Hillary Clinton's Damning Emails
Wednesday, 04 May 2016 00:00 By Ray McGovern, Consortium News | Op-Ed
A few weeks after leaving office, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
may have breathed a sigh of relief and reassurance when Director of National
Intelligence James Clapper denied reports of the National Security Agency
eavesdropping on Americans. After all, Clinton had been handling official
business at the State Department like many Americans do with their personal
business, on an unsecured server.
In sworn testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on March 12,
2013, Clapper said the NSA was not collecting, wittingly, "any type of data
at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans," which presumably
would have covered Clinton's unsecured emails.
I would guess that Clapper's confession may have come as a shock to then
ex-Secretary Clinton, as she became aware that her own emails might be among
the trillions of communications that NSA was vacuuming up. Nevertheless, she
found Snowden's truth-telling a safer target for her fury than Clapper's
dishonesty and NSA's dragnet. But NSA contractor Edward Snowden's
revelations -- starting on June 5, 2013 -- gave the lie to Clapper's
testimony, which Clapper then retracted on June 21 -- coincidentally,
Snowden's 30th birthday -- when Clapper sent a letter to the Senators to
whom he had, well, lied. Clapper admitted his "response was clearly
erroneous -- for which I apologize." (On the chance you are wondering what
became of Clapper, he is still DNI.)
In April 2014, Clinton suggested that Snowden had helped terrorists by
giving "all kinds of information, not only to big countries, but to networks
and terrorist groups and the like." Clinton was particularly hard on Snowden
for going to China (Hong Kong) and Russia to escape a vengeful prosecution
by the U.S. government.
Clinton even explained what extraordinary lengths she and her people went to
in safeguarding government secrets: "When I would go to China or would go to
Russia, we would leave all my electronic equipment on the plane with the
batteries out, because . they're trying to find out not just about what we
do in our government, they're . going after the personal emails of people
who worked in the State Department." Yes, she said that. (emphasis added)
Hoisted on Her Own Petard
Alas, nearly a year later, in March 2015, it became known that during her
tenure as Secretary of State she had not been as diligent as she led the
American people to believe. She had used a private server for official
communications, rather than the usual official State Department email
accounts maintained on federal servers. Thousands of those emails would
retroactively be marked classified -- some at the TOP SECRET/Codeword level
-- by the department.
During an interview last September, Snowden was asked to respond to the
revelations about highly classified material showing up on Clinton's
personal server: "When the unclassified systems of the United States
government, which has a full-time information security staff, regularly gets
hacked, the idea that someone keeping a private server in the renovated
bathroom of a server farm in Colorado is more secure is completely
ridiculous."
"She would never intentionally put America in any kind of jeopardy," the
President said on April 10. In the same interview, Obama told 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 case,
but in any case. Full stop. Period."
Asked if Clinton "intentionally endangered US international security by
being so careless with her email," Snowden said it was not his place to say.
Nor, it would seem, is it President Barack Obama's place to say, especially
considering that the FBI is actively investigating Clinton's security
breach. But Obama has said it anyway.
But, although a former professor of Constitutional law, the President sports
a checkered history when it comes to prejudicing investigations and even
trials, conducted by those ultimately reporting to him. For example, more
than two years before Chelsea Manning was brought to trial, the President
stated publicly: "We are a nation of laws. We don't let individuals make
decisions about how the law operates. [Manning] broke the law!"
Not surprisingly, the ensuing court martial found Manning guilty, just as
the Commander in Chief had predicted. Though Manning's purpose in disclosing
mostly low-level classified information was to alert the American public
about war crimes and other abuses by the U.S. government, Manning was
sentenced to 35 years in prison.
Prosecutorial Double Standards
On March 9, when presidential candidate Clinton was asked, impertinently
during a debate, whether she would withdraw from the race if she were
indicted for her cavalier handling of government secrets, she offered her
own certain prediction: "Oh, for goodness sake! It's not going to happen.
I'm not even answering that question."
Merited or not, there is, sadly, some precedent for Clinton's supreme
confidence. Retired General and ex-CIA Director David Petraeus, after all,
lied to the FBI (a felony for "lesser" folks) about giving his
mistress/biographer highly classified information and got off with a slap on
the wrist, a misdemeanor fine and probation, no jail time -- a deal that
Obama's first Attorney General Eric Holder did on his way out the door.
