Leading The Way!

[House of Wax]

Why Hillary’s EmailGate Matters | Observer


Every few days, another bombshell appears in the media illustrating just how poorly Hillary Clinton, during her tenure as our nation’s foreign policy boss, handled communications security. By now, we have a complex portrait of someone whose mishandling of our nation’s secrets, by herself and her staff, beggars belief for anyone versed in such matters. EmailGate isn’t going away, no matter how much Ms. Clinton’s supporters want it to.

The number of “unclassified” emails that turn out to be classified, some of which transited Ms. Clinton’s unencrypted server of bathroom fame, now surpasses 1,300 and may go higher still. A couple weeks ago I explained how Ms. Clinton’s emails included highly classified information from the National Security Agency, based on signals intelligence about Sudan at the Top Secret Codeword level (see this for an explanation of such classifications). How they got there has yet to be explained.

We’ve since learned Ms. Clinton’s “unclassified” emails also included Top Secret information from the Central Intelligence Agency, including espionage from axcompartmented Special Access Program. SAPs, as they are called in the Intelligence Community, represent “crown jewel” information. Even for holders of Top Secret Codeword clearances, the highest in the U.S. Government, access to SAPs requires special permissions, on a strict need-to-know basis.

Just what a sinkhole of secrets the Secretary of State’s office was during President Obama’s first term, when Ms. Clinton occupied that chair, is frighteningly apparent.

How such highly classified information from both NSA and CIA wound up in Ms. Clinton’s personal email is a messy question that the FBI is currently unravelling. Don’t expect pretty answers. That her staff at Foggy Bottom treated classification as a nuisance is already apparent, and such guidance, which was flagrantly illegal, could only have come from “the boss.”

Just what a sinkhole of secrets the Secretary of State’s office was during President Obama’s first term, when Ms. Clinton occupied that chair, is frighteningly apparent.xAllegationsxare swirling that her staff systematically copied Top Secret Codeword information off separate, just-for-intelligence computer systems and cut-and-pasted it into “unclassified” emails. This, if true, is an unambiguous felony. There is reason to be cautious about this claim, which is unsubstantiated so far, and would indicate a complex degree of intent: moving Top Secret Codeword information into unclassified emails is not simple, rather a multi-step process, and would leave an audit trail.

Nevertheless, the casual approach of Ms. Clinton and her staff to classified information is already abundantly clear. Cheryl Mills, her chief of staff at Foggy Bottom, was using her personal Blackberry for work, including the transmission of classified email. That alone is a crime. Then, in a move worthy of a dark comedy, Ms. Mills proceeded to lose that Blackberry. This would be a career-ender, at best, for any normal U.S. Government employee. Ms. Mills, a longtime Clinton insider, naturally suffered no penalties of any kind for this astonishing security lapse.

Of course, the loss of classified information is bound to happen when the nation’s top diplomat refuses to use government communications systems for government business, as Ms. Clinton did, intentionally rejecting State.gov email, as has been established, and her staff did the same, with awful consequences.

Why Ms. Clinton and her staff refused to use State Department email for official business is an open and important question. Suspicion inevitably falls on widespread allegations of pay-for-play, a corrupt scheme whereby foreign entities gave cash to the Clinton Global Initiative in exchange for Ms. Clinton’s favors at Foggy Bottom. The FBI is investigating this matter in connection with EmailGate.

Regardless of whether Ms. Clinton was engaged in political corruption, she unquestionably cast aside security as Secretary of State. She can’t quitexkeep her story straight on why that was, and she is at pains to deny that there is any real issue here at all, suggesting that it’s just anotherright-wing propaganda ploy. Ms. Clinton is veering hazardously close to her infamous “What difference at this point does it make?” claim, which she touted about the 2012 Benghazi attack.

Yet, as any seasoned intelligence professional will tell you, it matters a great deal—just not in ways visible to the American public. The communications of America’s top diplomat are closely monitored by dozens of foreign spy services, and anything sent out unencrypted, as Ms. Clinton’s email was, should be assumed to be read by numerous countries, including some who are not our friends.

John Kerry, her successor at Foggy Bottom, admitted that Russia and China are almost certainly reading his unclassified emails. Bob Gates, Obama’s first defense secretary, recently assertedit’s very likely that Russia, China, and Iran were inside Ms. Clinton’s homebrew email server. Mr. Gates is a career intelligence officer who served as CIA director, and he simply stated what any espionage professional knows.

