CC: KGB -- Hillary's reality
2015-10-25:
Hillary has made a number of assertions in her account of her communications methods as Secretary of State
which the media, it seems to me,
has failed to place in the proper context.
Let us consider two of them:
But let's look at some other true statements:
Again, my bottom line:
When the media lets her statements cited above go without challenge,
they are failing, very badly,
their duty to bring out the reason why those statements
fail to address the real problems that she, by her decisions,
has caused for America.
Some further articles discussing this issue:
by Michael Scheuer
non-intervention.com (his blog), 2015-11-05
[I have added the emphasis and the explicit reference to Mr. Netanyahu.]
...
The use America’s enemies will make of Mrs. Clinton’s e-mails will be pretty much as follows:
In sum, Mrs. Clinton’s e-mails are a treasure of personal and — given it is the Clintons — almost certainly salacious information. As this is written, foreign leaders and their intelligence services may well know who Bill and/or Hillary are sleeping with, which of Secretary Clinton’s official decisions were made to benefit a foreign nation and/or the Clintons, how many movie stars were exchanging gossipy e-mails with her while Ambassador Stevens and his team died, what Obama administration scandals she knew of and helped the president and other cabinet members to evade, what means she used to undercut Obama to advance her political aspirations, etc. If such matters are discussed in Hillary’s e-mails, moreover, the e-mails sent to her will give the public equal insight into the unsavory/illegal activities of her correspondents.
Also, and more important, Mrs. Clinton’s e-mails and the responses to them are a treasure for U.S. enemies because they deal with her official diplomatic activities, as well as present and planned U.S. government policies — and those of our allies — that pertain to them and their interests. Those e-mails, too, are being reviewed by Mr. Putin, Mr. Rouhani, [Mr. Netanyahu,] and their minions to identify which can best be used to threaten “President” Clinton with exposure if she refuses to compromise U.S. national interests and foreign-policy objectives.
When attempts by foreign governments are made to suborn an elected Mrs. Clinton — and they will be — she will be faced with two choices. First, she can refuse to cooperate and immediately and publicly inform Americans about the matter in her resignation speech, thereby destroying much of the value of the e-mails to America’s enemies. Second, she can agree to be suborned, accept large tranches of well-laundered cash from her new foreign employer; and pretend to be looking out for America while actively undercutting U.S. security.
Of the two, the latter choice seems more likely because of (a) the long and well-documented public record of Mrs. Clinton’s and her husband’s seemingly insatiable greed; (b) the reality that she and he are quite comfortable with and experienced at working for a foreign power, given the decades they have been taking “campaign contributions” from U.S.-citizen Israel-Firsters in return for compromising U.S. security on Israel’s behalf; and (c) the simple fact that if she cared a tinker’s damn about U.S. security and the republic’s survival she would have never, ever broken the law by using an unencrypted e-mail system for government business while secretary of state.
One must wonder how FBI Director Comey and the FBI and Attorney General Lynch and the Justice Department will ignore the foregoing reality when they refuse to indict the obviously guilty Mrs. Clinton? Oh, yes, I forgot, they are Democrats beholden to an anti-American Democratic president. As such the party and power must always come first, and all other Americans and their security, country, and liberty must always take the hindmost.
Lois Lerner redux, I suppose you might call it.
...
[As of 2015-11-05, I have added the following comment in his blog to this article:]
Mike, you omit the culpability of the IC in this.
Surely some of her email communications were with her fellow members of the National Security Council, and also with lower level government employees who were cognizant of the risks she was running through her private server, and also the fact that ALL communications of members of the NSC are prime collection targets for any big league intelligence operation.
Surely at least one of those was knowledgeable and responsible enough to pass this information, and his concerns about it, through the appropriate COMSEC channels to the U.S. government agency with overall responsibility for U.S. government communications security, the National Security Agency.
Not to mention the probability that said agency does general monitoring (sniffing and scanning) of Internet traffic for matters of intelligence interest, such as senior U.S. officials screwing up their communications.
The question is:
What did said agency do with this hot potato that had fallen in its lap?