We are likely to learn shortly whether Attorney General Loretta Lynch is as
malleable as Holder or whether she will allow FBI Director James Comey, who
held his nose in letting Petraeus cop a plea, to conduct an unfettered
investigation this time -- or simply whether Comey will be compelled to
enforce Clinton's assurance that "it's not going to happen."
Last week, Fox News TV legal commentator Andrew Napolitano said the FBI is
in the final stages of its investigation into Clinton and her private email
server. His sources tell him that "the evidence of her guilt is
overwhelming," and that the FBI has enough evidence to indict and convict.
Whether Napolitano has it right or not, it seems likely that Clinton is
reading President Obama correctly -- no profile in courage is he. Nor is
Obama likely to kill the political fortunes of the now presumptive
Democratic presidential nominee. Yet, if he orders Lynch and Comey not to
hold Hillary Clinton accountable for what -- in my opinion and that of most
other veteran intelligence officials whom I've consulted -- amounts to at
least criminal negligence, another noxious precedent will be set.
Knowing Too Much
This time, however, the equities and interests of the powerful, secretive
NSA, as well as the FBI and Justice, are deeply involved. And by now all of
them know "where the bodies are buried," as the smart folks inside the
Beltway like to say. So the question becomes would a future President
Hillary Clinton have total freedom of maneuver if she were beholden to those
all well aware of her past infractions and the harm they have done to this
country.
One very important, though as yet unmentioned, question is whether security
lapses involving Clinton and her emails contributed to what Clinton has
deemed her worst moment as Secretary of State, the killing of Ambassador
Christopher Stevens and three other U.S. personnel at the lightly guarded
U.S. "mission" (a very small, idiosyncratic, consulate-type complex not
performing any consular affairs) in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012.
However, if there is any indication that Clinton's belatedly classified
emails contained information about internal State Department discussions
regarding the consulate's security shortcomings, questions may be raised
about whether that information was somehow compromised by a foreign
intelligence agency and shared with the attackers. Somehow the terrorists
who mounted the assault were aware of the absence of meaningful security at
the facility, though obviously there were other means for them to have made
that determination, including the State Department's reliance on unreliable
local militias who might well have shared that inside information with the
attackers.
We know that State Department bureaucrats under Secretary Clinton overruled
repeated requests for additional security in Benghazi. We also know that
Clinton disregarded NSA's repeated warnings against the use of unencrypted
communications. One of NSA's core missions, after all, is to create and
maintain secure communications for military, diplomatic, and other
government users.
Clinton's flouting of the rules, in NSA's face, would have created
additional incentive for NSA to keep an especially close watch on her emails
and telephone calls. The NSA also might know whether some intelligence
service successfully hacked into Clinton's server, but there's no reason to
think that the NSA would share that sort of information with the FBI, given
the NSA's history of not sharing its data with other federal agencies even
when doing so makes sense.
The NSA arrogates to itself the prerogative of deciding what information to
keep within NSA walls and what to share with the other intelligence and law
enforcement agencies like the FBI. (One bitter consequence of this jealously
guarded parochialism was the NSA's failure to share very precise information
that could have thwarted the attacks of 9/11, as former NSA insiders have
revealed.)
It is altogether likely that Gen. Keith Alexander, head of NSA from 2005 to
2014, neglected to tell the Secretary of State of NSA's "collect it all"
dragnet collection that included the emails and telephone calls of Americans
-- including Clinton's. This need not have been simply the result of
Alexander's pique at her disdain for communications security requirements,
but rather mostly a consequence of NSA's modus operandi.
With the mindset at NSA, one could readily argue that the Secretary of State
-- and perhaps the President himself -- had no "need-to-know." And, needless
to say, the fewer briefed on the NSA's flagrant disregard for Fourth
Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures the better.
So, if there is something incriminating -- or at least politically damaging
-- in Clinton's emails, it's a safe bet that at least the NSA and maybe the
FBI, as well, knows. And that could make life difficult for a Clinton-45
presidency. Inside the Beltway, we don't say the word "blackmail," but the
potential will be there. The whole thing needs to be cleaned up now before
the choices for the next President are locked in.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not
be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
RAY MCGOVERN
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publication arm of the ecumenical
Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He served at CIA from the
administrations of John F. Kennedy to that of George H. W. Bush, and was one
of five CIA "alumni" who created Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity (VIPS) in January 2003.
