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Prosecuting Trump
What would you do if you were Merrick Garland? Would you prosecute Trump? Or would you walk away, concerned about accusations you and the FBI were playing politics?
Step One appears easy, put off any decision until after the midterms. Trump is not a candidate, key issues driving the midterms (inflation, Ukraine, Roe) are not his issues and though Trump is actively stumping for many candidates, initiating any prosecution before the midterms is just too obvious. Nothing else about Mar-a-Lago has had an urgency to it (months passed from the initial voluntary turnover of documents and the forced search) and announcing an indictment now would be a terrible opening move. So if you’re Garland, you have some time.
On the other hand waiting until after the midterms can be dangerous if as expected the Republicans do well and take both the House and the Senate. Even with slim majorities Republicans are expected to initiate their own hearings, into Hunter Biden’s laptop and how the FBI played politics with that ahead of the 2020 election. Holding off an indictment until that is underway risks making your case look like retaliation for their case. That’s a bad look for a Department of Justice which claims it is not playing politics. It would look even worse if the Republicans try and cut you off, opening some sort of hearings into the Mar-a-Lago search prior to an indictment. Nope, if you’re Merrick Garland you are caught between a rock and a hard place.
But there is a bigger question: if you are Garland and you indict Trump, can you win? Candidate Trump is already earning a lot of partisan points claiming he is the victim of banana republic politics, and his indictment ahead of 2024 (it matters zero if he has formally announced or not, he is running of course) will allow him to claim he was right all along. An indictment will allow Trump to fire both barrels, one aimed at Garland and the other at the FBI and these, coupled with the dirty tricks a Republican investigation into the FBI and Russiagate will expose will make Trump look very right. He was the victim of partisan use of justice, and the FBI did try to influence both the 2016 election (with Russiagate) and the 2020 (by deep-sixing Hunter Biden’s laptop claiming falsely it was Russian misinformation) and now is taking a swing at 2024 with the Mar-a-Lago documents. If public opinion moves further to Trump’s side, Merrick Garland through his indictment just reelected Trump to the White House as a sympathy candidate. The spooks call that blowback, and it is a real threat in this instance.
Any action against Trump must preserve what is left of faith in the rule of law applied without fear or favor, or risk civil disenfranchisement if not outright civil unrest. Garland will have to address the most obvious precedent case involving former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who maintained an unsecured private email server which processed classified material. Her server held e-mail chains classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level which included the names of CIA and NSA employees. The FBI found classified intelligence improperly stored on Clinton’s server “was compromised by unauthorized individuals, to include foreign governments or intelligence services, via cyber intrusion or other means.” Clinton and her team destroyed tens of thousands of emails, potential evidence, as well as physical phones and Blackberries which potentially held evidence. She operated the server out of her home kitchen despite the presence of the Secret Service on property who failed to report it. Her purpose in doing all this appeared to have been avoiding Freedom of Information Act requests during her tenure as SecState, and maintaining control over what records became part of the historical archive post-tenure.
Clinton seems to have violated all three statues Trump was searched under. If the FBI is going to take a similar fact sets and ignore one while aggressively pursuing another, it risks being seen as partial and political. Any further action against Trump and certainly any prosecution of him must address why Hillary was not searched and prosecuted herself. Fair is fair, and after all nobody is above the law.
The other fear holding Garland back would be that of losing the case outright in court. Classified documents are typically dealt with either via administrative penalties (an officer is sent home for a few days without pay) or as part of some much larger espionage case where the documents were removed illegally as part of the subject spying for a foreign country. Rarely is a case brought all the way to court for simple possession. Most of the laws Trump may have broken require some sort of intent to harm the United States. In other words, Trump would have had to have taken the documents not just for ego or his library or as some uber-souveniers but with the specific intent to commit harm against the United States. Garland certainly does not have that.
Other factors which typically play into documents cases are also not in Garland’s favor. Despite not being kept in line with General Services Administration standards, the documents appear to have been locked away securely at Mar-a-Lago, the premises itself guarded by the Secret Service. Trump has already turned over surveillance video of the documents storage location, which presumably does not show foreign agents wandering in and out of frame. It is much harder to prosecute a case when no actual harm was shown done to national security.
Another factor in documents cases involves the content of the documents themselves. The uninformed press has made much of the classification markings, but Garland will need to show the actual content of the docs was damaging to the U.S., and that Trump knew that. Overclassification will play a role, as will the age and importance of the information itself; after all, it is that information which is classified, not the piece of paper itself marked Secret. Garland will know Trump will fight him page by page, meaning much of the classified will be exposed in court and/or the trial will move to classified sessions to shield the information but feed the conspiracy machine. One can hear Trump arguing his right to a public trial being taken away.
Hyperbole aside, the critical question returns to whether or not prosecutors could prove specific intent on Trump’s part for the more serious charges. Proving a state of guilty mind — mens rea — would be the crux of any actual prosecution based on the Mar-a-Lago documents. What was Trump thinking at the time, in other words, did he have specific intent to injure the United States or to obstruct some investigation he would have had to have known about? Without knowing the exact nature of the documents this is a tough prediction but even with the documents on display in front of us proving to a court’s satisfaction what Trump wanted to do by keeping the documents would require coworkers and colleagues to testify to what Trump himself had said at the time, and that is unlikely to happen. It is thus unlikely based on what we know at present that Trump would go to jail for any of this.
