS Computer Threat Analysis Division (DS/CTAD) from the article ‘Let’s Watch Qaddafi Get Beaten and (Maybe) Sodomized’ published on WeMeantWell.com on 10/26/2011.” Agents also printed out nearly my entire blog to preserve a paper copy, apparently in case I deleted the files from my server. Hmm.
I was interviewed three times in depth by a team of security agents, who characterized my linking as “transferring [classified] information from Wikileaks.org” to my own, unclassified, blog. I learned later that Diplomatic Security had been monitoring my State Department computer to ensure I did not misuse it. Security also searched my official email back several years and interviewed my neighbors looking for, well, something to use against me.
It was a lot of effort by a busy organization over what, even if it had been as they portrayed it, a pretty minor matter.
Clinton v. Manning: Protecting Classified Information
And of course during the Bradley/Chelsea Manning trial, itself concerning State’s Secret level cables, Hillary Clinton was clear on her position: “I think that in an age where so much information is flying through cyberspace, we all have to be aware of the fact that some information which is sensitive, which does affect the security of individuals and relationships, deserves to be protected and we will continue to take necessary steps to do so.”
Others
I’ve focused here on my own situation not because it was important nationally, or out of bitterness (OK, maybe a little, I’m human) but primarily because it is the example I know most about.
But there are others.
The Intercept points out NSA whistleblower Tom Drake, for instance, faced years in prison, and ultimately had his career destroyed, based on the Obama DOJ’s claims that he “mishandled” classified information (it included information that was not formally classified at the time but was retroactively decreed to be such). Less than two weeks ago, “a Naval reservist was convicted and sentenced for mishandling classified military materials” despite no “evidence he intended to distribute them.” Last year, a Naval officer was convicted of mishandling classified information also in the absence of any intent to distribute it.
John Kiriakou was sent to prison in part for his alleged mishandling of a business card, unmarked as to classification, that the CIA claimed was sensitive. Robert Maclean, at TSA, lost his job because he revealed unclassified information that was later retroactively classified.
There are many examples.
What it means…You are welcome to say what you wish about the merits or lack thereof of how I was treated by the State Department when the issue was handling of classified information. This article is not to open an old can of worms. I retired from my 24 years at the State Department and that’s that as far as that’s concerned.
The point here instead is that State appears to have a sliding scale of how it sees possible security violations by its employees — Hillary Clinton and me, in this instance. Because while all this was happening with me in 2011, Clinton was running her own email system, unclassified in name but with classified materials in fact.
And when you have double standards, as everyone knows, you really have no standards at all.
BONUS: That photo’s of me, on my last day of work at State, wearing my ‘Free Bradley Manning’ T-shirt on campus. Manning, of course, is in jail for disclosing Secret-level information. I lost my job over purported confidential information. Hillary’s server contained above Top Secret information, the same level of information Edward Snowden is accused of disseminating.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Your Serve, Hillary: Email Scandal Deepens
March 10: Hillary admits she used a personal email server while Secretary of State, claiming it was because she did not want to handle multiple devices. She adamantly said there was no classified on her server, and that she would never turn the hardware over to anyone. “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material.”
“We have no indication that Secretary Clinton used her personal e-mail account for anything but unclassified purposes,” State Department deputy spokesperson Marie Harf said.
The devices argument died instantly in a hail of photos of her using multiple devices. Information released yesterday shows that not only did Hillary have classified information on her server, the tiny sample the State Department allowed the Inspector General from the Intelligence Community to review contained very highly classified material. Hillary was forced to turn her hardware over to the FBI.
Let’s break it down a bit.
That Classified Material
Seven emails are currently being reviewed by an inter-governmental agency, led by the FBI, to determine whether or not they are classified. Two other emails were classified as top secret by the CIA, according to information circulated by Senator Chuck Grassley.
Grassley said in a statement that: “two of the four emails that the office had previously described as ‘above Secret’ were, in fact, classified at the Top Secret/SI level. According to the Intelligence Community Inspector General, the other two emails, which intelligence community officials said were classified by the State Department at the time they were sent, are being reviewed by the State Department to determine what the current appropriate level of classification should be.”
TS//SI//TK//NF
In fact, the two emails in question were marked TS//SI//TK//NF. What does all that mean?
TS = TOP SECRET
SI = Special Intelligence (SIGINT)
TK = TALENT KEYHOLE (from satellites)
NF = NOFORN (US eyes only)America has a basic, three-tiered classification system: Confidential, Secret and Top Secret. Hillary exposed the highest level of classification, on par with what Edward Snowden and David Petraeus did. Chelsea Manning is in jail for only Secret level documents.
After information is considered Confidential, Secret or Top Secret, handling tags apply. These further indicate how the contents should be treated, given where it came from, those “sources and methods” one hears about that when known to an adversary, tell them not only what we know, but how we know it.
SI and TK together indicate the information came from electronic spying, eavesdropping of some sort, and satellite-based. An adversary would know, after seeing what was on Hillary’s server, that they were being monitored from space and that the U.S. satellites were specifically capable of picking up whatever was discussed in those emails. The argument about how, post-Snowden, all of the world “knows” they are being monitored is one thing, but hard proof in a specific instance is another level of “knowing” that will allow an adversary to take specific countermeasures.
Lastly, the NF means that the information is of such sensitivity that it cannot be disclosed even to America’s closest allies, typically the “Five Eyes” group: Australia, Canada, Great Britain and New Zealand. Sharing among the group is so broad that the U.S. even gave them access to information pulled electronically by the NSA from inside the equivalent of Japan’s Oval Office.
As for any security Clinton may have used on her server, it is important to note that Top Secret materials within the government are not only processed on special hardware, they must be read inside of special rooms with physical security.
A friend of this blog also wrote in to say:
“Unclass, class up to Secret, and TS/SCI are processed and retrieved on three distinct systems; employees have separate log-ons for each. You can’t ‘accidentally’ send a classified doc to an unclass address.
“So, for HRC or her colleagues to have gotten classified info into an unclass system, they would have had to copy or ‘gist’ it into the class system, while omitting the markings. As you and others have noted, the material remains classified. This is a deliberate decision to ignore law and regulations. If you then use a non-State server and your personal, unencrypted phones… the likelihood of compromise is high.”
It is also important to note that Clinton’s email server was not encrypted for at least her first three months of foreign travel, including her using the system on a visit to China.