My expectation would be that its officials mulled it over, than discussed the matter with their counterparts in the ODNI and the NSC.
But what happened then?
Surely there must be an audit trail somewhere in the IC of what the IC knew about this matter and what it did about it.
Somebody, some IG or member or body of Congress, really needs to ask that agency what it knew about HRCs communications, and what it did about that knowledge.
by Paul Roderick Gregory
Forbes Opinion, 2016-02-12
[This is a very, very useful article,
giving key background to the widely-reported story of the emails.
An excerpt; empasis is added.]
...
The national security risks of the Clinton e-mail scandal have taken an undeserved backseat.
Putin’s Kremlin has one of the most sophisticated cyber warfare systems the world has ever seen.
Kremlin cyber experts would surely have used the Guccifer e-mails to try to access Clinton’s e-mails
on an account that apparently had no special security protections.
A Kremlin penetration of Clinton’s private e-mail account would give it
the world’s most complete record of her secretary of state correspondence
including the almost 32,000 emails that the Clinton team deemed private and made unavailable.
Consider Vladimir Putin with a full inventory of Clinton e-mails.
Putin’s KGB training was in running agents,
most recruited bykompromat (compromising information) that he had gathered,
meaning that he would immediately have understood the possibilities.
Putin’s FSB and military security experts would be told to scour the load of e-mails for operational information, names, addresses and dates.
Askompromat specialists, they would look for personal Clinton material ranging from embarrassing to compromising.
As a KGB agent who cut his teeth onkompromat,
Putin would consider several options on how and when to use the Hillary file with maximum effect.
If he preferred Hillary’s Republican opponent in the general election,
he could release enough incriminating information
(that could not be traced back to the Kremlin, of course)
to scuttle her candidacy.
For those who believe Putin would not dare interfere with a U.S. election,
consider his strange flirtation with Donald Trump.
Putin, however, may prefer Hillary to give him a sitting U.S. president on whom he has a big stack ofkompromat.
If Putin rules out blackmail,
the Kremlin could selectively leak damaging information to U.S. allies and enemies
that would weaken the United States’ hand in world affairs throughout a Clinton presidency.
Those who follow Kremlin propaganda understand that
it is not necessary for Putin to have Clinton’s e-mails
to cause serious damage to a Clinton presidency.
All he needs is that many believe he has Hillary’s e-mails.
The Kremlin specializes in fabricating narratives (such as the U.S. intent to steal Siberia)
that are false but may contain a small kernel of truth.
Putin’s army of “information technologists” (propagandists) can release fabrications to its numerous clandestine sources throughout the world.
Clinton might ignore or deny those narratives (which cannot be traced to the Kremlin),
but the mere idea that Putin has her e-mails will lend the necessary credibility to the story.
The Kremlin knows that repeated lies are eventually taken as truth,
so that an unsourced narrative, repeated, will eventually become the “truth.”
Who knows what Putin’s information technologists can cook up to blacken the presidency of Hillary Clinton?
Hillary Clinton has laughed off the e-mail scandal as partisan or petty legalism.
I hope that she and the American public understand the threat to national security her e-mails have caused.
The national security threat increases if she is elected president.
I would hope that the Democrat Party, and candidate Clinton understand this and do what is right for the American people.
[The trouble with this analysis is that Hillary is not unique in her use of potentially hackable email.
Which presidential candidate does not use email for his or her personal communications?
And of those, presumably all, who do,
who has an unhackable, totally secure, email system?
In other words, any presidential candidate has similar vulnerabilites when it comes tokompromat .
What does make Hillary unique, however,
is her use of a personal system for her official duties as U.S. Secretary of State,
which, according to reports, lacked even the not-so-great security of the State Department's systems.]
Hillary has made a number of assertions in her account of her communications methods as Secretary of State
which the media, it seems to me,
has failed to place in the proper context.
Let us consider two of them:
- She, and her surrogates, have frequently noted that,
at least to date,
none of the emails from her, or to her, stored on her private server
were MARKED as classified.
In 2015, as appropriate U.S. authorities have the opportunity to examine what was on that server,
they are determining that
some of the emails should have been classified.
