Hillary Clinton: National Security Disaster -How Hillary's Contempt for Protocols has Endangered the Entire Nation

by Arnold Ahlert

For an army of ethically compromised defenders in politics and the media, Hillary Clinton’s email scandal is being framed as little more than a political attack aimed solely at derailing her presidential candidacy. Yet while each new revelation makes it harder to dismiss Hillary and Bill’s seemingly endless effort to monetize the Clinton Foundation by virtually any means possible, most of it is beside the point. What’s not beside the point is the reality that Hillary Clinton is a walking, talking national security disaster.

The Daily Beast’s John R. Schindler, who wonders if other officials in the Obama administration, including the president, will be burned by this scandal, notes that many counterintelligence officials now assume Clinton’s emails have been read by foreign intelligence officials in Russia and China because her server was “wholly unencrypted for months.” A Department of Defense counterintelligence official was so certain of that reality he insisted that anyone working for the Chinese or Russians would be fired if they couldn’t explain why “they didn’t have all of Hillary’s email.”

As if on cue, RadarOnline.com revealed a person claiming to be a computer specialist allegedly has 32,000 emails from Clinton’s private server, and is putting them up for sale for $500,000. “Promising to give the trove of the former Secretary of State’s emails to the highest bidder, the specialist is showing subject lines as proof of what appear to be legitimate messages,” the website states.

At least four of those emails contain subject lines with the word “Sid,” presumably referring to Clinton hatchet man Sidney Blumenthal, whose own AOL account was breached in 2013 by the Romanian hacker known as Guccifer. That hack also revealed Clinton’s @clintonemail.com email address. The website’s source warns that if the 32,000 emails enter the public domain, “not only is Hillary finished as a potential Presidential nominee, she could put our country’s national security at risk.”

She already has, and the National Review’s Stanley Kurtz reveals the unassailable logic behind that assertion. Even if Clinton was extraordinarily lucky, and the Russians and Chinese haven’t accessed some or all of her emails, it is nonetheless incumbent on the nation’s entire security community to behave as if they did. “Doesn’t that mean that we are now making massive changes to the sources and methods of our intelligence?” Kurtz asks. “Are we now withdrawing valuable agents? Are we trying to replace methods that cannot be easily replicated? Are we now forced to rebuild a good deal of our intelligence capabilities from the ground up? Are we not suffering tremendous intelligence damage right now, regardless of what foreign intelligence services did or did not manage to snatch from Hillary’s server—simply because we are forced to assume that they got it all?”

Considering the stakes—as well as the reality there have been massive hacks at Office of Personnel Management, networks of the Department of Defense (DOD), the IRS, the State Department (called the “worst ever”), and the White House, compromising the personal data of million of Americans—the answer is an unequivocal yes.

Probe for digital traces of cyber-espionage by foreign governments

Yet arrogant as ever, Hillary completely dismisses the possibility her emails were hacked, insisting in March her private system “was set up for President Clinton’s office. And it had numerous safeguards. It was on property guarded by the Secret Service. And there were no security breaches.”

FBI investigators refuse to confirm that assessment, and they will continue to probe for digital traces of cyber-espionage by foreign governments. That probe includes determining how the data on the private server were protected, a forensic analysis of the physical server to ascertain whether traces of code appear that suggest hacking programs, and an effort to reconstruct the logs of any machines that accessed Clinton’s server during her tenure as Secretary of State.

All this was necessitated by the reality that the server turned over to the FBI by Denver-based computer services firm Platte River Networks, who had been hired by the Clintons in 2013 after Hillary had left the State Department, had been wiped clean.

Clinton continues to insist she has done nothing wrong. Yet the trail of lies that attends this scandal says otherwise. At her press conference in March, Clinton claimed she carried “one device for my work.” Two weeks later a freedom of information request by the AP revealed Clinton’s use of multiple electronic devices, including an iPad and a BlackBerry. At the same presser she insisted she was “well aware of classification requirements and did not send classified material.” We now know Clinton wrote and sent at least six e-mails containing classified information using her private server. And the inspector general of 17 spy agencies told Congress a random sample of 40 emails already released contained information labeled “Top Secret.”

Clinton also insisted there was no law or regulation preventing her from having “the full authority to decide how I was going to communicate.” Yet in 2009, shortly after Clinton became Secretary of State, the U.S. Code of federal regulations on handling electronic records was updated. It stated that “Agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that Federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency record-keeping system.” Responsibility for adhering to that law was the responsibility of “the head of each federal agency.” Furthermore, acable bearing Clinton’s signature warned department employees to “avoid conducting official Department business from your personal e-mail accounts.”

Apparently Clinton’s inner circle, which includes former Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, Deputy Chief of Staff Jacob Sullivan, and personal aide Huma Abedin, never got the memo. Every one of them sent or received classified emails from Clinton. And Abedin also had a private account on the server that is now in FBI custody.