To take just the Russians: their plus-sized embassy in Washington, D.C. is conveniently located on a hill overlooking the city, with an impressive antenna field on its roof aimed downtown. That is where Ms. Clinton’s“unclassified” emails went. The Russians care so much about State Department information they’ve been caughtxplanting bugs inside a conference room just down the hall from the Secretary of State’s office. “Of course the SVR got it all,” explained a high-ranking former KGB officer to me about EmailGate (the SVR is the post-Soviet successor to the KGB’s foreign intelligence arm). “I don’t know if we’re as good as we were in my time,” he added, “but even half-drunk the SVR could get those emails, they probably couldn’t believe how easy Hillary made it for them.”

Any foreign intelligence service reading Ms. Clinton’s emails would know a great deal they’re not supposed to about American diplomacy, including classified information: readouts from sensitive meetings, secret U.S. positions on high-stakes negotiations, details of interaction between the State Department and other U.S. agencies including the White House. This would be a veritablexintelligence goldmine to our enemies. Worse, access to Ms. Clinton’s personal email likely gave foreign spy agencies hints on how to crack into more sensitive information systems. Not to mention that if Clinton Inc. was engaged in any sort of illegal pay-for-play schemes, our adversaries know all about that, as well as anything else shady that Ms. Clintonxand her staff were putting in those unencrypted emails.

The State Department has a longstanding reputation for being less than serious about security, and its communications have often wound up in foreign hands. It’s something of a tradition at Foggy Bottom, to the chagrin of the Intelligence Community, and history records numerous examples. To take a big one, in early 1917 British intelligence intercepted the infamous Zimmermann Telegram, Germany’s ham-handed effort to get Mexico to attack the United States, and shared it with President Woodrow Wilson. Shocked, Mr. Wilson used this to get America into the First World War on Britain’s side. What he didn’t realize, and neither did anybody else in Washington, was that London got their hands on the Zimmermann Telegram by intercepting and decrypting classified State Department communications.

Even by these low standards Hillary Clinton is an outlier. Her willful disregard for basic security has harmed our country, though it may take decades to discover exactly how. As a top French diplomatexplainedxin exasperation, “You cannot say just anything on just any network!”—a reality-based viewpoint wholly absent when Ms. Clinton ran the show at Foggy Bottom.

As Secretary of State, Ms. Clinton had access to a wide array of government-supplied communications systems, ranging from lightly encrypted to deeply so, at varying levels of classification, all intended to protect our nation’s secrets. She chose not to use them, and it’s not Hillary Clinton who’s paying the price for that.

All this angers Americans with experience in our military and intelligence services who understand what Ms. Clinton and her staff did—and that they would be held to far harsher standards for attempting anything similar. They know thatxbrave Americansxhavexgiven their livesprotecting Top Secret Codeword information. They know that in every American embassy around the world, our diplomatic outposts that worked for Hillary Clinton, Marine guards have standing orders to fight to the death to protect the classified information that’s inside those embassies. That Hillary Clinton gave similar information away, by choice, is something she needs to explain if she expects to be our next Commander-in-Chief.

[House of Wax]

‘This was all planned’: Former IG says Hillary, State Dept. are lying | New York Post




The State Department is lying when it says it didn’t know until it was too late that Hillary Clinton was improperly using personal e-mails and a private server to conduct official business — because it never set up an agency e-mail address for her in the first place, the department’s former top watchdog says.


“This was all planned in advance” to skirt rules governing federal records management, said Howard J. Krongard, who served as the agency’s inspector general from 2005 to 2008.


The Harvard-educated lawyer points out that, from Day One, Clinton was never assigned and never used a state.gov e-mail address like previous secretaries.


“That’s a change in the standard. It tells me that this was premeditated. And this eliminates claims by the State Department that they were unaware of her private e-mail server until later,” Krongard said in an exclusive interview. “How else was she supposed to do business without e-mail?”


Modal Trigger
Photo: AP
He also points to the unusual absence of a permanent inspector general during Clinton’s entire 2009-2013 term at the department. He said the 5¹/₂-year vacancy was unprecedented.


“This is a major gap. In fact, it’s without precedent,” he said. “It’s the longest period any department has gone without an IG.”


Inspectors general serve an essential and unique role in the federal government by independently investigating agency waste, fraud and abuse. Their oversight also covers violations of communications security procedures.


“It’s clear she did not want to be subject to internal investigations,” Krongard said. An e-mail audit would have easily uncovered the secret information flowing from classified government networks to the private unprotected system she set up in her New York home.


He says “the key” to the FBI’s investigation of Emailgate is determining how highly sensitive state secrets in the classified network, known as SIPRNet, ended up in Clinton’s personal e-mails.