But they weren't so marked during her tenure as SecState.
Again, to date, that seems to be a true statement. - Clinton (and her surrogates):
"To date, there is no hard evidence that anyone has hacked my server."
Again a true statement, so far as is publicly known to date.
But let's look at some other true statements:
- It is a fact,
which anyone at the level of SecState, or his/her closest advisors,
should know with rock-hard certainty,
that the communications of top level officials in the U.S. government
are a prime target for interception by entities which are in part or whole
hostile to the U.S. government.
In that category must be included such nation-states as
Russia, China, North Korea, and, yes, Israel
(not necessarily hostile, but surely interested in influencing U.S. policy,
and therefore desirous of knowing what U.S. officials are saying among themselves),
and various non-state actors who have hacking skills.
This is true whether or not the communications are marked as classified.
Did Hillary, and her senior staff, such as Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin,
not know this?
If they didn't, what the hell were they doing in those senior positions? - Consider an example from ancient history (to many of those now alive :-).
For much of the 1950s,
John Foster Dulles was President Eisenhower's SecState.
What if he had told his secretaries:
"All my communications which aren't marked as classified,
be sure to send a courtesy copy to the USSR Embassy,
just so they know what I'm thinking about and doing."
If that had been true, and known to the American people,
I'll go out on a limb and say the outrage would have been incredible,
from Congress, editorial boards and pundits, and from various patriotic organizations.
"Why are you making espionage so easy for the KGB?"
would have been the least of the comments.
(P.S.: Yes, I know that (this part of) the KGB has been replaced by
another, but similar, organization.
But whatever name is used by foreign intelligence organizations,
the issue for the U.S. is still there.) - Let's consider some more facts about her emails.
She reports that her server had something like 60,000 emails,
~30,000 "of a personal nature" and ~30,000 of an official nature.
I haven't seen a number for the number of correspondents for those emails,
but surely it was in the hundreds, if not thousands.
Then there were the other places those first-level correspondents
would have forwarded her emails to.
I, at least, would think we now are in the thousands for sure.
Further, some of the emails were sent or received
while she was in foreign countries,
using the telecom organizations of those countries
(see "DOJ Officials Fear Foreign Telecoms Hacked Clinton Emails, Server").
With all that activity,
would any knowledgeable person really believe
the communications intelligence organizations of Russia, China, and Israel, among others,
were unaware of exactly what "clintonemail.com" was being used for?
I would very seriously question the sanity or truthfulness
of any person competent in such matters who would deny that
the probability that those states, among others,
knew exactly what was happening.
And what then?
Each of Russia, China, and Israel
have very sophisticated cyberintelligence operations,
with highly effective hacking skills.
This is widely known.
And that her server was guarded with the cyber equivalent of tin foil
for critical times is also widely known
(see " 'Like inviting spies over to dinner':
Cyber experts are stunned by Hillary Clinton's security choices").
The bottom line:
We absolutely must assume that Russia, China, and Israel
have the contents of her server
stored in the files of their intelligence organizations.
Again, my bottom line:
When the media lets her statements cited above go without challenge,
they are failing, very badly,
their duty to bring out the reason why those statements
fail to address the real problems that she, by her decisions,
has caused for America.
Some further articles discussing this issue:
2015-11-05-Scheuer-mr-putin-and-hillary-clintons-e-mails
Mr. Putin and Hillary Clinton’s e-mailsby Michael Scheuer
non-intervention.com (his blog), 2015-11-05
[I have added the emphasis and the explicit reference to Mr. Netanyahu.]
...
The use America’s enemies will make of Mrs. Clinton’s e-mails will be pretty much as follows:
- Because the Russians, Chinese, Iranians, Israelis, and others have all of Hillary’s unencrypted e-mails, as well as those e-mails sent to her by others in the same channel, their problem is not if to use them against her, but only the timing of when to use them.
- For each of these foreign governments it would be singularly unproductive to use this great, once-in-a-lifetime intelligence asset before the presidential election. Foreign leaders would gain little but the acute embarrassment of Mrs. Clinton and the outgoing Obama regime from pre-election publishing in either their domestic media or via leaks to Western journalists.