What’s Next
With Clinton’s server (as well as the two thumb drives her attorney held with duplicate contents) now in possession of the FBI, all of the emails she did not delete are available for analysis. Depending on how the other emails, the ones she claimed were personal, were deleted, they may also be forensically salvageable.
Yet all that only will add to the growing pile of what happened.
The key question of what will be done with the amassed data, such as some sort of prosecution, remains hanging. It is not a partisan statement or an exaggeration to say that any other government employee found to have held such highly classified data on an unclassified system would have lost her job, her security clearance and likely faced judicial charges.
Clinton’s limited defense options are already in the trial balloon stage, fronted by a State Department that should be a neutral entity at this point now that the case has moved to the FBI.
“Department employees circulated these emails on unclassified systems in 2009 and 2011 and ultimately some were forwarded to Secretary Clinton,” said State Department spokesman John Kirby. “They were not marked as classified.”
What affect any of this will have on voters is even a larger question fully unresolved.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Understanding Why the Clinton Emails Matters
In the world of handling America’s secrets, words – classified, secure, retroactive – have special meanings. I held a Top Secret clearance at the State Department for 24 years and was regularly trained in protecting information as part of that privilege. Here is what some of those words mean in the context of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails.
The Inspectors General for the State Department and the intelligence community issued a statement saying Clinton’s personal email system contained classified information. This information, they said, “should never have been transmitted via an unclassified personal system.” The same statement voiced concern that a thumb drive held by Clinton’s lawyer also contains this same secret data. Another report claims the U.S. intelligence community is bracing for the possibility that Clinton’s private email account contains multiple instances of classified information, with some data originating at the CIA and NSA.
A Clinton spokesperson responded that “Any released emails deemed classified by the administration have been done so after the fact, and not at the time they were transmitted.” Clinton claims unequivocally her email contained no classified information, and that no message carried any security marking, such as Confidential or Top Secret.
The key issue in play with Clinton is that it is a violation of national security to maintain classified information on an unclassified system.
Classified, secure, computer systems use a variety of electronic (often generically called TEMPESTed) measures coupled with physical security (special locks, shielded conduits for cabling, armed guards) that differentiate them from an unclassified system. Some of the protections are themselves classified, and unavailable in the private sector. Such standards of protection are highly unlikely to be fulfilled outside a specially designed government facility.
Yet even if retroactive classification was applied only after Clinton hit “send” (and State’s own Inspector General says it wasn’t), she is not off the hook.
What matters in the world of secrets is the information itself, which may or may not be marked “classified.” Employees at the highest levels of access are expected to apply the highest levels of judgment, based on the standards in Executive Order 13526. The government’s basic nondisclosure agreement makes clear the rule is “marked or unmarked classified information.”
In addition, the use of retroactive classification has been tested and approved by the courts, and employees are regularly held accountable for releasing information that was unclassified when they released it, but classified retroactively.
It is a way of doing business inside the government that may at first seem nonsensical, but in practice is essential for keeping secrets.
For example, if an employee were to be handed information sourced from an NSA intercept of a foreign government leader, somehow not marked as classified, she would be expected to recognize the sensitivity of the material itself and treat it as classified. In other cases, an employee might hear something sensitive and be expected to treat the information as classified. The emphasis throughout the classification system is not on strict legalities and coded markings, but on judgment. In essence, employees are required to know right from wrong. It is a duty, however subjective in appearance, one takes on in return for a security clearance.
“Not knowing” would be an unexpected defense from a person with years of government experience.
In addition to information sourced from intelligence, Clinton’s email may contain some back-and-forth discussions among trusted advisors. Such emails are among the most sensitive information inside State, and are otherwise always considered highly classified. Adversaries would very much like to know America’s bargaining strategy. The value of such information is why, for example, the NSA electronically monitored heads of state in Japan and Germany. The Freedom of Information Act recognizes the sensitivity of internal deliberation, and includes a specific exemption for such messages, blocking their release, even years after a decision occurred. If emails discussing policy or decisions were traded on an open network, that would be a serious concern.
The problem for Clinton may be particularly damaging. Every email sent within the State Department’s own systems contains a classification; an employee technically cannot hit “send” without one being applied. Just because Clinton chose to use her own hardware does not relieve her or her staff of this requirement.
Some may say even if Clinton committed security violations, there is no evidence the material got into the wrong hands – no blood, no foul. Legally that is irrelevant. Failing to safeguard information is the issue. It is not necessary to prove the information reached an adversary, or that an adversary did anything harmful with the information for a crime to have occurred. See the cases of Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Jeff Sterling, Thomas Drake, John Kiriakou or even David Petraeus. The standard is “failure to protect” by itself.
None of these laws, rules, regulations or standards fall under the rubric of obscure legalities; they are drilled into persons holding a security clearance via formal training (mandatory yearly for State Department employees), and are common knowledge for the men and women who handle America’s most sensitive information. For those who use government computer systems, electronic tools enforce compliance and security personnel are quick to zero in on violations.
A mantra inside government is that protecting America’s secrets is everyone’s job. That was the standard against which I was measured throughout my career and the standard that should apply to everyone entrusted with classified information.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Man Who Ran Clinton’s Personal Email Server Worked for State Department
The man who set up and administered Hillary Clinton’s personal email server during her tenure as Secretary of State worked for the State Department. This adds ethical issues to the problems Clinton already faces, as well raising questions about a taxpayer-paid official conducting private business on our dime.
The FBI has begun looking into the security of Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail setup. Also last week, the FBI contacted Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall, with questions about the security of a thumb drive in his possession that contains copies of work e-mails Clinton sent during her time as secretary of state, some of which — according to the Inspectors General from State and the Intelligence Community — contain classified material.
According to the Washington Post, those briefed on the server state the hardware was purchased for use by Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign and installed at the Chappaqua home. That means any malware acquired under the conditions of the campaign migrated with the server.
Bryan Pagliano
More significantly, along with the new server came a technical specialist, Bryan Pagliano, pictured, who had worked as Clinton’s campaign’s IT director. According to federal campaign finance records, Pagliano was paid by Clinton’s Senate leadership PAC through April 2009. The next month, he went to work for the State Department as an IT specialist.