Take for example the charges of tax evasion now levied again the Trump Organization (i.e., not Trump personally and not part of the Mar-a-Lago case.) Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg, as part of a plea deal, will testify against the Organization but not Trump himself as to why the Organization paid certain compensation in the form of things like school tuitions, cars, and the like, all outside the tax system. It will be a bad day for the Organization but loyal to the end, Weisselberg will not testify as to his boss’ mens rea. It is equally unclear who would be both competent and willing to do so against President of the United States Trump. Blue Check enthusiasm aside, he won’t go to jail over this.
The final questions are probably the most important: DOJ knows what the law says. If knowing the chances of a serious conviction are slight, why would the Justice Department take the Mar-a-Lago case to court? Then again, if knowing the chances for a serious conviction are slight, why would the FBI execute a high-profile search warrant in the first place? To gather evidence unlikely ever to be used? No one is above the law, but that includes politics not trumping clean jurisprudence as well.
And then what? If Garland successfully navigates the politics, if he proves his case in court, and if he secures some sort of conviction against Trump which withstands the inevitable appeal, then what? Trump’s Mar-a-Lago “crimes” are relatively minor. Could Garland call Trump having to do some sort of community service during the 2024 campaign a win? Pay a fine? It seems petty. It sure seems Trump wins politically big-picture whether he wins or loses at Mar-a-Lago. If you were Merrick Garland, what would you do?
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
The Clinton Precedencies and Mar-a-Lago Search
It always ends up back with the Clintons, doesn’t it? The laws Trump may be charged under at Mar-a-Lago appear to have been violated by both of the Clintons, yet the two were never searched, never mind charged and prosecuted. Any action against Trump must account for that to preserve what is left of faith in the rule of law applied without fear or favor, or risk civil disenfranchisement if not outright civil unrest.
The more obvious case involves former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who maintained an unsecured private email server which processed classified material on a daily basis. Her server held at least 110 known messages containing classified information, including e-mail chains classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level, the highest level of civilian classification, that included the names of CIA and NSA employees. The FBI found classified intelligence improperly stored and transmitted on Clinton’s server “was compromised by unauthorized individuals, to include foreign governments or intelligence services, via cyber intrusion or other means.” Clinton and her team destroyed tens of thousands of emails, potential evidence, as well as physical phones and Blackberries which potentially held evidence. She operated the server out of her home kitchen despite the presence of the Secret Service on property who failed to report it. Her purpose in doing all this appeared to have been avoiding Freedom of Information Act requests during her tenure as SecState, and maintaining control over what records became part of the historical archive post-tenure.
Clinton seems to have violated all three statues Trump was searched under:
— 18 U.S.C. §§ 793, “Gathering, transmitting or losing defense information” says “Whoever, for the purpose of obtaining information respecting the national defense with intent or reason to believe that the information is to be used to the injury of the United States, or to the advantage of any foreign nation…” This law is part of the infamous Espionage Act of 1917. Parts of the Espionage Act also includes a gross negligence standard, meaning a prosecutor does not have to prove specific intent in all cases. That Clinton’s server was compromised strongly speaks to the question of injury to the United States.
— 18 U.S.C. §§ 2071, “Concealment, removal, or mutilation generally of an record…” is a no-brainer for Clinton, given that she destroyed thousands of emails, physical hard drives, and handheld devices.
— 18 U.S.C. §§ 1519, The “anti-shredding provision” which imposes criminal penalties on anyone who (emphasis added) “knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede or obstruct an investigation.” Clinton destroyed much of the data during an investigation into her communications, satisfying intent. Her overall intent was to block FOIA requests, and might speak to intent to impede or obstruct some investigation that required the full diplomatic record be made available.
Absent a trial no one can say conclusively Clinton was guilty of what Trump is likely to be charged with, but the basic elements are there. That is not the point anymore anyway. The point is that if the FBI is going to take a similar fact sets and ignore one while aggressively pursuing another, it risks being seen as partial and political. Any further action against Trump and certainly any prosecution of him must address why Hillary was not searched and prosecuted herself. Fair is fair, after all.
And then there’s Bill Clinton. Bill made a series of some 79 audio tapes from 1993-2001 with a historian inside the Oval Office, sometimes recording his thoughts and decision making, other times directly recording his phone calls. He kept the raw tapes himself after a book was published in 2009, actually storing them in a dresser drawer inside the White House residence. Judicial Watch sued Bill for the tapes claiming they were presidential records and had to be made available to the public through the National Archives, aka NARA, and that the Archives needed to seize the tapes. Clinton argued they were personal records outside the control of NARA.
In directly contravening what is happening with Trump, the court ruled in 2012 “NARA does not have the authority to designate materials as ‘presidential records,’ and NARA lacks any right, duty, or means to seize control of them.”