- The impact of pre-election publication, moreover, might cost Mrs. Clinton the presidency and she is — far and away — the favorite candidate of the Russians, Chinese, Israelis, and Iranians precisely because they have each stolen her communications and can use them to compromise her in the very same Oval Office that played host to feminist-hero Bill’s sexual suborning of a young female intern.
- Mr. Putin and his regime, among U.S. enemies, are in the cat-bird seat in regard to blackmailing Mrs. Clinton because they have her e-mails and they know what Hillary, Bill, the State Department, and the Clinton Foundation did to advance the interests of Russia and other foreign states and companies — and the Clinton’s personal wealth — while she was Secretary of State.
In sum, Mrs. Clinton’s e-mails are a treasure of personal and — given it is the Clintons — almost certainly salacious information. As this is written, foreign leaders and their intelligence services may well know who Bill and/or Hillary are sleeping with, which of Secretary Clinton’s official decisions were made to benefit a foreign nation and/or the Clintons, how many movie stars were exchanging gossipy e-mails with her while Ambassador Stevens and his team died, what Obama administration scandals she knew of and helped the president and other cabinet members to evade, what means she used to undercut Obama to advance her political aspirations, etc. If such matters are discussed in Hillary’s e-mails, moreover, the e-mails sent to her will give the public equal insight into the unsavory/illegal activities of her correspondents.
Also, and more important, Mrs. Clinton’s e-mails and the responses to them are a treasure for U.S. enemies because they deal with her official diplomatic activities, as well as present and planned U.S. government policies — and those of our allies — that pertain to them and their interests. Those e-mails, too, are being reviewed by Mr. Putin, Mr. Rouhani, [Mr. Netanyahu,] and their minions to identify which can best be used to threaten “President” Clinton with exposure if she refuses to compromise U.S. national interests and foreign-policy objectives.
When attempts by foreign governments are made to suborn an elected Mrs. Clinton — and they will be — she will be faced with two choices. First, she can refuse to cooperate and immediately and publicly inform Americans about the matter in her resignation speech, thereby destroying much of the value of the e-mails to America’s enemies. Second, she can agree to be suborned, accept large tranches of well-laundered cash from her new foreign employer; and pretend to be looking out for America while actively undercutting U.S. security.
Of the two, the latter choice seems more likely because of (a) the long and well-documented public record of Mrs. Clinton’s and her husband’s seemingly insatiable greed; (b) the reality that she and he are quite comfortable with and experienced at working for a foreign power, given the decades they have been taking “campaign contributions” from U.S.-citizen Israel-Firsters in return for compromising U.S. security on Israel’s behalf; and (c) the simple fact that if she cared a tinker’s damn about U.S. security and the republic’s survival she would have never, ever broken the law by using an unencrypted e-mail system for government business while secretary of state.
One must wonder how FBI Director Comey and the FBI and Attorney General Lynch and the Justice Department will ignore the foregoing reality when they refuse to indict the obviously guilty Mrs. Clinton? Oh, yes, I forgot, they are Democrats beholden to an anti-American Democratic president. As such the party and power must always come first, and all other Americans and their security, country, and liberty must always take the hindmost.
Lois Lerner redux, I suppose you might call it.
...
[As of 2015-11-05, I have added the following comment in his blog to this article:]
Mike, you omit the culpability of the IC in this.
Surely some of her email communications were with her fellow members of the National Security Council, and also with lower level government employees who were cognizant of the risks she was running through her private server, and also the fact that ALL communications of members of the NSC are prime collection targets for any big league intelligence operation.
Surely at least one of those was knowledgeable and responsible enough to pass this information, and his concerns about it, through the appropriate COMSEC channels to the U.S. government agency with overall responsibility for U.S. government communications security, the National Security Agency.
Not to mention the probability that said agency does general monitoring (sniffing and scanning) of Internet traffic for matters of intelligence interest, such as senior U.S. officials screwing up their communications.
The question is:
What did said agency do with this hot potato that had fallen in its lap?
My expectation would be that its officials mulled it over, than discussed the matter with their counterparts in the ODNI and the NSC.