The people briefed on the server indicated that Pagliano continued to act as the lead specialist responsible for Clinton’s personal server even while he was employed by the Department of State. The e-mail system was not always reliable, these people said, with Pagliano summoned at various times to fix problems. Notably, the system crashed for days after New York was hit by Hurricane Sandy in October 2012, while Hillary Clinton was still secretary of state. It is unclear what email system the secretary used to conduct the nation’s diplomatic business with during that period.
Responsibility for Clinton’s email system was moved to a private company, Platte River Networks in Denver, only in 2013, after Clinton left the State Department. That company either administered Clinton’s server in New York remotely, or operated a server for her in its own data warehouse. Either would have opened the hardware and its contents to a larger group.
Pagliano at State
Bryan Pagliano’s job at the State Department is confirmed on his LinkedIn page.
He lists his political-appointee position as “Serve as strategic advisor and special projects manager to the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) / Deputy Chief Information Officer (DCIO) overseeing the operations of the Information Resource Management (IRM) bureau.” Working at such a high level inside State’s IT structure assures that State’s most senior information officers knew about Clinton’s email setup, and apparently did not or were not able to stop it.
Pagliano’s Facebook page also shows his closeness to the Clintons (the third person is identified on Facebook as Carrie Pagliano):
We note that at the same of this writing, Pagliano’s Facebook page employs no security, meaning anyone may access all of its content. Odd move for a guy in charge of the Secretary of State’s email.
BONUS: The State Department’s Chief Information Officer, who should have stopped the Clinton email server? Well, well, she retired from State a few months before Hillary left, into a nice job at the IMF. It pays to be a winner!
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Hillary Clinton Emails Said to Contain Classified Data
Here’s the story behind the drive by the Inspector General of the State Department and the Intelligence Community Inspector General for the Justice Department open a full investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email account while she held the position of secretary of state.
Government investigators discovered classified information on the private email account that Hillary used while secretary of state, stating “unequivocally” that those secrets never should have been stored outside of secure systems.The inspectors general of the State Department and the nation’s intelligence agencies said the information they found was classified when it was sent and remains so now. Information is considered classified if its disclosure would likely harm national security, and such information can be sent or stored only on computer networks with special safeguards. The inspectors have not revealed which of Clinton’s emails contained classified data, though the State Department has redacted portions of email it has released, and the FBI demanded data in some emails pertaining to the security situation in Libya be withheld.
Clinton has said for months that she kept no classified information on the private server that she set up. Her campaign said Friday that any government secrets found on the server had been classified after the fact.
There are multiple holes in Clinton’s latest set of excuses.
To begin, she has stated there was nothing classified on her server. It appears now there was. The source is not a partisan attack dog, but the State Department’s own inspector general and the intelligence community. She violated national security, which require cleared individuals, such as Hillary, to protect sensitive information. Exposing classified data is a crime; that is what Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden are accused of doing. It does not matter if the info can be proven to have reached the media or an adversary, the crime is the exposure itself, not the results.A person in Hillary’s position, and certainly with her claimed experience in government, should know what is and is not classified, sensitive or otherwise needs to be protected. In my own 24 years with the State Department, I saw that almost everything that reached the secretary’s office needed to be classified, either because of the contents itself, or because it was part of the tiny fraction of information that bubbled up that high. Of all the issues in the world, an adversary knowing what the secretary was personally focused on, or how the data was being presented to her, was valuable in its own right.
Some/much of the information Hillary was dealing with originated within her inner circle, particularly email sent between her and her closest advisors that helped shape her decisions. It is the originating person that is charged inside State with assigning a classification. If Hillary’s staff did not assign a classification, well, then one was not technically included with the data. But that’s a fudge; it is the data itself that matters, with or without a label, and as part of the responsibility for holding a clearance a person is expected to make judgements to protect information. Hillary knew how sensitive the information was at times. It is a veneer of deniability.
There have also been multiple public cases where the government has taken action against individuals because they “should have known unclassified” data “should have been classified” and thus protected. Google up those of TSA’s Robert MacLean, NSA’s Thomas Drake and, sadly, my own. All of us were punished, fired or threatened with jail over the alleged release of unclassified data that the government deemed ex post facto should have been considered classified. This is not speculation, it is precedent.
Criminal? Maybe. Irresponsible? Likely. Not very presidential? Certainly.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Statement of Terms Regarding My Private Email Server
Please note that the files, including emails sent and received, for WeMeantWell.com, as well as The We Meant Well Foundation and the Peter, Hillary and Miley Global Initiative and Crime Syndicate, are maintained on a private server unguarded by pretty much anyone except this one dude who comes in Tuesdays and Thursdays.As such, all such files, should they in fact exist, are private property and not subject to any existing disclosure laws or regulations, should those exist. Since I forgot to sign any release forms when leaving the Department of State, the eight bazillion gigabytes of files that stuck to the bottom of my shoe as I was frog-marched out of the building are also not subject to disclosure. Those files are now held in a paper bag in the former Benghazi Consulate and Shoulder-to-Air Missile Emporium. Since as of 2012 that facility is no longer U.S. property, they are not subject to Congressional subpoena. If Trey Gowdy freaking wants them, he can go to Libya himself and demand them from the militias there.
However, in the interest of full disclosure, I have instructed my intern, who unfortunately does not read English, to carefully review every file in my possession and turn over to the Department of State any she finds that are work-related. How you want to play this is up to you– either she’ll learn English first before getting right to work, or we’ll just shred the files. Either way, don’t expect jack sh*t out of me.
Sorry, my lawyer just advised me to rephrase that. The review process will be robust, ongoing, and comprehensive.
Quick Note: Any State Department folks reading this, I sorta left something behind when I last left the office. It is stuffed between my old desk and the wall, a manila folder marked “Stuff I Gave to Wikileaks.” It’s next to the “Snowden” things. I don’t need those, they’re on the web now. If you could grab the Wikileaks thingie for me, I’ll buy coffee!
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Despite Hillary Clinton Promise, Her Charity Did Not Disclose Donors
The operations of the Clintons’ main non-profit, the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, aka the Clinton Global Initiative, aka The Clinton Foundation, have come under increasing scrutiny, particularly over their lack of overall transparency, and their acceptance of significant foreign government donations that some feel are little more than payola.Now, there is more.