Judicial Watch argued the Clinton tapes should have been included among the presidential records transferred to the Archivist at the end of the Clinton presidency, but Bill retained them in his personal possession when he left office and refused to produce them for use by Judicial Watch nor hand them over to NARA, considering them his own property just like the underwear and socks he stored the tapes among in his dresser. Judicial Watch lost the case and never appealed, and the tapes presumably remain with the Clintons.
As with the Hillary case, any prosecution of Trump for dispossessing presidential records must address the precedent set in the Bill Clinton case, i.e., the simple assertion by Bill that the tapes were his personal property. More significantly, going forward on the Trump case the DOJ must address the court’s decision in the Bill Clinton case that “NARA does not have the authority to designate materials as presidential records, and NARA lacks any right, duty, or means to seize control of them.” In other words, for what Trump had in his possession to be government records, someone would have had to designate them as such. The court in Judicial Watch v. NARA said NARA could not make such a designation, and the FBI certainly is not legally the one to do it. Could it be the president himself designates when a record is official and when it is personal?
Sort of. It appears a president’s discretion on what are personal vs. official records is far-reaching and solely his, as is his ability to declassify or destroy records at will. Per Judicial Watch, “under the statutory scheme established by the Presidential Records Act (PRA) the decision to segregate personal materials from presidential records is made by the president, during the president’s term and in his sole discretion… Since the president is completely entrusted with the management and even the disposal of presidential records during his time in office, it would be difficult for this Court to conclude that Congress intended that he would have less authority to do what he pleases with what he considers to be his personal records.”
Now to be fair there is a fair amount of case law trying to define more clearly what is a presidential record and what is a personal record. There are also mechanisms to try and resolve differences of opinion between a president and NARA. But none of those mechanisms are criminal, and none seem to involve physically seizing documents under a search warrant. It is clear the PRA does not bestow on the president the power to assert sweeping authority over whatever materials he chooses to designate as presidential records without any possibility of judicial review. But NARA on the other hand cannot do so either. The battleground under the PRA is the courts, not the back rooms at FBI headquarters.
If Trump were to designate a record as personal, not presidential, and NARA disagreed, it appears the standard mechanism (as shown in the Bill Clinton case) would be to go to court to redesignate the record. Step One (as in the Bill Clinton case) is not for the FBI to seize the record acting as some Solomon-like neutral party between the president and NARA. The bottom line is Bill Clinton was able to hold on to his audiotapes as personal records, and the tapes were never seized by the FBI under threat of the Espionage Act.
Any attempts to move the Trump case forward as a criminal one will first need to explain how it differs from the Bill Clinton case. If DOJ can’t do that — as well as differentiate Trump from Hillary Clinton and her server — then they have no basis to claim they are enforcing the law without fear or favor. It will be just plain old political hackery, using the criminal justice system to defeat Trump when the electoral system will not. That’s Third World stuff, skippy.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Russiagate: The Smoking Gun, Part I
We are looking for two smoking guns now in connection with Russiagate. Today’s Part I will show Hillary Clinton herself sat atop a large-scale conspiracy to use the tools of modern espionage to create and disseminate false information about Trump. Part II to follow will show the FBI was an active participant in that conspiracy.
In summer 2016 Hillary Clinton’s private email server and her improper handling of classified information was the political story. Consensus was the election was Hillary’s to lose, that her opponents in general and especially the Trump clown show, could not stop her. Despite the MSM’s heroic attempts to downplay the importance of the emails, the issue lingered in the public mind, often aided by Hillary’s own contradictory statements. The emails nagged at the Clinton campaign — her unsecured server lay exposed during her SecState trips to Russia and China, and the deepest fear was that her internal communications might appear one day on Wikileaks, ending her career.
Clinton fought back. The initial shot was fired on July 24, 2016 by campaign manager Robby Mook, who was the first to claim there was a quid pro quo between Trump and Russia. “It was very concerning last week that Donald Trump changed the Republican platform to become what some experts would regard as pro-Russian,” Mook said, referring to a false story from the GOP convention just a few days earlier. The New York Times sent up a warning flare to all MSM media the next day announcing Clinton was making the Trump-Russia allegation a “theme” of the campaign. As if she knew just what was coming next, Hillary took that as her cue to claim the Russians were trying to destroy her campaign, a theme which soon morphed into the Russians were trying to help Trump. That soon became Trump and Putin were working in collusion to elect Trump as a Manchurian candidate.
A prime driver behind all this was a mysterious “dossier.” The jewel in the crown was a “pee tape,” blackmail, kompromat, Moscow held to control Trump. Word was a former MI-6 intelligence officer named Christopher Steele compiled the dossier, giving the whole thing credibility. America media openly speculated on Trump’s imminent arrest for treason, with Twitter aflutter with phrases like tik-tok, walls closing in, and the like. The FBI’s James Comey and CIA’s John Brennan briefed the newly-elected Trump on the dossier simultaneously with the full contents spilling into the media. Talk shifted to impeachment, alongside claims Hillary might still deserve to be president.
We know now the dossier was fiction. Steele’s raw information was provided by the Clinton campaign, with his chief source working for the Brookings Institute. Steele worked as a double-agent, feeding Clinton-paid for fake info to the FBI pretending he was an FBI informant with sources deep inside Mother Russia. The dossier was a product of the Clinton campaign.