“The starting point of the investigation is the material going through SIPRNet. She couldn’t function without the information coming over SIPRNet,” Krongard said. “How did she get it on her home server? It can’t just jump from one system to the other. Someone had to move it, copy it. The question is who did that?”


As The Post first reported, the FBI is investigating whether Clinton’s deputies copied top-secret information from the department’s classified network to its unclassified network where it was sent to Hillary’s unsecured, unencrypted e-mail account.


‘It tells me that this was premeditated. And this eliminates claims by the State Department that they were unaware of her private e-mail server until later’
- Howard J. Krongard on the State Dept. never giving Hillary an agency e-mail address
FBI agents are focusing on three of Clinton’s top department aides. Most of the 1,340 Clinton e-mails deemed classified by intelligence agency reviewers were sent to her by her chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, or her deputy chiefs, Huma Abedin and Jake Sullivan, who now hold high positions in Clinton’s presidential campaign.


“They are facing significant scrutiny now,” Krongard said, and are under “enormous pressure to cooperate” with investigators.


He says staffers who had access to secret material more than likely summarized it for Clinton in the e-mails they sent to her; but he doesn’t rule out the use of thumb drives to transfer classified information from one system to the other, which would be a serious security breach. Some of the classified computers at Foggy Bottom have ports for memory sticks.


Either way, there would be an audit trail for investigators to follow. The SIPRNet system maintains the identity of all users and their log-on and log-off times, among other activities.


“This totally eliminates the false premise that she got nothing marked classified,” Krongard said. “She’s hiding behind this defense. But they [e-mails] had to be classified, because otherwise [the information in them] wouldn’t be on the SIPRNet.”


Added Krongard: “She’s trying to distance herself from the conversion from SIPRNet to [the nonsecure] NIPRNet and to her server, but she’s throwing her staffers under the bus.”


Modal Trigger
Photo: EPA
Still, “It will never get to an indictment,” Krongard said.


For one, he says, any criminal referral to the Justice Department from the FBI “will have to go through four loyal Democrat women” — Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell, who heads the department’s criminal division; Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates; Attorney General Loretta Lynch; and top White House adviser Valerie Jarrett.


Even if they accept the referral, he says, the case quickly and quietly will be plea-bargained down to misdemeanors punishable by fines in a deal similar to the one Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall, secured for Gen. David Petraeus. In other words, a big slap on the wrist.


“He knows the drill,” Krongard said of Kendall.

[House of Wax]

BREAKING: Hillary Clinton Put Spies’ Lives at Risk | | Observer

BREAKING: Hillary Clinton Put Spies’ Lives at Risk. It`s not the `nothing-burger` Clinton allies have tried to portray -- lives are literally at stake

By*John R. Schindler*•*02/01/16 1:00pm

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks to the crowd during the King Day at the Dome rally at the S.C. State House January 18, 2016 in Columbia, South Carolina. (Photo: Sean Rayford/Getty Images)

For months you’ve read about Email Gate in this column. I’ve*elaborated*how Hillary Clinton, the apparent Democratic front runner for President this year, put large amounts of classified information at grave risk through slipshod security practices by herself and her staff. Now that scandal has taken a significant turn for the more ominous.

Last Friday afternoon the State Department’s latest court-mandated release of Hillary Clinton’s emails from when she was Secretary of State caused a new political firestorm. While*many more emails*were released by Foggy Bottom, some with redactions due to classified materials they contained, twenty-two emails totaling thirty-seven pages of text were*withheld entirely*at the request of the Intelligence Community. Those twenty-two emails, deemed “unclassified” by Ms. Clinton and her staff, were judged to be Top Secret in reality.

Since Top Secret is the U.S. Government’s highest official classification level, this revelation exploded months of denials from the Clinton presidential campaign that Hillary had done no wrong. The Federal government*defines*Top Secret materials as “information, the unauthorized disclosure of which reasonably could be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security.” The disclosure of Top Secret information is a serious criminal matter that normal Americans face prosecution and substantial jail time for perpetrating.

Nevertheless, Hillary Clinton over the weekend continued to deny any wrongdoing in EmailGate, painting the scandal as just more political theater by her enemies. Echoes of the “vast right-wing conspiracy,” the Clintonian 1990s bogeyman, are now distinctly audible. Moreover, she*compared*the story to the attack on our Benghazi consulate in 2012, which may not help her politically, given the lingering problems that tragedy still causes Ms. Clinton in certain quarters.