Broken Promises of TransparencyAccording to Reuters, in 2008, Hillary Clinton promised president-elect Barack Obama there would be no mystery about who was giving money to her family’s charities. She made a pledge to publish all the donors’ names on an annual basis to ease concerns that as Secretary of State she could be vulnerable to accusations of foreign influence. The Clinton Foundation did indeed publish a list of donors at first, but, in a breach of the pledge, the charity’s flagship health program, which spends more than all of the other foundation initiatives put together, stopped making the annual disclosure in 2010.
Officials at the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) and the foundation confirmed to Reuters no complete list of donors to the Clintons’ charities has been published since 2010. CHAI was spun off as a separate legal entity that year, but the officials acknowledged it still remains subject to the same disclosure agreement as the foundation. CHAI published only a partial donor list, and only for the first time, and only this year.
A spokesperson for Hillary Clinton declined to comment. Bill, who also signed on to the agreement with the Obama administration, was traveling and could not be reached for comment, his own spokesman said.
It gets worse.
No State Department ReviewReuters also raised questions about a second assurance Hillary Clinton made to the Obama administration: that the State Department would be able to review any new or increased contributions to CHAI by foreign governments while she served as Secretary of State. The Clintons said at the time the pledge was intended to defuse accusations that foreign governments might use such donations to earn favors. Payola.
By the time Clinton left office in February 2013, the charity had received millions of dollars in new or increased payments from at least seven foreign governments. Five of the governments came on board during her tenure as Secretary of State, while two doubled or tripled their support in that time.
You know what comes next.
The State Department said it was unable to cite any instances of its officials reviewing or approving new money from any foreign governments. A CHAI spokesperson confirmed that none of the seven government donations had been submitted to the State Department for review. The spokeswoman said CHAI did not believe State needed to review the donations. One explanation offered was that the new money was for “expansions of existing programs.”
The White House declined to answer questions about whether the Obama administration was aware of CHAI not disclosing its donors or submitting new donations from foreign governments.
Quick SummaryHillary Clinton was running the State Department from a hidden, private email server, outside of all government accountability as Secretary of State, while taking tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments that abuse women and gays, while promoting herself as a champion of women’s and LGBTQ rights. Did I miss anything?
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Hillary Wins by Wiping the Slate, er Server, Clean
There’s a point where the game has been decided, and the teams are just running down the clock. We’re there with Hillary. She won.
A Largely Ceremonial PositionIn 2008 some deal with the Obama campaign landed Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. It was the perfect platform for her to work from toward 2016, when she expects to be selected as president of the United States. Secretaries of State these days are not really expected to do much, not like the old days. Most foreign policy is run out of the White House directly, and with communications as they are the president just interacts directly with foreign leaders as he choses.
In such a largely ceremonial position, Clinton was able to keep herself in the public eye, creating B-roll footage for her 2016 campaign in exotic locales, making “fun” memes like “Texts from Hillary,” running up some faux foreign affairs credibility and achieving “accomplishments” on soft, feel-good, working on can’t go wrong issues like stopping AIDS, helping poor kids and empowering women. None of those things ever really end, so you are always moving forward and can’t really fail. It’s all about progress.
Let’s go to the horse’s mouth, so to speak, and quote Hillary Herself, from a speech summing up her own version of accomplishments as “…hosting town halls with global youth, raising awareness for religious minorities, protecting Internet freedom and advancing rights for women and the LGBT community around the world.”
So there.
Her Greatest AccomplishmentWe now know that Hillary was working the biggest accomplishment of her tenure at the State Department behind the scenes: eliminating any hint of a politically-dangerous or embarrassing paper trail by using her own personal email server, perhaps alone in the Federal government. This is evil genius at a Bond-villain level.
Clinton maintained 100 percent control over everything she wrote, and, with the State Department’s conveniently antiquated policy of not archiving its own senior officials’ record communications, everything that was written to her. For the most sensitive communications, between Hillary and her personal aides, she controlled every aspect of the process. Her server, her email addresses, no outsiders.
When she left the State Department, everything left with her. When no one asked about the emails for a couple of years, Hillary just held on to them. When someone did ask, she culled out her choice of what constituted official messaging, consulting no one outside her own inner circle, and then delivered those to the State Department on paper. No metadata.
When Congressional committees and the media came looking for the official messages, Clinton referred them to the State Department, where the emails were supposedly going to be “reviewed,” perhaps for a very long time. Any release or withholding would come from State; Hillary could stand back and call for “full disclosure” knowing a) only what she already selected could ever be disclosed and b) even that will take a long time, nothing she could do about it, check with Foggy Bottom.
She Nuked the Email ServerThen the final stroke of brilliance. We learned only on March 28 that after selecting the emails to turn over to State, Clinton nuked her email server and any backups. Congress and the media can subpoena and FOIA from now until the end of time, but there is nothing to seek. It. Is. All. Gone.
“Thus, there are no hdr22@clintonemail.com emails from Secretary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state on the server for any review, even if such review were appropriate or legally authorized,” her attorney said in a letter to the House select committee investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi.
Bonus points to Clinton: Before having her lawyer announce the server was blanked back in 2014, she obtained a two-week extension on the 2015 subpoena asking for its contents, you know, just to mess with Congress, let ’em know who’s the boss. FYI: There is speculating that the server was only nuked recently, after Clinton’s March press conference.
And oh yes, at her one and done tell-all press conference about the email issue, Clinton never mentioned she had had the server wiped clean three months earlier. Cleverly, she said only that the emails she did not turn over to State would remain “private.” And indeed they will.
Computer hackers of the world: you can bet your stash of black T-shirts that when the decision was made in December to get rid of the emails, someone with a suitcase of cash showed up wherever the server and the backups where and purchased the physical hard drives and tapes. Those rest, in small pieces, at the bottom of the Potomac.
You Have No Other ChoiceSo there you have it. Heading into the campaign, all anyone will know of Hillary’s four years as Secretary of State is what she wants us to know. The photo ops she scheduled, the communications she chose for you to know about, nothing more. And with the emails deleted, there is not a thing anyone can do about it. There never can be a smoking gun, should one ever have allegedly existed.
The whole thing was planned from Day One, six years ago, just for this moment. It represents a giant, cynical, raised middle finger to the concept of open government and democracy. You see what she wants you to see, know what she wants you to know. You have no other choice. Hillary Clinton got exactly what she planned to get.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
State Department Now Just Making It Up to Explain Away Clinton’s Excesses
State Department spokesdrone Jen Psaki is now just straight out making things up to explain away the questions surrounding Clinton and her email, and the State Department’s complicity.
