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Hillary Clinton: Incompetence, Corruption, Sleeze, Lies, Deceit, Theft Thread

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Soul Crusher:
EXCLUSIVE: HILLARY CLINTON AND HER STAFF MAY HAVE COMPROMISED COUNTERTERRORISM OPS WITH ‘SLOPPY’ COMMUNICATIONS

http://www.newsweek.com/hillary-clinton-email-terrorism-sloppy-communications-463605

Updated | A retired senior State Department military adviser claims that Hillary Clinton’s “sloppy communications with her senior staff” when she was secretary of state may have compromised at least two counterterrorism operations.

Bill Johnson, who was the State Department’s political adviser to the special operations section of the U.S. Pacific Command, or PACOM, in 2010 and 2011, says secret plans to eliminate the leader of a Filipino Islamist separatist group and intercept Chinese-made weapons components being smuggled into Iraq were repeatedly foiled.

Johnson says he and his team eliminated the possibility of other security leaks before settling on the unprotected telephone calls of the secretary of state and her aides as the likely source—though he quickly adds they have “no proof.” 

Try Newsweek for only $1.25 per week

“I had several missions that went inexplicably wrong, with the targets one step ahead of us,” Johnson tells Newsweek in an exclusive interview.

Clinton’s spokesman Nick Merrill calls the allegations "patently false."

RTSFXHB
Hillary Clinton speaks at the UFCW Union Local 324 in Buena Park, California, on May 25.
REUTERS/LUCY NICHOLSON

Johnson's target in the Philippines was Umbra Jumdail, also known as Dr. Abu, the founder of the Muslim militant group Abu Sayyaf, which the State Department officially designated a terrorist organization in 1997. U.S. advisers were assisting Filipino military units. 

“We had good intel. We knew where he was,” says Johnson, who worked in U.S. Air Force special operations with Army Green Beret and Navy SEAL units for more than 25 years before joining the State Department in 1999. “He would be gone three hours before, sometimes as little as a half-hour before” the counterterrorism teams moved in. “We knew he was getting tipped off somehow. We just didn’t know why.”

They began to investigate. The U.S. team advising the Filipino forces swapped out one local counterterrorism unit it was working with for another in an effort to locate the source of the leaks, Johnson says. But Dr. Abu still managed to elude them. The reason, he believes: unsecure chatter between Washington and the U.S. Embassy in Manila.

“Anyone can just sit outside the embassy and listen,” with off-the-shelf eavesdropping devices, he says. “We suspected the leaks [came from] somewhere at State at the time.”

As a dramatic solution, the Special Operations Command stopped giving advance warning to senior State Department officials about raids, Johnson says. Whatever the cause, the leaks stopped. In February 2012, Dr. Abu and two other senior militants were eventually killed in what was described as “a U.S.-backed airstrike.”

Around the same time, a U.S. special operations unit was tracking agents from the United Arab Emirates, who were suspected of buying advanced remote-control bomb devices from China to use against U.S. troops in Iraq. Their main smuggling route led through Thailand. U.S. counterterrorism agents set a trap for them in Bangkok, Johnson says, but “word of it leaked.” He suspected the “sloppy” communication habits of Clinton and senior State Department staff were to blame, but again, he admits, “I had no proof.”

Johnson, who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and now supports Senator Bernie Sanders, says he had previously witnessed the lax communications habits of Clinton and her aides. In January 2010, Clinton was in Honolulu to give a speech on the administration’s “pivot” to Asia when news of the Haiti earthquake broke. She retreated to the secure communications facility in the basement of Pacific Command headquarters to make calls to various military officials and humanitarian groups to help organize a response to the catastrophe. But she also “needed to talk to her senior staff on Mahogany Row,” her seventh-floor executive suite back in Washington, Johnson recalls.

The only problem: She did not readily have any secure telephone numbers or email addresses for her staff members because they were all using personal servers and phones. Security had prevented her traveling aides from bringing their personal cellphones into PACOM headquarters. They appealed to Johnson for an exception, but he refused, citing alarms and lockdowns that would be automatically triggered by any attempt to bring unauthorized signal-emitting units into the building.

Clinton came up with a work-around, Johnson says. “She had her aides go out, retrieve their phones and call the seventh floor from outside”—on open, unsecure lines, he says.

“My relationship with that group started downhill when I refused to let them bring phones and computers into my office [at the Special Operations Command],” Johnson recalls. “It was really an eye-opener to watch them stand outside using nonsecure comms [communications] and then bring messages to the secretary so she could then conduct a secure [call] with the military” and the State Department.