We also now know the Clinton campaign, via one of its lawyers, Michael Sussmann, gathered Internet DNS data on Trump and used that to create a fully fictional story about Trump using a secret server connected to the Alfa Bank to communicate with his Russian “handlers.” Sussmann also peddled a false story about Russian smartphones connecting into the Trump White House. We know Sussmann hid his relationship to Clinton from the FBI, pretending to be a “concerned citizen.” Sussmann is under indictment by Special Counsel John Durham, and in his own defense filing does not dispute the basic facts. He only claims his lying was immaterial.
Both the dossier op and the DNS op were funded by Clinton campaign money laundered through its lawyers at Perkins Coie and then contractors Fusion GPS and Orbis. In both instances the false information created was peddled to the FBI (and CIA) by a Clinton-paid stooge pretending not to be affiliated with the campaign, Steele as an FBI informant and Sussmann as a “concerned citizen.” Both ops used a sophisticated information sub-op, feeding the media as if Steele and Sussmann were not the source and then having Steel and Sussmann step in to serve as anonymous confirmers, an inside loop. In both instances the FBI took the bait and opened unprecedented full-spectrum investigations into first Candidate Trump, and then President of the United States Trump.
Four years after all that, on October 6, 2020, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe declassified documents revealing then-CIA Director John Brennan briefed then-President Obama on or about July 28, 2016 on Hillary Clinton’s plan to tie Candidate Trump to Russia as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.
The highly-redacted document says “We’re getting additional insight into Russian activities from [REDACTED]. Cite alleged approved by Hillary Clinton on July 26 a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.”
Ratcliffe in 2020 also revealed in September 2016 the CIA forwarded to the FBI an investigative referral on Hillary Clinton approving “a plan concerning U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections in order to distract the public from her email scandal.”
The MSM at the time dismissed these two important disclosures as unverified disinformation. The problem with simply waving away these documents is the very high threshold for information to actually reach the president. Every day a near-infinate amount of information is collected by the CIA. A tiny percentage of that is culled for the standing Agency briefings the president receives. An even tinier subset is seen as important and credible enough to be personally briefed by the CIA Director face-to-face with the president.
Rarely is there near-time “verification” with intelligence. There is however “confidence,” how sure the CIA is the information is true, and the Director would not waste his boss’ time with that of low or medium confidence (and neither would the Agency do the same in sending its referral on to the FBI.) Knowing what we know now about Clinton campaign funding of the ops and Clinton personnel involvement, Brennan’s confidence is better understood. And it is important to remember Brennan openly supported Hillary; he was not the guy to dish dirt on her. He was making sure his boss, Barack Obama, had a heads up if the whole thing was ever exposed.
There is also the matter of Ratcliffe, who hand-selected the documents to declassify, lending them more credibility. Why play high stakes with information Radcliffe knew to be false?
One last concern has been that the CIA source appears to be foreign, and therefore suspect. The CIA is legally prohibited from spying on Americans in America, particularly something as sensitive as a presidential campaign. Even if tipped off by an American, the CIA would need to go overseas and recreate the info with a foreign source. That the information was available through a foreign source also suggests strongly Moscow had eyes on inside the Hillary campaign. Perhaps through her email?
Both ops ran on Clinton’s money and Clinton’s people. The smoking gun of Brennan’s notes ties it all to Hillary herself.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
It’s You, Isn’t It Hillary?
After losing the race for president in 2008, Hillary made plans to never have that happen again.
She believed — no, she was certain — that history had chosen her to be the first woman president of the United States. All the years of acting the role of First Lady, all the public humiliation with Bill’s sex life strewn across TV, it would all finally pay off.And she wrote a damn good script. Once again swallowing her pride, Hillary came to publicly support Barack Obama, taking as her prize the job of Secretary of State. As Secretary, she amassed hours of B-roll footage of herself traveling around the world empowering women, talking tough to dictators, showing concern, lots of safe smoke with no dangerous fire.
About a year ago everything looked good.She had a summer autobiography out with a not-running-for-president book tour to get her into the news ahead of a fall announcement to run. Bill was again at her side, the Old Dog returning some big favors by sharing his popular image. The Democratic National Party made sure the fix was in, assuring that she’d only have as “competition” loyal punching bag Martin O’Malley, who’d fight the good fight for awhile before graciously disappearing forever. And just in case, the superdelegate system was tweaked up to ensure Hillary didn’t even really need to win too many primaries. That would also bank campaign funds for the general election. She’d be on the offensive the whole time, controlling the message, basically running an 18 month general election campaign.
On the Republican side, Hillary faced no real challenge. A limp Jeb, a frustrating Mario, an unsteady Cruz and some has-beens and never will be’s. It’d be a turkey shoot.
But… but… Hillary just couldn’t stop being herself.She is now struggling to just stay above water, hoping to limp to the nomination based on some funny delegate math and a few earlier victories in the South. If she is the nominee, she’ll be the least popular and least trusted nominee from her party in its history, with a negative campaign based nearly 100% on hoping people dislike Trump just a bit more than they dislike her.