Her “misstatements” can now be debunked with a click of a mouse, which we will do in a moment.
The devil is in the details on these things, as no one expects to find a notarized document that reads “Yes, I did it all to hide embarrassing stuff from the Freedom of Information Act because dammit it is my turn to be president, signed, Hillary”).
So let’s drill down.
The OF-109 FormOutgoing State Department personnel are required to sign a statement called an OF-109. I signed one when I retired from the State Department.
Though the possibility exists some folks get out the door without signing for whatever reason, mostly negligence, I can find no stated exceptions to having to sign. The document is straightforward; read it here. Basically it says you turned over “all [classified and] unclassified documents and papers relating to the official business of the Government acquired by me while in the employ of the Department or USIA.” The rest has to do with acknowledging you understand disclosure laws relating to those documents.
Clinton, somewhat infamously, never signed an OF-109. Had she done so, she would have committed perjury, at the minimum, because as we now know she did not turn over her emails upon exiting the job. She did not do what every other outgoing State Department person is required to do. Clinton has a large staff, and no doubt had the attention of State’s HR people, so it seems there was near zero chance her not signing was some mere oversight.
What Jen Psaki Said
But here’s what Jen Psaki said instead of all that:
The State Department spokesperson also explained why Clinton would not have signed the OF-109 separation statement. Psaki said that former secretaries of state “want to remain accessible” to future secretaries and presidents, which is why they maintain their security clearance. Psaki added that former secretaries may also want access to their files for future books.
See, none of that is true. Signing the OF-109 has nothing at all to do with retaining one’s security clearance. That is a fully separate, independent process. Signing the OF-109 has nothing at all to do with remaining accessible to future secretaries and presidents. Signing the OF-109 has nothing to do with accessing files for future books. As a private citizen, Clinton has no more special access to State Department files than you do.
It was all a lie. Psaki is the spokesperson. She has been asked about this matter numerous times, and has the full resources of the State Department behind her to research an answer. There is near zero chance she was uninformed. She just lied.
But It’s Just Some Form
One true thing Psaki did say was “that there has long been a responsibility placed on the outgoing employee to account for his or her emails.” Indeed. That accountability is embedded in the OF-109 form; that’s where the outgoing employee certifies she has done what she is required to do.
Of course signing or not signing the form does not change the underlying law and regulation requiring outgoing personnel to turn over their stuff, so there is also that independent of the form itself.
In rebuttal you will no doubt hear someone say “Yeah, yeah, it’s just another government form, so let’s focus on the important stuff.” This is the important stuff. Judging character, honesty and intent requires understanding the details.
BONUS: Sounds like somebody is leaning forward hoping for that sweet, sweet White House spokesperson job in 2016. Also, an unexplored side of all this is the complicity of the State Department in Clinton’s email “issues.” State allowed her to operate outside its rules and regulations, perhaps outside the law, for four years.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Clinton Lied about Location of Email Server
In her only public comment on her personal email server, Clinton said:
It was on property guarded by the Secret Service and there were no security breaches. So I think that the use of that server… certainly proved to be effective and secure.
According to tech site Ars Technica, she lied.
Since at least 2010 (the server went online in early 2009) the email server with the Secretary of State’s official government emails was located in a commercial facility in Huntsville, Alabama. There would not be any Secret Service there.
Clinton’s staff has allowed the meme to circulate that the email server was a stand-alone device located at her Chappaqua, New York, home. That may have been true initially. Historic DNS records from October 2010 showed Clinton’s e-mail server was in fact at a static IP address provided by Optimum, a Cablevision subsidiary, that corresponded to the Clintons’ Chappaqua address.
After that, however, the home server was dropped in 2010, and the mail exchange (MX) record for clintonemail.com was moved to a hosted Microsoft Exchange server running out of a data center in Huntsville, Alabama. Such commercial data servers can be expensive stand alone devices, but are more commonly shared computers. Clinton’s email could conceivably been on a server alongside of www.ILikeBigButtsXXX.com. It would be a good question to ask the candidate.
The other feature of such rental data center hosting is the extensive backups they offer. Even a cheapo plan like the one used on this blog offers daily backups kept for a year. That means the likelihood of a backup of Clinton’s email exists in Huntsville, Alabama.
If I was a Congressional committee with subpoena power, I’d be on the phone right now to Huntsville.
BONUS: The server Clinton uses even to this day runs Microsoft Exchange 2010 server software, on an instance of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 with Internet Information Server 7.5, both of which have had numerous security vulnerabilities uncovered since this particular server was configured. Here’s a short list. One certainly hopes the host has kept tidy with his patches.
We have noted previously that Clinton’s earliest server ran for three months of her overseas travel without encryption, and that her use of a commercial spam filter service left her emails viewable to that company.
Clinton can make no credible claim that her email server was secure.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Did Spam Filtering Service Have Full Access to Clinton Emails?
A researcher says the commercial spam filtering service Hillary Clinton used for her personal email server had full, unfettered access to her messages. A person at the company — or someone who could hack into the company — could read and save any of her messages.
Marc Perkel tells us that “Hillary Clinton used a spam filtering service MxLogic to filter her spam and viruses. What this means is employees at MxLogic, now owned by McAfee (which has been bought out by Intel), had full access to all her State Department email in unencrypted form.”
Perkel explains email from the Internet is routed by DNS records called MX records which are used to look up where to deliver email. When someone uses an external spam filtering service they point their MX records to that service and all email for that domain goes to the spam filtering service first. They clean it and forward the good email on to the recipient.”
So, without such a filtering service, your email goes from You straight to Me. When I sign up for such a service, your email goes from You to the MxLogic Company to Me.
Setting things up is pretty easy, once you sign up for the filtering service. McAfee says “activation starts with a simple mail exchanger (MX) record redirection.” That redirects emails from you to them, and then them to me.