State Department security officials warned Clinton’s senior aides about the risks of using unsecure devices right after they came into office in January 2009, according multiple media accounts and the department’s inspector general report, which was published on Tuesday. The security briefing would hardly have seemed necessary after decades of revelations that foreign intelligence services and hackers were breaking into U.S. government computer networks. But the State Department’s devices and systems were “so antiquated,” according to a former top official quoted in the report, “that NO ONE uses a State-issued laptop and even high officials routinely end up using their home email accounts to be able to get their work done quickly and effectively.”

So it was with Clinton and her staff. Plus, they were “dedicated [BlackBerry] addicts,” according to one of many such accounts in The Washington Post and elsewhere over the past year. 

Johnson says the email scandal dogging Clinton “could've been avoided if the CIA gave her a secure phone. She requested one,” he adds, “but they turned it down.”

A CIA spokesman said the agency could not immediately comment without studying the matter further.

The inspector general’s report does not have Clinton’s name in its title, but Tuesday’s headlines leave the impression it’s all about her. In fact, as the report notes in depth, her immediate predecessors and their staffs ignored the security rules too.

“For instance,” it says, “more than 90 department employees who served on the immediate staffs” of her immediate predecessors Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell "periodically used personal email accounts” to conduct official business. The report also fingered Jonathan Scott Gration, a former U.S. ambassador to Kenya, for using “non-Departmental systems on an exclusive basis for day-to-day operations.”

Powell, secretary of state during the first term of President George W. Bush, admitted to the inspector general “that he accessed [his personal] email account via his personal laptop computer in his office, while traveling, and at his residence, but not through a mobile device.” Rice, who succeeded Powell, “did not use either personal or Department email accounts for official business,” the inspector general reported. As for her staff, “only one acknowledged the use of personal email,” the report said.

Yet the use of personal email for government purposes seemed to explode in the second year of Clinton’s tenure when “more than 9,200 emails were sent within one week from [senior State Department executives] via “16 web-based email domains, including gmail.com, hotmail.com, and att.net,” the inspector general reported.

With more than six months to go until the presidential election, the FBI investigation into Clinton’s handling of classified material is continuing with no “external deadline,” according to FBI Director James Comey. He has, however, “acknowledged that there is pressure to wrap up the matter promptly and thoroughly,” The Washington Post reported.

For her part, Clinton has toggled between admitting she made “a mistake” with her handling of emails and insisting that “what I did was allowed. It was allowed by the State Department," she said last September. “The State Department has confirmed that.”

All of which disturbs Bill Johnson, now retired in Florida after nearly 40 years of military and State Department service.

“For the most part, my work with Secretary Clinton was spent working on common goals,” he says. “She once told me that when she spoke of ‘smart power,’ it was me she had in mind.”

Today, he says, “I wouldn't be so hard on her if she had simply admitted that what she did was wrong."

“But to insist she's done nothing wrong,” he adds, “is beyond the pale.”

This story has been updated to include a comment from Clinton's spokesman.

Soul Crusher:
We Now Know Hillary Lied Multiple Times About Her Email Server
REUTERS/Randall Hill
By Edward Morrissey 
 
May 26, 2016

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Ever since news broke that Hillary Clinton used an unauthorized and unsecured private e-mail server for all of her correspondence as secretary of state, she has defended herself with several arguments. None of the information transmitted through the server was classified, Clinton insisted at first, a claim that has been proven false in well over a thousand instances.

Even after that fell apart, Clinton claimed that the use of private e-mail for official business fell within the rules of the State Department and that she had ensured that the server met the department’s security requirements.

Related: Clinton’s Staff Ignored Investigators as They Looked Into Her Emails

Finally, Clinton insisted that she and her team complied with the Federal Records Act by making sure that their correspondence got copied to other State Department addresses. Clinton explained this decision by insisting that she wanted the most efficient method of handling electronic communications, even if in retrospect that decision turned out to be regrettable.

Regrets should be coming, but not in the way Clinton has suggested. State’s Inspector General released the long-awaited report into Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server – and it contradicts every excuse Clinton has offered over the last fifteen months.

The use of private e-mail might have been interpreted to be acceptable prior to 2009, when Clinton first assumed office as secretary of state, but by then, “the department’s guidance was considerably more detailed and sophisticated,” the IG concludes. From 2005 forward and for at least two years into her tenure, State had issued a number of memoranda detailing the need – nay, the “obligation” – to use the department’s own communications systems, even for sensitive-but-unclassifed (SBU) material.