And she did it all by herself.Her endless paranoia led her to create that private email server as Secretary of State, despite advice to the contrary (as well as common sense.) She tried to hide it, until she got caught. Her reaction then was to sound like a desperate lawyer without much of case, parsing words and claiming she was the victim of a “vast right wing conspiracy.” Under pressure, she later issued a without-consequences faux apology and pleaded with people to forget the whole thing. Served by a compliant media, she was pretty successful.
But her lies and parsing and prevarications ended her up as the only candidate in U.S. history running for office while under investigation by the FBI.
She and her aides are being subpoenaed in multiple Freedom of Information Act cases. The State Department — her State Department — issued a scathing Inspector General report blowing holes in her multiple explanations for the server. State still has an open and ongoing conflict of interest investigation into Clinton’s decision to have senior aide Huma Abedin employed simultaneously by Clinton, the State Department, a Clinton-connected private firm and the Clinton Foundation. Accusations and investigations into the shady finances of and overseas donations to the Clinton Foundation swirl.
If any of this would have caught the public’s eye a few months sooner, Bernie Sanders would already have the Democratic nomination. If somehow the primary season had a few more months to go, Bernie Sanders would have the nomination.The game is not over, and Clinton must survive the final primaries, an FBI report on her mishandling of classified materials on her email server, the convention, and of course the general election itself. Trump will be a rough opponent, and Clinton will be on the defensive much of the time. It is unclear how many of Sanders’ supporters will come over to her after such a bitter primary season.
Clinton may yet sneak through all this to claim her prize, floating on the apparent new standard for the presidency, “at least she’s not under indictment.” But is that really the way we want to now choose our leaders?
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Memo to the President Regarding the Hillary Clinton Email Server
The following memo was written by a group of U.S. intelligence, diplomatic, and military veterans, calling on President Obama to expedite the FBI review of former Secretary of State Clinton’s alleged email security violations so the public can assess this issue in a timely fashion.Clinton’s judgement — never mind the significant question of legality — is an important criterion which Americans must consider in choosing their next president.
Yeah, it is long, but sometimes important things are complex, and need to be explained clearly. That is especially true in the case of the Clinton Emails, where the media has failed in its job of explaining how classification works, and the significance of exposing classified material.
I am a member of the group that drafted this memo, and proudly signed it before it was sent to the White House.
MEMORANDUM FOR: The President
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
SUBJECT: Those “Damn Emails” – “Really a Concern”
IntroductionLast Wednesday Robert Gates, CIA Director under President Bush-41 and Defense Secretary under President Bush-43, publicly commented that Secretary Hillary Clinton’s “whole email thing … is really a concern in terms of her judgment,” adding, “I don’t know what originally prompted her to think that was a good idea.”
What originally prompted her does not matter. As your Secretary of State and your subordinate, she willfully violated laws designed to protect classified information from unauthorized disclosure. It may be somewhat difficult for those not as immersed in national security matters as we have been to appreciate the seriousness of the offense, including the harm done in compromising some of the most sensitive U.S. programs and activities. This is why we write.
Pundits and others are playing down the harm. A charitable interpretation is that they have no way to gauge what it means to expose so much to so many. We do know, and our overriding concern is to protect the national security of our country from further harm. It would be a huge help toward this end, if you would order Attorney General Loretta Lynch to instruct the FBI to stop slow-walking the email investigation and release its findings promptly.
If you choose, instead, to give precedence to politics over national security, the American people will be deprived of timely appreciation of the gravity of the harm done; national security officials who do follow the rules will be scandalized; FBI investigators will conclude that that their job is more political than professional; and the noxious impression will grow that powerful people cannot be held accountable when they break the law. Worse: if the results of the FBI investigation remain under lock and key, dangerous pressures are likely to be exerted on the most senior U.S. officials by those who have the key – as we explain below.
We the undersigned Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) have spent 400 years working with classified information – up to and including TOP SECRET, Codeword, and Special Access Programs (SAP). Given that experience, we believe that much of the commentary on the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton email controversy has been misplaced, focusing on extraneous issues having little or nothing to do with the overriding imperative to protect classified information.
As intelligence, military, and foreign service professionals, we are highly aware not only of that compelling need, but also of the accompanying necessity to hold accountable those whose actions compromise – whether for reasons of convenience or espionage – sensitive operations, programs and persons. In addition, we know that successful mutual cooperation with foreign intelligence services depends largely on what they see as our ability to keep secrets secret.
Background
Last August, Secretary Clinton handed over her private email server to the FBI, five months after she acknowledged she had used it for work-related emails as Secretary of State. She admitted to having deleted about 31,000 emails she described as personal. Media reports last fall, however, indicated that the FBI was able to recover the personal emails, and was reviewing them, as well as the 30,000 others she had described as work-related.
In January, the Department of State announced that, of the 30,000 work-related emails, at least 1,340 contained classified material. The Department retroactively classified 22 of those TOP SECRET and prevented their release. Among the 22 were some that, according to media reports, included information on highly sensitive Special Access Programs (SAP).
The White House has said it will do nothing to impede the FBI investigation and possible filing of charges against Clinton, if the facts should warrant that kind of action. Inasmuch as the outcome of the investigation is bound to have major political consequences, such White House assurances stretch credulity.