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By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! | Video Report
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Hillary Clinton's Damning Emails
Wednesday, 04 May 2016 00:00 By Ray McGovern, Consortium News | Op-Ed
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. A few weeks after leaving office, former Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton may have breathed a sigh of relief and reassurance when Director of
National Intelligence James Clapper denied reports of the National Security
Agency eavesdropping on Americans. After all, Clinton had been handling
official business at the State Department like many Americans do with their
personal business, on an unsecured server.
. In sworn testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on March
12, 2013, Clapper said the NSA was not collecting, wittingly, "any type of
data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans," which
presumably would have covered Clinton's unsecured emails.
I would guess that Clapper's confession may have come as a shock to then
ex-Secretary Clinton, as she became aware that her own emails might be among
the trillions of communications that NSA was vacuuming up. Nevertheless, she
found Snowden's truth-telling a safer target for her fury than Clapper's
dishonesty and NSA's dragnet. But NSA contractor Edward Snowden's
revelations -- starting on June 5, 2013 -- gave the lie to Clapper's
testimony, which Clapper then retracted on June 21 -- coincidentally,
Snowden's 30th birthday -- when Clapper sent a letter to the Senators to
whom he had, well, lied. Clapper admitted his "response was clearly
erroneous -- for which I apologize." (On the chance you are wondering what
became of Clapper, he is still DNI.)
In April 2014, Clinton suggested that Snowden had helped terrorists by
giving "all kinds of information, not only to big countries, but to networks
and terrorist groups and the like." Clinton was particularly hard on Snowden
for going to China (Hong Kong) and Russia to escape a vengeful prosecution
by the U.S. government.
Clinton even explained what extraordinary lengths she and her people went to
in safeguarding government secrets: "When I would go to China or would go to
Russia, we would leave all my electronic equipment on the plane with the
batteries out, because . they're trying to find out not just about what we
do in our government, they're . going after the personal emails of people
who worked in the State Department." Yes, she said that. (emphasis added)
Hoisted on Her Own Petard
Alas, nearly a year later, in March 2015, it became known that during her
tenure as Secretary of State she had not been as diligent as she led the
American people to believe. She had used a private server for official
communications, rather than the usual official State Department email
accounts maintained on federal servers. Thousands of those emails would
retroactively be marked classified -- some at the TOP SECRET/Codeword level
-- by the department.
During an interview last September, Snowden was asked to respond to the
revelations about highly classified material showing up on Clinton's
personal server: "When the unclassified systems of the United States
government, which has a full-time information security staff, regularly gets
hacked, the idea that someone keeping a private server in the renovated
bathroom of a server farm in Colorado is more secure is completely
ridiculous."
"She would never intentionally put America in any kind of jeopardy," the
President said on April 10. In the same interview, Obama told 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 case,
but in any case. Full stop. Period."
Asked if Clinton "intentionally endangered US international security by
being so careless with her email," Snowden said it was not his place to say.
Nor, it would seem, is it President Barack Obama's place to say, especially
considering that the FBI is actively investigating Clinton's security
breach. But Obama has said it anyway.
But, although a former professor of Constitutional law, the President sports
a checkered history when it comes to prejudicing investigations and even
trials, conducted by those ultimately reporting to him. For example, more
than two years before Chelsea Manning was brought to trial, the President
stated publicly: "We are a nation of laws. We don't let individuals make
decisions about how the law operates. [Manning] broke the law!"
Not surprisingly, the ensuing court martial found Manning guilty, just as
the Commander in Chief had predicted. Though Manning's purpose in disclosing
mostly low-level classified information was to alert the American public
about war crimes and other abuses by the U.S. government, Manning was
sentenced to 35 years in prison.
Prosecutorial Double Standards
On March 9, when presidential candidate Clinton was asked, impertinently
during a debate, whether she would withdraw from the race if she were
indicted for her cavalier handling of government secrets, she offered her
own certain prediction: "Oh, for goodness sake! It's not going to happen.
I'm not even answering that question."
Merited or not, there is, sadly, some precedent for Clinton's supreme
confidence. Retired General and ex-CIA Director David Petraeus, after all,
lied to the FBI (a felony for "lesser" folks) about giving his
mistress/biographer highly classified information and got off with a slap on
the wrist, a misdemeanor fine and probation, no jail time -- a deal that
Obama's first Attorney General Eric Holder did on his way out the door.
We are likely to learn shortly whether Attorney General Loretta Lynch is as
malleable as Holder or whether she will allow FBI Director James Comey, who
held his nose in letting Petraeus cop a plea, to conduct an unfettered
investigation this time -- or simply whether Comey will be compelled to
enforce Clinton's assurance that "it's not going to happen."