Exposing Clinton’s Technical Details
Did Hillary use the services of MxLogic/McAfee? Perkel says yes, that the MX records for clintonemail.com are:
clintonemail.com. 7200 IN MX 10 clintonemail.com.inbound10.mxlogicmx.net.
clintonemail.com. 7200 IN MX 10 clintonemail.com.inbound10.mxlogic.net.We know that Clinton’s server was fully unencrypted for her first three months of overseas travel. It is unclear exactly when after that encryption was employed, but it does not matter. McAfee had to be able to read the email messages to filter them. So a message might have been encrypted into McAfee, and it might have left McAfee encrypted, but inside the company it was visible. A company employee could have accessed it. A foreign intelligence service could have planted someone inside the company. Someone could have hacked into McAfee from outside.
Now one of the ways all this could be quickly checked and parsed through is to examine the header information on Clinton’s emails, the technical stuff you usually don’t see when you open a message (but it is in there.) Oh, wait. You can only see that information if you have the actual electronic email. If someone prints the message out, as Clinton did in delivering 55,000 pages to the State Department, the technical information is lost forever. In that sense, Clinton did not deliver her actual records to State as required by law, just partial copies.
Now if someone — anyone — who received an actual Clinton email and has it electronically would share that with some responsible technical people, much would be revealed. Someone with access should also look to see if Guccifer leaked full headers with Sidney Blumenthal’s email from the Clinton server.
Is Clinton Secure?
So how secure is Clinton’s email server? Well, first of all, the log-in page is still online. Go here and let me know if you get in, please. Keep in mind this may be considered felony hacking and you could go to jail for a long time, so don’t do it.
But in addition to that, let’s see what security company Qualys’ online server security checker does with Clinton’s rig. Here are the results. Oops! She got only a “B,” with lots of technical stuff marked as “weak.”
One recalls Clinton in her press conference stating that her server was in a location guarded by the Secret Service. However, researcher Perkel claims to have evidence that the server is at a commercial facility, and not in Clinton’s home or another known location guarded by the Secret Service.
To be fair, all of the information above pertains to the current state of Clinton’s email server. We do not know much about the state of the server during her four years as Secretary of State. It does seem funny to think, however, that there was any reason to downgrade security at any point. That does not make sense, especially since until recently all of the State Department emails were still on the server.
Important Note
Trying to figure out these details is at the edge of my own limited technical knowledge, so I invite readers to clarify, debunk or support all this.
It also seems that large media companies who can pose questions to Clinton have smart IT personnel. It remains a source of great frustration that these significant issues are being raised exclusively in non-mainstream forums. THE INTERCEPT, WIRED, NEW YORK TIMES — where are you?
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Clinton Team Never Really Reviewed Emails Before Deletion
Oh, this just gets worse.
The Process as Stated
Here is how Clinton described the “process” by which her own staff determined which of the 60,000 emails on her personal server were work-related, and thus turned over to the State Department for even further review, and which were not work-related and deleted.
I am very confident of the process that we conducted and the e-mails that were produced… I have absolute confidence that everything that could be in any way connected to work is now in the possession of the State Department… My direction [was] to conduct the thorough investigation to err on the side of providing anything that could be possibly viewed as work related.
The image created was one of completeness, and complexity, of interns and lawyers, perhaps Clinton herself for the tough calls, working their way painstakingly through four years worth — 60,000 messages — one-by-one, always erring on the side of caution to ensure a complete record before things were (perhaps) forever deleted.
But like seemingly everything else connected with the Clinton speech and the email server, it was all a fudge. What she said was not what really happened.
The Process in Reality
According to David Von Drehle of Time, the process used was actually as follows:
She commissioned a review of the 62,320 messages in her account only after the Department — spurred by the congressional investigation — asked her to do so.
And this review did not involve opening and reading each email; instead, Clinton’s lawyers created a list of names and keywords related to her work and searched for those. Slightly more than half the total cache, 31,830 emails, did not contain any of the search terms, according to Clinton’s staff, so they were deemed to be “private, personal records.”
And then deleted.
More Questions
So instead of answering any questions, Clinton’s actions only create more. Would someone in the media please acquire some brass and ask Clinton:
— Give us the list of keywords and names.
— Question why XYZ was not on the list, as appropriate.
— If someone’s full name was “William Jefferson Clinton,” was a search also run on “Bill,” “William J. Clinton” and the like? Did they run searches for “WH” and “White House,” “ISIS, IS, ISL, Islamic State, Daesh”?
— Ask if the keyword search process was set up to catch “Obama” as well as “Obbama” like Google, or only exact matches, like Microsoft Word does. Upper and lower case? Names as part of email addresses?
Other issues with even a decent keyword search done fairly are that people don’t always write emails in complete, referential sentences. Sometimes they write things like “I hope the press never hears about that thing from yesterday” or “As I told you on the phone, time to act” that can be critical when matched against events and other information.
Jeez, everyone who has ever watched a gangster movie knows they say things like “We’re gonna have to pay a visit to our friend in Yonkers” before they put out a hit.
Get It?
You get it. Running a keyword search is not a process that could create “absolute confidence” on a potential world-leader scale. Claiming it does is prevarication of the worst kind, deliberate manipulation of expectations and words. There is no basis on which to trust, not even a decent feint at creating trust. Just smoke and mirrors and misdirection.
Here it is in a clearer way: No one looked at more than 30,000 emails before they were deleted. No one.
There is a crushing certainty to Clinton’s supporters, and I hear that from many of them in explicit terms, that eliminates doubt. It troubles me greatly. Because if you people keep dismissing these signs of what is headed our way with silly tropes like “everybody does it” and “it’s a partisan attack,” we are all going to pay for it.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Clinton Lickspittle James Carville Blames it All on ‘The Press’
After a row of tumbling, failed excuses for her use of personal email to shield her official actions as Secretary of State from Freedom of Information Act requests (which basically boiled down to, it was more convenient to set up my own mail server than to carry two devices on the road even when I already carried two devices on the road), Clinton has released the hounds.
The running dog in question is James Carville, a major player in Bill’s campaigns known for his take-no-prisoners approach to dirty politics. Carville, in his new role as propagandist for Media Matters, ignores every single substantive question regarding Hillary’s actions to identify the real issue behind all those substantive questions: it’s all the fault of the press.In his “response,” here’s some of what Carville has to say:
It is an ironclad rule that most any journalist covering the Clintons must follow: There shall be one standard for covering everyone else in public life, and another standard for the Clintons. Because, well… because they are the Clintons. Henceforth this will be referred to as the Clinton Rule. My point to you, dear reader, is that it is the Washington Press Corps’ rule, and they’re not going to change it,
So that’s settled, dear reader. Carville goes on oblivious to his own contradictions by saying while Clinton did nothing wrong, others like Jeb Bush and Colin Powell did it too.