But what happened then?
Surely there must be an audit trail somewhere in the IC of what the IC knew about this matter and what it did about it.
Somebody, some IG or member or body of Congress, really needs to ask that agency what it knew about HRCs communications, and what it did about that knowledge.
Miscellaneous Articles
[Here are some miscellaneous articles dealing with this issue.2016-02-12-Forbes-Gregory-vladimir-putin-hillary-clinton-emails
What If Vladimir Putin Has Hillary Clinton's Emails?by Paul Roderick Gregory
Forbes Opinion, 2016-02-12
[This is a very, very useful article,
giving key background to the widely-reported story of the emails.
An excerpt; empasis is added.]
The Clinton cache of e-mail correspondence
in the hands of the Kremlin or other hostile intelligence agencies could represent
one of America’s greatest intelligence disasters,
giving Vladimir Putin the opportunity to determine the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election
or, barring that,
to cast a cloud over a Clinton presidency.
The national security implications of Hillary Clinton’s cavalier approach to security far outweigh
the legal consequences of her actions.
...
The national security risks of the Clinton e-mail scandal have taken an undeserved backseat.
Putin’s Kremlin has one of the most sophisticated cyber warfare systems the world has ever seen.
Kremlin cyber experts would surely have used the Guccifer e-mails to try to access Clinton’s e-mails
on an account that apparently had no special security protections.
A Kremlin penetration of Clinton’s private e-mail account would give it
the world’s most complete record of her secretary of state correspondence
including the almost 32,000 emails that the Clinton team deemed private and made unavailable.
Consider Vladimir Putin with a full inventory of Clinton e-mails.
Putin’s KGB training was in running agents,
most recruited by
meaning that he would immediately have understood the possibilities.
Putin’s FSB and military security experts would be told to scour the load of e-mails for operational information, names, addresses and dates.
As
As a KGB agent who cut his teeth on
Putin would consider several options on how and when to use the Hillary file with maximum effect.
If he preferred Hillary’s Republican opponent in the general election,
he could release enough incriminating information
(that could not be traced back to the Kremlin, of course)
to scuttle her candidacy.
For those who believe Putin would not dare interfere with a U.S. election,
consider his strange flirtation with Donald Trump.
Putin, however, may prefer Hillary to give him a sitting U.S. president on whom he has a big stack of
If Putin rules out blackmail,
the Kremlin could selectively leak damaging information to U.S. allies and enemies
that would weaken the United States’ hand in world affairs throughout a Clinton presidency.
Those who follow Kremlin propaganda understand that
it is not necessary for Putin to have Clinton’s e-mails
to cause serious damage to a Clinton presidency.
All he needs is that many believe he has Hillary’s e-mails.
The Kremlin specializes in fabricating narratives (such as the U.S. intent to steal Siberia)
that are false but may contain a small kernel of truth.
Putin’s army of “information technologists” (propagandists) can release fabrications to its numerous clandestine sources throughout the world.
Clinton might ignore or deny those narratives (which cannot be traced to the Kremlin),
but the mere idea that Putin has her e-mails will lend the necessary credibility to the story.
The Kremlin knows that repeated lies are eventually taken as truth,
so that an unsourced narrative, repeated, will eventually become the “truth.”
Who knows what Putin’s information technologists can cook up to blacken the presidency of Hillary Clinton?
Hillary Clinton has laughed off the e-mail scandal as partisan or petty legalism.
I hope that she and the American public understand the threat to national security her e-mails have caused.
The national security threat increases if she is elected president.
I would hope that the Democrat Party, and candidate Clinton understand this and do what is right for the American people.
[The trouble with this analysis is that Hillary is not unique in her use of potentially hackable email.
Which presidential candidate does not use email for his or her personal communications?
And of those, presumably all, who do,
who has an unhackable, totally secure, email system?
In other words, any presidential candidate has similar vulnerabilites when it comes to
What does make Hillary unique, however,
is her use of a personal system for her official duties as U.S. Secretary of State,
which, according to reports, lacked even the not-so-great security of the State Department's systems.]
posted by KHarbaugh at 08:10
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