Last week, Fox News TV legal commentator Andrew Napolitano said the FBI is
in the final stages of its investigation into Clinton and her private email
server. His sources tell him that "the evidence of her guilt is
overwhelming," and that the FBI has enough evidence to indict and convict.
Whether Napolitano has it right or not, it seems likely that Clinton is
reading President Obama correctly -- no profile in courage is he. Nor is
Obama likely to kill the political fortunes of the now presumptive
Democratic presidential nominee. Yet, if he orders Lynch and Comey not to
hold Hillary Clinton accountable for what -- in my opinion and that of most
other veteran intelligence officials whom I've consulted -- amounts to at
least criminal negligence, another noxious precedent will be set.
Knowing Too Much
This time, however, the equities and interests of the powerful, secretive
NSA, as well as the FBI and Justice, are deeply involved. And by now all of
them know "where the bodies are buried," as the smart folks inside the
Beltway like to say. So the question becomes would a future President
Hillary Clinton have total freedom of maneuver if she were beholden to those
all well aware of her past infractions and the harm they have done to this
country.
One very important, though as yet unmentioned, question is whether security
lapses involving Clinton and her emails contributed to what Clinton has
deemed her worst moment as Secretary of State, the killing of Ambassador
Christopher Stevens and three other U.S. personnel at the lightly guarded
U.S. "mission" (a very small, idiosyncratic, consulate-type complex not
performing any consular affairs) in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012.
However, if there is any indication that Clinton's belatedly classified
emails contained information about internal State Department discussions
regarding the consulate's security shortcomings, questions may be raised
about whether that information was somehow compromised by a foreign
intelligence agency and shared with the attackers. Somehow the terrorists
who mounted the assault were aware of the absence of meaningful security at
the facility, though obviously there were other means for them to have made
that determination, including the State Department's reliance on unreliable
local militias who might well have shared that inside information with the
attackers.
We know that State Department bureaucrats under Secretary Clinton overruled
repeated requests for additional security in Benghazi. We also know that
Clinton disregarded NSA's repeated warnings against the use of unencrypted
communications. One of NSA's core missions, after all, is to create and
maintain secure communications for military, diplomatic, and other
government users.
Clinton's flouting of the rules, in NSA's face, would have created
additional incentive for NSA to keep an especially close watch on her emails
and telephone calls. The NSA also might know whether some intelligence
service successfully hacked into Clinton's server, but there's no reason to
think that the NSA would share that sort of information with the FBI, given
the NSA's history of not sharing its data with other federal agencies even
when doing so makes sense.
The NSA arrogates to itself the prerogative of deciding what information to
keep within NSA walls and what to share with the other intelligence and law
enforcement agencies like the FBI. (One bitter consequence of this jealously
guarded parochialism was the NSA's failure to share very precise information
that could have thwarted the attacks of 9/11, as former NSA insiders have
revealed.)
It is altogether likely that Gen. Keith Alexander, head of NSA from 2005 to
2014, neglected to tell the Secretary of State of NSA's "collect it all"
dragnet collection that included the emails and telephone calls of Americans
-- including Clinton's. This need not have been simply the result of
Alexander's pique at her disdain for communications security requirements,
but rather mostly a consequence of NSA's modus operandi.
With the mindset at NSA, one could readily argue that the Secretary of State
-- and perhaps the President himself -- had no "need-to-know." And, needless
to say, the fewer briefed on the NSA's flagrant disregard for Fourth
Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures the better.
So, if there is something incriminating -- or at least politically damaging
-- in Clinton's emails, it's a safe bet that at least the NSA and maybe the
FBI, as well, knows. And that could make life difficult for a Clinton-45
presidency. Inside the Beltway, we don't say the word "blackmail," but the
potential will be there. The whole thing needs to be cleaned up now before
the choices for the next President are locked in.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not
be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
Ray McGovern
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publication arm of the ecumenical
Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He served at CIA from the
administrations of John F. Kennedy to that of George H. W. Bush, and was one
of five CIA "alumni" who created Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity (VIPS) in January 2003.
Related Stories
White House Struggles to Explain Clinton Email Flap
By Anita Kumar, McClatchy Newspapers | ReportClinton Proposes Campaign
Finance Reform While Raking in Millions From Wall Street Since 2008
By Candice Bernd, Truthout | ReportClinton vs. Sanders: Who Do Progressives
Choose?
By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! | Video Report
Show Comments