Most controversially, Hillary and her mouthpieces have kept pushing the line that none of this information was “marked” classified when it appeared in her personal emails, despite the fact that this claim, even if true, does not mitigate any disclosure of classified information. Her defense seems to be that neither she nor anybody on her staff were able to recognize that Top Secret information was actually Top Secret, which is hardly a ringing endorsement of Hillary’s qualifications to be our next commander-in-chief.

Mysteries abound in this latest trove of emails. One of the big ones is that four emails from Sidney Blumenthal, Hillary’s close friend and factotum, were withheld by the Intelligence Community because they were*judged*to be entirely classified. How Mr. Blumenthal, who held no U.S. Government position after January 2001, when Bill Clinton left the White House, had access to classified information a decade after that is not explained.

This column has*previously detailed*how Mr. Blumenthal was running an impressive private intelligence agency for the Secretary of State, and that his emails to Ms. Clinton inexplicably included highly sensitive Top Secret Codeword intelligence from the National Security Agency. Since Mr. Blumenthal’s emails were illegally accessed by a*private hacker, they can be safely assumed in to be in the hands of numerous foreign intelligence services. There’s a lot here that the FBI needs to unravel to understand EmailGate’s full complexity – and illegality.

Nevertheless, Hillary has upped the ante by*demanding*that the twenty-two Top Secret emails that have been withheld by the State Department be released to the public so Americans can see that they are in fact innocuous, as Ms. Clinton and her defenders maintain. Yet this is pure political theater: she surely knows that the emails are not going to be released on security grounds anytime soon, probably not for several decades, at least.

What, then, is in those twenty-two emails? Contrary to the assertions of Team Clinton that the information was benign, a “nothing-burger” to cite her allies, implying that the overzealous Intelligence Community has classified information that doesn’t need protection, their contents are Top Secret with good reason. Hillary has opted for cries of“overclassification”*as her last line of defense in EmailGate, notwithstanding that’s the choice of any officials in Washington, DC, who have broken secrecy laws and have no leg left to stand on.

Today FoxNews has*reported*that those twenty-two Top Secret emails included “operational intelligence” that involves espionage sources and methods, adding that lives have been put at risk by Hillary’s mishandling of this information.

I can confirm that the FoxNews report, which lacks any specifics about exactly what was compromised, is accurate. And what was actually in those Top Secret emails found on Hillary’s “unclassified” personal bathroom server was colossally damaging to our national security and has put lives at risk.

Discussions with Intelligence Community officials have revealed that Ms. Clinton’s “unclassified” emails included Holy Grail items of American espionage such as the true names of Central Intelligence Agency intelligence officers serving overseas under cover. Worse, some of those exposed are serving under non-official cover. NOCs (see*this*for an explanation of their important role in espionage) are the pointy end of the CIA spear and they are always at risk of exposure – which is what Ms. Clinton’s emails have done.

Not only have these spies had their lives put in serious risk by this, it’s a clear violation of Federal law. The*Intelligence Identities Protection Act*of 1982, enacted due to the murder of the CIA’s station chief in Athens after his cover was blown by the left-wing media, makes it a Federal crime to divulge the true identity of any covert operative serving U.S. intelligence if that person has not previous been publicly acknowledged to be working for our spy agencies.

People really go to jail for breaking this law.*John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer, recently emerged from two years in prison for unauthorized disclosure of classified information, including exposing the identity of an Agency colleague who was serving under cover.

Anyone possessing political memory will recall that this law was also the centerpiece of the 2003 scandal surrounding Valerie Plame, a CIA NOC officer whose identity appeared in the media after it was exposed by the George W. Bush White House. Ms. Plame became a liberal icon of sorts, complete*with high glamour, while*the affair*became an obsession for much of the mainstream media, despite the fact that the spy was physically unharmed by the leak.

Indeed, Valerie Plame parleyed the ruckus into a successful post-CIA career and she remains in the limelight. In a perverse irony, last weekend she was in New Hampshire*campaigning for Hillary Clinton. Neither Ms. Plame nor much of the media seem interested in their candidate’s far greater compromise of classified information, including the identities of NOCs like Valerie Plame once was.

Hillary’s emails also include the names of foreigners who are on the CIA payroll, according to Intelligence Community officials. Since it can be*safely assumedthat several foreign intelligence agencies intercepted Ms. Clinton’s unencrypted communications, this directly threatens the lives of the exposed individuals. “It’s a death sentence,” explained a senior Intelligence Community official: “if we’re lucky only agents, not our officers, will get killed because of this.” (Agents are foreigners working for U.S. intelligence while officers are American staffers.)