By all indications, the FBI is slow-walking the investigation and mainstream media are soft-pedaling the issue. As things now stand, most Americans remain unaware of the import of this industrial-scale compromise of very sensitive national security information in Secretary Clinton’s emails.
Our concern mounted in January when the Inspector General of the intelligence community wrote to the chairs of the congressional intelligence committees that he had received from one of the intelligence agencies two “sworn declarations” asserting that Secretary Clinton’s emails contained not only CONFIDENTIAL and SECRET information, but also information at the TOP SECRET/SAP level.
In 2009, you signed an Executive Order regarding SAP (Special Access Programs), so we assume you were briefed on their extremely high sensitivity and the consequent need to sharply limit the number of people allowed to be “read-in” on them. The mishandling of SAP information can neutralize intelligence programs costing billions of dollars, wreck liaison relationships assiduously cultivated for decades, and get a lot of people killed.
‘It Wasn’t That Bad’
All those directly or peripherally involved in the investigation of the Clinton email issue know very well that it could have a direct impact on who is likely to become the next President of the United States, and they will be making decisions with that reality in mind. They know that it is with you that “the buck stops,” and they are sensitive to signs of your preferences. Those were not difficult to discern in your commencement address at Howard University on May 7, in which you strongly advocated the same basic policy approaches as those espoused by one Democratic presidential candidate – Hillary Clinton.
Your White House has also made excuses for deliberate security violations by Secretary Clinton that would have gotten senior officials like us fired and probably indicted. We look with suspicion at what we see as contrasting and totally inappropriate attempts by the administration and media to play down the importance of Secretary Clinton’s deliberate disregard of basic security instructions and procedures.
It appears that the option chosen by the White House is using the declared need for “thoroughness” to soft-pedal and delay completion of the investigation for several more months, while the corporate media sleeps on. Four months have already gone by since the smoking-gun-type revelations in the intelligence community Inspector General’s letter to Congress, and it has been well over a year since Secretary Clinton first acknowledged using an insecure email server for official business.
Another claim emanating from your White House is that Clinton was careless in managing her emails and has admitted as much, but that she has not damaged American national security. She has called it a “mistake,” but security officials of the National Security Agency explicitly forewarned her against violating basic laws and regulations designed to prevent the compromise of classified information.
NSA, FBI Have Enough Evidence
Surely, enough time has passed, and enough material has been reviewed, to permit a preliminary damage assessment. The NSA has the necessary information and should, by now, have shared that information with the FBI. Secretary Clinton’s server in her house in Chappaqua, New York, was not a secured device. Her email address incorporated her initials, “hdr” (apparently for her maiden name, Hillary Diane Rodham). It also included the “clinton” server identity, so it was easy for a hacker to spot.
Anyone with the proper equipment, knowledge and motivation might have been able to obtain access. That is what hackers are able to do, with considerable success, against government servers that are far better protected than the private email server located in her New York State home.
In fact, there have been reports that Secretary Clinton’s emails were, indeed, hacked successfully by foreigners. The Romanian hacker who goes by the name Guccifer claimed earlier this month that he had repeatedly hacked her email server. He described the server as “like an open orchid on the Internet” and that “it was easy … easy for me, for everybody.” Guccifer has been extradited from Romania and is now in jail in Alexandria, Virginia, where the FBI is said to be questioning him on the emails. There have also been credible claims that Russian intelligence and other foreign services were able to hack the Secretary’s server.
Another argument being surfaced, in a transparent attempt to defend Secretary Clinton, has to do with intent. It is said that she did not intend to have classified information on her computer in New York and had no intention of handling secret material in a way that would be accessible to foreign intelligence or others lacking the proper security clearances and the need-to-know.
But while intent might be relevant in terms of punishment, it does not change the fact that as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, then Senator Clinton had clearances for classified information for years before becoming Secretary of State. She knew the rules and yet as Secretary she handled classified information carelessly after a deliberate decision to circumvent normal procedures for its safeguarding, thus making it vulnerable to foreign intelligence, as well as to criminal hackers.
Anyone who has ever handled classified material knows that there are a number of things that you do not do. You do not take it home with you, you do not copy it and share it with anyone who does not have a clearance and a need-to-know, you do not strip off the classification marks and treat it as unclassified, and you do not transfer it to another email account that is not protected by a government server.
If you have a secured government computer operating off of a secure server that means that what is on the computer stays on the computer. This is not a matter of debate or subject to interpretation. It is how one safeguards classified information, even if one believes that the material should not be classified, which is another argument that has been made in Clinton’s defense. Whether or not the classification is unnecessary is not your decision to make.
Apart from the guidelines for proper handling of classified information, outlined in Executive Order 13526 and 18 U.S.C Sec. 793(f) of the federal code, there is some evidence of a cover-up regarding what was compromised. This itself would be a violation of the 2009 Federal Records Act and the Freedom of Information Act.
Numerous messages both in New York and in Washington have reportedly been erased or simply cannot be found. In addition, the law cited above explicitly makes it a felony to cut and paste classified information removing its classification designation. Retaining such information on a private email system is also a felony. In one of Secretary Clinton’s emails, she instructed her staff simply to remove a classification and send the information to her on her server.