Carville also knows where the nefarious press conspiracy against Clinton came from:
Based on all my time in Washington watching the GOP scandal machine go, my guess is that this story came as a result of contact between the New York Times and Republicans on the House Select Committee on Benghazi.
And now it is all over:
You could almost touch the disappointment of the media yesterday when Secretary Clinton brought down the curtain on this charade.
So that too is settled, dear reader. Oh dear God is it going to be a long campaign.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Hillary Press Conference About Her Email
Hillary needed a home run, and she only even tried for a safe infield hit. That, in this case, is the same as a strike-out.
She needed to do two things in her brief press conference March 10 about her use of personal email to conduct four years of Secretary of State business and the aftermath. Primarily, she needed to lay out an explanation that made enough “sense” that her Democratic supporters could get behind her on this issue, and she needed to explain enough to take the wind out of future press stories, create a “nothing to see here” meme. We all can expect the Republicans to try and work the issue no matter what she says, and we can all expect her strongest supporters did not need convincing.
Hillary’s task was to hold the center. Let’s look at what she said, and didn’t say, in light of those two themes.
What She Said
— Clinton said she “opted out” of using an official email system for her convenience, stating she did not want to use two email devices.
— She said that the “vast majority” of her official emails were sent to official government addresses and thus archived somewhere no matter what she did.
— Clinton claimed she turned over any work-related emails when State asked for them, “after I left office.”
— She said she has asked State to review and ultimately release the releasable emails.
— She said she would not allow any third party review of her server (such as the State Department’s Inspector General) because it is a Federal employee’s personal responsibility to determine work versus personal emails, and it is a moot point anyway because she has already deleted the 30,000 emails she determined were not work-related.
Looking at What She Said: Convenience
The “two devices” would have been inconvenient argument is very weak.
One does not have “two devices,” one has two accounts. Do you have separate computers for your Gmail and your Yahoo mail? State employees are allowed to access private webmail on their official desktop computers. State employees access web mail on their official Blackberrys, though it is slow. Many State Department employees do carry two devices.
There is also no prohibition from receiving and sending personal email from an official account as long as one does not misrepresent a personal message as an official State Department document. Indeed, in some overseas posts where decent Internet service does not exist because of limited infrastructure, or because of security concerns, all personal messages travel through USG accounts. It is encouraged.
And who is ready to believe Clinton as Secretary of State needed to carry her own devices anyway? She has people for that; she doesn’t carry her own luggage, does she?
And is setting up and maintaining in secret a personal server in some way “convenient?” How do all other Cabinet officials handle this? Do they all have personal servers? Why not? If this Clinton-only technique is so handy, why didn’t she share it with others in government as some sort of best-practice? How does Bill Gates or George Clooney handle such issues? We know Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, for one, had a single device with both a personal email account and a work email account.
Can Democrats answer Clinton critics with concerns about transparency, mistrust and prevarication simply by saying, “Well, it was convenient for her. Accept that, OK?”
Looking at What She Said: Archiving
That the emails were archived “somewhere” because she sent the “vast majority” to someone else’s government accounts is also weak. Many FOIA requesters to the State Department for Clinton’s emails were told no records exist. Any emails archived at the Pentagon, or the UN or the White House would have to be FOIA’ed agency-by-agency — you can’t send a FOIA request to “the government.” Any let’s not forget the term “vast majority.” How many emails are not archived anywhere?
There also appears to be some questions. Huge gaps exist in the emails Clinton provided to a congressional committee investigating the 2012 attack in Benghazi, the panel’s chairman said. Republican Representative Trey Gowdy said his committee lacked documentation from Clinton’s trip to Libya after the attack despite a popular photo image of her using her famous Blackberry during a flight to that country. “We have no emails from that day. In fact we have no emails from that trip,” said Gowdy. “There are huge gaps.” – See more at: https://wemeantwell.com/blog/#sthash.YUWe4QIz.dpuf
Looking at What She Said: Other Points
Clinton claimed she turned over her any work related emails when State asked for them, “after I left office.” Left unanswered is why State had to ask in the first place, and of course the way the statement “after I left office” will only beg the question someone else will need to answer of how Clinton can characterize waiting to be asked two years later as “after I left office.”
Good for Hillary to ask State release all her emails. That is what the law behind the many FOIA requests now pending at State demands anyway. What is missing is a timeframe; no one seems to know when that release might take place, though State has suggested it will be months. Remember too that first Clinton had a cut on which emails were to her mind “work related,” and then the State Department gets to make a second cut and/or redact portions of those emails for sensitive or personal information. The “release them all” line sounds good but does not parse out well.
Clinton’s final point that it is a Federal employee’s personal responsibility to determine work versus personal emails is sort of true but largely a fudge. State Department regulations make it clear that government email must be used whenever possible for official business. While not explicitly forbidden, there is no section of law, regulation or practice that allows an employee to “opt-out” of the system. Hillary’s assertion that the decision on what is and is not work-related is based on the premise that almost everything work-related is already on a government server, and the culling of personal email for archiving is a minimal task. State Department practice is that a personal email deemed work-related be forwarded to the employee’s official account as soon as possible to create a single archive.
What She Didn’t Say
Clinton’s omissions and non-answers are however more troubling.
— She did not answer a question about whether or not she sought or received guidance from State’s IT, Diplomatic Security or legal staff on her use of a personal email server.
— She did not answer a question about whether or not she had been briefed on possible security issues regarding her use of personal email.
— She did not say why she curated her email archive herself and did not involve a neutral third party.
— She did not demand State commit the resources necessary to get her emails out before the primaries, or before the convention, or even before the election.
— She did not say why, after holding them for two to six years, she only after the recent notice decided to delete all of her personal, non-work-related emails.
— She did not say why she did not hand over her emails and/or discuss the issue of a personal server for the two years since leaving office, the seven months since this became known to Congress, the three months since she delivered her email tranche to the State Department, the eight days since the story broke widely in public or two days after members of her own party asked her publicly to do so.
On another topic, she did not answer a question about the foreign money, particularly from Middle Eastern countries oppressive to women, that has poured into the Clinton Foundation.