Related: How the FBI Could Derail Hillary Clinton’s Presidential Run

If a need arose to use an outside communications channel to transmit SBU data, then Clinton should have “requested a solution” from within the department. Instead, the IG found “no evidence that Secretary Clinton ever requested such a solution, despite the fact that emails exchanged on her personal account regularly contained information marked as SBU.”

The IG also rebutted claims that Clinton ever put “robust protections” on her server, claims that appear on Clinton’s website. State’s information-management groups told the IG that Clinton had never checked with them at all. Neither her server nor the mobile device Clinton used to access it had ever been certified to meet standards established before Clinton took office. Furthermore, no official recalled Clinton ever checking to ensure that the use of the server was acceptable – and that such a request would have been rejected outright had she made one.

Perhaps most notably, officials at State issued multiple warnings about records retention in relation to Clinton’s use of the private server, especially given the need for FOIA and Congressional access to official State business. In 2010 and in 2011, the issue arose, but in both cases the discussion got shut down.

The first query was dismissed by Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, claiming that the requirement to use two devices for official and personal e-mail “didn’t make a lot of sense.” Staffers raised concerns again the next January, but were told by a director that Clinton had received approval for her private server, even though she never requested it. Furthermore, the same official “instructed the staff never to speak of the Secretary’s personal e-mail system again.”

Related: Another Batch of Clinton State Dept. Emails Included ‘Top Secret’ Material

To recap: Clinton lied about having approval for the system. She lied about saying it was within the rules to use it, and that she had brought the server up to State Department security standards. Contrary to multiple statements from her team, not only did warnings arise about the use of that system during her tenure, those who raised the red flags were told to shut up about them.  And despite assurances that Clinton would cooperate in reviews of her use of the private e-mail system, the IG report pointedly notes that “[t]hrough her counsel, Secretary Clinton declined OIG’s request for an interview.”

For someone who’s been insisting since the beginning that she was allowed to operate her own e-mail system, that refusal is stunning all on its own.

That also contradicts more recent Clinton statements. The FBI has begun to interview Clinton’s inner circle, a sign that the investigation is coming to a conclusion. Two weeks ago, Clinton told CBS News’ Face the Nation host John Dickerson that the FBI had not yet requested an interview, but that she would be “more than ready to talk to anyone, anytime.” The IG report clearly shows that as another lie, and if her attorneys kept her from talking with State Department investigators, it’s almost certain that she’d pass on an FBI “interview” as well.

Related: If Clinton Loses Her Security Clearance, Could She Still Be President?

The new IG report gives clarity to the screamingly obvious. Hillary Clinton used an unauthorized and unsecured private e-mail server to avoid compliance with legitimate Congressional oversight and Freedom of Information Act requests. Under her leadership, the State Department misled several courts and a number of Congressional inquiries about the existence of Clinton’s e-mails.

In doing so, she allowed the system to transmit and retain highly classified information relating to intelligence and national security, putting that data and those responsible for collecting it in danger. Clinton did so recklessly, negligently, and in violation of 18 USC 793 and 18 USC 1924 – statutes that identify such transgressions as felonies.

What happens if the FBI investigation goes to a grand jury? We might have the spectacle of a major-party nominee getting subpoenaed to testify in a criminal inquiry – and taking the Fifth to avoid self-incrimination. And that might be the most honest statement that Clinton would have made about her secret e-mail server in the past fifteen months.

loco:
WTF?  Soul Crusher's back?  Man, we're ya been?

Soul Crusher:

--- Quote from: loco on May 26, 2016, 02:02:36 PM ---WTF?  Soul Crusher's back?  Man, we're ya been?

--- End quote ---

Training hard - real hard.  Been killing it. 

Big goals for 2017

Soul Crusher:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/27/opinion/hillary-clinton-drowning-in-email.html?ref=opinion


Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the presidency just got harder with the release of the State Department inspector general’s finding that “significant security risks” were posed by her decision to use a private email server for personal and official business while she was secretary of state. Contrary to Mrs. Clinton’s claims that the department had “allowed” the arrangement, the inspector general also found that she had not sought or received approval to use the server.

So far, no security breaches have been reported; a separate F.B.I. investigation is looking into that. But above and beyond security questions, the inspector general’s report is certain to fuel doubts about Mrs. Clinton’s trustworthiness, lately measured as a significant problem for her in public polls.



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