So the question is not whether Secretary Clinton broke the law. She did. If the laws are to be equally applied, she should face the same kind of consequences as others who have been found, often on the basis of much less convincing evidence, guilty of similar behavior.
Some More Equal Than OthersSecretary Clinton’ case invites comparison with what happened to former CIA case officer Jeffrey Sterling, now serving a three-and-a-half-year prison term for allegedly leaking information to New York Times journalist James Risen. Sterling first came to the media’s attention when in 2003 he blew the whistle on a botched CIA operation called Operation Merlin, telling the Senate Intelligence Committee staff that the operation had ended up revealing nuclear secrets to Iran. When in 2006 James Risen published a book that discussed, inter alia, this amateurish cowboy operation, the Department of Justice focused on Sterling as the suspected source.
In court, the federal prosecutors relied almost entirely on Risen’s phone and email logs, which reportedly demonstrated that the two men had been in contact up until 2005. But the prosecutors did not provide the content of those communications even though the FBI was listening in on some of them. Risen has claimed that he had multiple sources on Operation Merlin, and Sterling has always denied being involved.
Jeffrey Sterling was not permitted to testify in the trial on his own behalf because he would have had to discuss Operation Merlin, which was and is still classified. He could not mention any details about it even if they were already publicly known through the Risen book. No evidence was ever produced in court demonstrating that any classified information ever passed between the two men, but Sterling, an African American, was nevertheless convicted by an all-white jury in Virginia based on “suspicion” and the presumption that “it had to be him.”
The contrast between the copious evidence – some of it self-admitted – of Secretary Clinton’s demonstrable infractions, on the one hand, and the very sketchy, circumstantial evidence used to convict and imprison Jeffrey Sterling, on the other, lend weight to the suspicion that there is one law for the rich and powerful in the United States and another for the rest of us.
Failing to take steps against a politically powerful presidential candidate and letting her off unscathed for crimes of her own making, while an institutionally unprotected Jeffrey Sterling sits in prison would be a travesty of justice not dissimilar to the gentle wrist-slap given Gen. David Petraeus for giving his mistress extremely sensitive information and then lying to the FBI about it.
Your order to then-Attorney General Eric Holder to let Gen. David Petraeus off easy created a noxious – and demoralizing – precedent in the national security community indicating that, whatever the pains taken at lower levels to prevent compromise of duly classified information, top officials are almost never held accountable for disregarding well-established rules. These are some of the reasons we are so concerned that this is precisely the direction in which you seem to be leaning on the Clinton email issue.
In our view, the sole legitimate reason for disclosing classified information springs from the only “oath” we all took – “to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic.” When, for example, Edward Snowden saw the U.S. government grossly violating our Fourth Amendment right to be “secure” against warrantless “searches and seizures,” he gave more weight to that oath (ethicists call it a supervening value) than to the promise he had made not to disclose information that could harm U.S. national security.
Possibly Still Worse AheadYou might give some thought, Mr. President, to a potentially messy side of this. What is already known about NSA’s collect-it-all electronic practices over the past several years strongly suggests that NSA, and perhaps the FBI, already know chapter and verse. It is virtually certain they know what was in Secretary Clinton’s emails – including the ones she thought she had deleted. It is likely that they have also been able to determine which foreign intelligence agencies and other hackers were able to access the emails.
One ignores this at one’s peril. Secretary Clinton’s security violations can have impact not only on whether she becomes your successor, but also on whether she would, in that case, be beholden to those who know what lies hidden from the rest of us – perhaps even from you.
Intelligence professionals (in contrast to the occasional political functionary) take the compromise of classified information with utmost seriousness. More important: this is for us a quintessentially nonpartisan issue. It has to do, first and foremost, with the national security of the United States.
We are all too familiar with what harm can come from blithe disregard of basic procedures designed to protect sensitive intelligence and other national security information. Yes, the lamentable unevenness in how such infractions are handled is also an important issue – but that is not our main focus in the present context.
The Truth Will OutNot all workers at the NSA or the FBI are likely to keep their heads in the sand, as they watch very senior officials and politicians with their own agendas disregard laws to safeguard the nation’s security. We know what it is like to do the difficult, disciplined work of protecting information from being compromised by strictly abiding by what often seem to be cumbersome rules and regulations. We’ve been there; done that.
If you encourage the Department of Justice and the FBI to continue slow-walking the investigation, there is a good chance the truth will come out anyway. As you are aware, the Justice Department, the FBI, and NSA have all yielded recent patriots who, in such circumstances, decided that whistleblowing – rather than silence – was the only way to honor the oath we all swore – to support and defend the Constitution.
To sum up our concern regarding how all this plays out, if you order the Justice Department and FBI to pursue the investigation with “all deliberate speed,” so to speak, and Secretary Clinton becomes president, the juicy email secrets in the hidden hands of the NSA and FBI are likely to give those already powerful institutions a capacity for blackmail that would make J. Edgar Hoover’s mouth water. In addition, information hacked by foreign intelligence services or Guccifer-like hackers can also provide useful grist for leverage or blackmail.