The Biggest Omission
There was no action statement, no suggestion Clinton would do anything more in regard to all this. She spoke for about 18 minutes, including taking eight questions, and seems to have left us with “that is that.”
It appears unlikely that “that is that,” with important questions still unanswered. It is unclear that Clinton gave her own centrist supporters enough red meat to get behind her on this issue. It seems instead that Democrats are left wondering what else is out there, and whether a Clinton candidacy, or a Clinton administration, will not look far too much like Bill’s time, herky-jerking from crisis to scandal to crisis, both real and imagined. That will be hard to get behind.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Clinton Personal Email Problem Deepens
Hillary Clinton announced in a Tweet that she wants her former employer, the Department of State, to review her emails with an eye toward releasing them. Here, she said it herself, on The Official Twitter:I want the public to see my email. I asked State to release them. They said they will review them for release as soon as possible.
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) March 5, 2015
So accepting the fact that it took Clinton almost three full days’ worth of controversy to get around to saying even that, that’s it, right? Problem solved? Maybe not.Who Will End Up Holding the Bag?
The key part of what Clinton no doubt feels is some pretty slick sleight of hand is that State only has in its possession some fraction of all of her emails sent while Secretary of State. The emails State does have were hand-picked by Clinton, curated by her staff, from the total.
Clinton, alone in the entire U.S. government, has left herself in the unique position of being the only one to determine what records the American people are entitled to see. Her basis for her decisions? Trust me.
Even at that, she now throws State under the bus, thinking anytime between now and inauguration day anybody asks about a missing email or ten, Clinton will just “refer them” back to State, who of course decided what to withhold from what Clinton personally chose not to withhold. Clinton no doubt thinks herself clever with this bit of political jujitsu, turning the State Department into her campaign spokesperson. But putting the burden on State is a red herring; this isn’t really the State Department’s dog.
Her attempt to use the White House this week in the same capacity has only returned mediocre results. The Counsel’s office there claimed it had no knowledge of Clinton’s exclusive use of a personal email system, and quickly mentioned once it found out that it had directed the State Department to make sure all appropriate rules were followed (CYA.) They also made clear that the administration gave “very specific guidance” that employees should use official accounts when conducting government business.
Obama’s spokesman was careful to note “There was not an Obama administration official that was responsible for reviewing those emails.”
While trying to avoid doing political damage to Clinton, the White House has put the onus on her aides to explain exactly what happened. If there is gonna be a bag of sh*t to hold at some point, the White House does not want to get stuck with it.
Slow-Walking FOIA
State, ever the lap dog to the rich and famous, is ready to do its part in dragging its feet. Secretary of State John Kerry said in Riyadh Thursday that his department “will undertake this task as rapidly as possible in order to make sure that we are dealing with the sheer volume in a responsible way.” State spokeswoman Marie Harf warned that the review could “take some time to complete” while other officials indicated it could take months. And, surprise! State’s current review personnel are already overwhelmed with nearly 11,000 other pending requests, which for complex cases can take an average of more than 18 months to complete.
Maybe first-come, first-serve will get the Clinton emails reviewed at least in time for her second term.
Perhaps State will want to turn its attention to previous Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. More than 75 separate requests for her emails were filed with the State Department between 2009 and 2013 by media organizations and other parties. Associated Press requests for Clinton emails and other documents have been delayed for more than a year — and in one case, four years — without any results. All “answered” FOIA requests were told that the State Department did not have any emails from Clinton to consider releasing, sort of true in that State had no Clinton emails on file; they were all held on her private server. The AP says it is considering legal action against the department to compel responses.
And that all leads deep into another can of worms. FOIA requests are strictly limited to U.S. government documents. You cannot FOIA Michelle Obama’s personal NetFlix viewing list. A very tricky legal question arises about whose emails those are on Clinton’s private mail server. Google and other tech companies have regularly won legal challenges to say that the Gmail you send actually belongs to Google, not you. It resides on their server, after all. Much of the NSA’s quasi-legal ability to gobble up your emails rests on the same premise, as they request “your” email not from you but your internet service provider. Requests for Clinton emails not turned over to State could be refused based on the fact that they are her private property.
The Trouble with Republicans
Meanwhile, Clinton’s troubles with the Republicans are just starting.
The Republican National Committee on Thursday asked the Inspector General of the State Department to investigate Clinton’s use of personal email to conduct government business. RNC Chief Counsel John Phillippe wrote in a letter that the investigation should focus on whether Clinton violated department policies or caused the department to violate the requirement to archive emails. Such inspections can take a long time, but in this case, those delays could easily help keep the email issue alive well into the 2016 campaign, and the Republicans know it.
The Inspector General should also look into where State Department management and security were sleeping while all this email fun transpired. One can speculate that if a mid level employee proposed to do all his official work off a personal email server they would have had something to say about that. Oh wait, they already did, roundly criticizing one State Department ambassador for bypassing State’s email system.
The House committee investigating Benghazi also just got a new lease on life. The committee announced Wednesday it has issued a subpoena to Clinton for all of her communications relating to Libya, including emails from her personal server, texts, attachments and pictures. New emails mean new hearings, new questions for Clinton, new demands for in-person testimony and new accusations of information being withheld or scrubbed. This clearly will keep the red-meat-to-the-base Benghazi issue alive well into the 2016 campaign, even if nothing substantive emerges. And if it does…
Questions
Clinton, in her own sense of transparency, has issued only the Tweet (above) as her sole public response to all this. Her spokesperson disingenuously claimed Clinton had complied with both the letter and the spirit of the law, a tough one to swallow even for a group of supporters used to swallowing.
Clinton has announced in advance that she will take no questions at her next scheduled public appearance, somewhat ironically the March 23 ceremony celebrating the winner of the Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting.
But here are a few very simple questions we’d like Clinton to answer:
— Why did you alone in the State Department not use official email and only use private email run off a private server?
— Why didn’t you turn over your full set of emails to State for review?
— Why did you wait until your private server was disclosed publicly to turn over even the subset of emails you did? Why didn’t you turn them over during your tenure as Secretary?
— As president of the United States, will you encourage or condone your Cabinet level officials employing personal email servers in lieu of U.S. government systems?
— Is the way you handled your email at State and now in the aftermath indicative of your approach to public service?
That’ll be a good start.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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