CIA and the entire Intelligence Community are in panic mode right now, trying to determine which of our intelligence officers and agents have been compromised by EmailGate. At a minimum, valuable covers have been blown, careers have been ruined, and lives have been put at serious risk. Our spies’ greatest concern now is what’s still in Hillary’s emails that investigators have yet to find.

And what about those*30,000 emails*that Ms. Clinton had deleted? “I’ll spend the rest of my career trying to figure out what classified information was in those,” stated an exasperated Pentagon counterintelligence official, “everybody is mad as hell right now.” “The worst part,” the counterspy added,” is that Moscow and Beijing have that information but the Intelligence Community maybe never will.”

[Ronkh]

FBI confirms Clinton probe | TheHill

[Accumulator]

Goodness knows I`m in that "the Clintons are the Devil" camp, but..but...what`s the *point*? I mean, end-result, functionally-speaking?

They`re not gonna spank her in any meaningful way. It`s not gonna matter in the election. It`s not gonna change anybody`s future behavior if only because everybody in that sphere thinks they can get away with anything (says cynical ol` me ) id they`re the kind of person who breaks the rules in the first place.

I can`t help but see the whole thing as a complete waste of resources at this point. Isn`t there something better for them to spend our tax money on? Like investigating Bubba`s history of sexual assaults or somesuch...

[Stokdgs]

It may turn out to be everything you said, Accumulator, but nevertheless, it all needs to come out and the person needs to know that because he/she did not admit the guilt, this is how it works...

Along that line, there is the "taking responsibility for your actions" part that has to be dealt with for the accused...

This is how it`s dealt with in the Scriptures, and while there is no more "an eye for an eye" (Old Testament), there certainly is an accounting of one`s actions and then if they were bad, there needs to be an admission of them, then restitution if possible to those that were harmed, and finally, repentance, and then for we human beings, we are to forgive them right away, but for Deity, that forgiveness comes when it is deemed time for it...

I think C.S. Lewis said it best when talking about removing sins from ourselves, he said that there is no other way, "the spell must be unwound"...

Lastly, what an example this would be for all others growing up to see that even people in high places in government or actually any place, must adhere to the laws of the land, and if not, and they run afoul of them, they are going to have to go through this process until they just admit it and do the above...
Dan F

[Ronkh]

I dont understand.....
Bernie beat her 60/40, yet she got more delegates.

[Accumulator]

Eh, I fear the lesson is gonna be "some people get away with [stuff]".

I simply don`t believe that the Clintons feel the rules apply to them, their personal philosophies/value systems just don`t include that. It`s like trying to convince a sociopath that their behavior is wrong...hey, maybe it`s more than "like" that, maybe it *is* that!

If there will be any real punishment, OK, but I`ll believe that when it`s meted out. Hope I`m proven wrong, guess we`ll see.

[Stokdgs]

Eh, I fear the lesson is gonna be "some people get away with [stuff]".

I simply don`t believe that the Clintons feel the rules apply to them, their personal philosophies/value systems just don`t include that. It`s like trying to convince a sociopath that their behavior is wrong...hey, maybe it`s more than "like" that, maybe it *is* that!

If there will be any real punishment, OK, but I`ll believe that when it`s meted out. Hope I`m proven wrong, guess we`ll see.

Accumulator,

Well, for those that believe that the rules don`t apply to them, imagine their terror when they find out in the by and by, that YES, the rules DO apply and will at that time be enforced...
Dan F

[Accumulator]

I wish we had some way to change their behavior in the here-and-now, but that`s easier said than done.

I guess I get [ticked] off about the endless hearings/investigations/etc. because there is just *so* much to be done and I see those activities as squandering resources that could be better applied.. And here I am, discussing stuff like Politics on the internet...I feel like an idiot even when it`s a reasonable discussion with people I esteem Same ol` thing I was ranting about other people doing...I`m wasting resources doing something that accomplished nothing. Life`s too short to waste even mere moments on this stuff, there`s just too much to do.

[Ronkh]

I figured it out....
It`s common core math.

[Accumulator]

This thread is like Crack, I gotta avoid it for a while or I`ll feel guilty about not spending the time waxing an undercarriage (thinking about another thread I just posted on ).

[Ronkh]

Mebbe O gave the stand down order...................

Rescue Interrupted | Full Measure


Part 2

Rescue Interrupted Part 2 | Full Measure


Even though the ad is in Spanish, program is in English.


Dunno how real it is, but ...........................

[Ronkh]

bumping this cuz nobody commented

[GearHead_1]

Watched them. Not sure what to say. Could it be accurate? In my opinion, sure. I don`t think we`ve ever been given the whole story.