Taking Care the Laws Are Faithfully ExecutedWe strongly urge you to order Attorney General Loretta Lynch to instruct FBI Director James Comey to wind up a preliminary investigation and tell the country now what they have learned. By now they – and U.S. intelligence agencies – have had enough time to do an early assessment of what classified data, programs and people have been compromised. Realistically speaking, a lengthier, comprehensive post-mortem-type evaluation – however interesting it might be, might never see the light of day under a new president.
We believe the American people are entitled to prompt and full disclosure, and respectfully suggest that you ensure that enforcement of laws protecting our national security does not play stepchild to political considerations on this key issue.
On April 10, you assured Chris Wallace, “I guarantee that there is no political influence in any investigation conducted by the Justice Department, or the FBI – not just in this [Clinton email] case, but in any case. Full stop. Period.”
We urge you to abide by that promise, and let the chips fall where they may. Full stop. Period.
For the Steering Group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)William Binney, Technical Director, NSA; co-founder, SIGINT Automation Research Center (ret.)
Thomas Drake, Senior Executive, NSA (former)
Philip Giraldi, CIA, Operations Officer (ret.)
Sen. Mike Gravel, Adjutant, top secret control officer, Communications Intelligence Service, special agent the Counter Intelligence Corps and United States Senator
Matthew Hoh, former Capt., USMC, Iraq & Foreign Service Officer, Afghanistan (associate VIPS)
Larry C. Johnson, CIA & State Department (ret.)
Michael S. Kearns, Captain, USAF Intelligence Agency (ret.), ex-Master SERE Instructor
John Kiriakou, Former CIA Counterterrorism Officer
Ray McGovern, former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA analyst (ret.)
Elizabeth Murray, Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Middle East, CIA (ret.)
Todd Pierce, MAJ, US Army Judge Advocate (ret.)
Scott Ritter, former MAJ, USMC, former UN Weapon Inspector, Iraq
Diane Roark, DOE, DOD, NSC, & professional staff, House Intelligence Committee (ret.)
Robert David Steele, former CIA Operations Officer
Peter Van Buren, U.S. Department of State, Foreign Service Officer (ret.) (associate VIPS)
Kirk Wiebe, former Senior Analyst, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA, (ret.)
Ann Wright, U.S. Army Reserve Colonel (ret) and former U.S. Diplomat
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Justice Dept Grants Immunity to Staffer Who Set Up Clinton’s Email Server
You remember Bryan Pagliano, pictured above, the guy who ran Hillary’s IT during her 2008 presidential campaign. After Obama tossed Hillary the job of secretary of state, Hillary had Pagliano hired by the State Department. She also had him continue to administer her private server, supposedly paying him on the side for the help.
Taking the Fifth
In addition to everything else swirling in the cesspool of that email server, there are also questions about whether or not whether the State Department spent taxpayer money to manage Hillary’s email server. See, Pagliano was working for both State as a government employee and Hillary as a private employee at the same time. One wonders if he always kept the two tasks fully separate, and of course what a government employee was doing working privately for the Clintons at the same time.
When asked back in September to provide testimony to Congress, Pagliano refused, asserting his Fifth Amendment rights.
Now things have changed.
Getting Immunity
The Justice Department has granted immunity to the former State Department staffer, who worked on Hillary Clinton’s private email server, as part of a criminal investigation into the possible mishandling of classified information, according to a senior law enforcement official.
The official said the FBI had secured the cooperation of Bryan Pagliano, who worked on Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign before setting up the server in her New York home in 2009.
What Pagliano Likely Knows
Bryan Pagliano can shed light on several issues:
— Pagliano’s dual role as government employee and Clinton employee opens a whole new arena for investigation against Clinton, similar to the one already ongoing with aide Huma Abedin, who at one point worked simultaneously for the State Department, the Clinton Foundation, Hillary herself and a private company closely tied to the Clintons.
— While at State, what was Pagliano’s day-to-day job? What did he really do, not just his job description, but is actual work accomplishments? Is there a paper trail showing he did any actual work at all, or was the State “job” just a make-work position to get him on the payroll as a gift in return for his service to Clinton?
— He listed on LinkedIn 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.” Employed 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. Unless Brian never told his supervisor about his other job.
— What was going on inside the State Department vis-a-vis the email server. Who knew about it? When did they know? Was it ever vetted/approved, and if so, by whom? Were objections raised by security personnel and how were those objections dealt with? Who is on the complete list of people who had email addresses on the server? What discussions took place inside State regarding the presence of classified information on the server? Were objections ever raised from outside State, say from the White House or the intelligence community?
— Pagliano can also speak to what security measures if any were in place on Clinton’s server, and when were they instituted. He had visibility into server logs, showing any attacks or penetrations into the server.
— Pagliano, as a State Department employee, had access to the State Department computer systems. He currently works as a computer contractor for State, and still has access to State Department computer systems. Has he ever been asked by Clinton to use his positions to gain information she would ordinarily not have access to, or to which she did not want her name attached?
— Pagliano may have knowledge of where any backups of the server are, shedding light on what emails were deleted by Clinton before her “full disclosure” of what was in fact a highly curated batch of documents.
There is a lot to learn from Bryan Pagliano. His testimony could be like when the Feds turn a Mafia accountant, a low-level guy with access to the family jewels.
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.
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.
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.
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