A special intelligence review of two emails that Hillary Rodham Clinton received as secretary of state on her personal account — including one about North Korea’s nuclear weapons program — has endorsed a finding by the inspector general for the intelligence agencies that the emails contained highly classified information when Mrs. Clinton received them, senior intelligence officials said.
Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign and the State Department disputed the inspector general’s finding last month and questioned whether the emails had been overclassified by an arbitrary process. But the special review — by the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency — concluded that the emails were “Top Secret,” the highest classification of government intelligence, when they were sent to Mrs. Clinton in 2009 and 2011.
On Monday, the Clinton campaign disagreed with the conclusion of the intelligence review and noted that agencies within the government often have different views of what should be considered classified.
So it’s the Hillary Clinton campaign’s word versus the words of the inspector general and the national security agencies. Well, Hillary would never lie to us about setting up a private e-mail server so that her e-mails would not be stored by her employer, would she?
But wait, there’s news about this story. To be fair, it does strike me as suspicious that the person that she hired to run the secret private e-mail server is going to plead the fifth when he has to testify, just like Lois Lerner did.
The aide who set up Hillary Clinton’s email server will reportedly take the Fifth Amendment rather than testify before Congress. Obviously, what he knows will hurt her.
Bryan Pagliano was Clinton’s director of information technology during her failed 2008 presidential run. After she became secretary of state in 2009, he followed her there.
He’s now known as the tech specialist who set up and maintained the Clinton server. Naturally, he has vital information Congress needs as it continues its probe.
And just as naturally, he said he will invoke his Fifth Amendment right when called on to testify.
While that’s his constitutional right, we’d bet his testimony would be likelier to incriminate his former boss than him.
Oh. So, I guess that does kinda make it look like the inspector general and national security agencies might be telling the truth, and Hillary Clinton’s campaign not telling the truth. Unexpected!
Hillary Clinton dismissed the controversy surrounding her private email server and defended her conduct as legal during a press conference Tuesday in Las Vegas.
A visibly aggravated Clinton repeatedly insisted that she had done nothing wrong and seemed frustrated by questions about the issue.
[…]Asked if the server, which has been turned over to the Department of Justice, had been wiped clean, Clinton initially shrugged and later joked: “Like with a cloth or something?”
“I don’t know how it works digitally at all,” she added.
With a cloth or something? That’s the contempt she has for those who try to get the truth and hold her accountable. That’s what she would be like as President – “how dare you judge me, peasants?”
Although Clinton said that no material on her e-mail server was classified… well, let the Washington Times explain:
More than 300 of former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s emails — or 5.1 percent of those processed so far — have been flagged for potential secret information, the State Department reported to a federal court Monday as the political furor continued to grow for the Democratic presidential candidate and her aides.
[…]Mrs. Clinton has insisted that she never sent any classified information from her account at all and that none of the messages she received had information that was marked classified at the time — though some of it has since been designated.
[…]Internal watchdogs have contradicted Mrs. Clinton’s account, saying messages clearly contained classified information, even if it wasn’t marked as such, and should have been kept more secure than on her own server.
These are the e-mails that Clinton insists are her “personal business”. You know, recipes, Yoga, pictures of Chelsea’s weddings… nothing classified. Move along, nothing to see here.
The UK Daily Mail got a world exclusive scoop yesterday. Doing the journalism that the left-wing United States media won’t do.
Excerpt:
The IT company Hilary Clinton chose to maintain her private email account was run from a loft apartment and its servers were housed in the bathroom closet, Daily Mail Online can reveal.
Daily Mail Online tracked down ex-employees of Platte River Networks in Denver, Colorado, who revealed the outfit’s strong links to the Democratic Party but expressed shock that the 2016 presidential candidate chose the small private company for such a sensitive job.
[…]It will be the small scale of the firm and its own home-made arrangements which will raise the most significant questions over security and over what checks Clinton’s aides made about how suitable it was for dealing with what new transpires to be classified material.
The article says that the firm did not even have an alarm.
So… the entire national security of the nation… was being managed by a company that ran out of a loft apartment… with servers in a bathroom closet? That’s really secure and great disaster recovery, too. Is that a good way to safeguard national security secrets? There is a reason why government employees have to use secure servers that are disaster-resistant, encrypted, and so on. This was not a casual mistake by Clinton – she went out of her way to make sure that what she wrote in her e-mails would never be discovered and used against her.
A former CIA analyst explains what should happen to her in the Washington Examiner:
If Hillary Clinton allowed classified information onto her private server or personal phone, she should be disqualified from becoming president, former CIA spy Bob Baer said Saturday.
Baer, a former CIA officer and commentator on national security issues, said that sending or receiving top secret information is a “transgression that I don’t think the president of the United States should be allowed to have committed.”
In an interview with CNN International, Baer claimed that the markings on emails believed to have crossed the private server Clinton maintained as secretary of state represented the highest levels of secrecy in the government.
“You don’t get any more secret than that,” he said.
“Even Snowden didn’t get into that,” Baer said. “If this in fact was on a private server, you and I would get fired and possibly jailed. This could be a felony.”
Baer said that when he was on assignment, he wasn’t allowed to receive messages at that level of classification, and that putting it on a private server or handheld device was a major mistake.
“If this was on her server and it got into her smartphone, there’s a big problem there,” he claimed. “Seriously, if I had sent a document like this over the open Internet, I’d get fired the same day — escorted to the door, and gone for good, and probably charged with mishandling classified information.”
She’s running for the White House, but her lousy judgment could land her in the Big House. Unforgiveable.
Are Democrats capable of taking national security and foreign policy seriously?
Well, consider the recent hack of Office of Personnel Management records by Chinese hackers.
The radically leftist New York Times reports on the extent of the hack:
The Obama administration on Thursday revealed that 21.5 million people were swept up in a colossal breach of government computer systems that was far more damaging than initially thought, resulting in the theft of a vast trove of personal information, including Social Security numbers and some fingerprints.
Every person given a government background check for the last 15 years was probably affected…
The agency said hackers stole “sensitive information,” including addresses, health and financial history, and other private details, from 19.7 million people who had been subjected to a government background check, as well as 1.8 million others, including their spouses and friends.
[…]The breaches constitute what is apparently the largest cyberattack into the systems of the United States government, providing a frightening glimpse of the technological vulnerabilities of federal agencies that handle sensitive information.
Has any Democrat being fired for this catastrophic failure?
No:
In a conference call to detail the grim findings and announce the agency’s response, Katherine Archuleta, the director of the Office of Personnel Management, said that she would not resign despite calls from members of Congress in both parties for her dismissal.
“I am committed to the work that I am doing at O.P.M.,” she said. “We are working very hard, not only at O.P.M. but across government, to ensure the cybersecurity of all our systems, and I will continue to do so.”
This morning, Katherine Archuleta was sworn-in as the 10th Director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and will serve as the Federal government’s personnel chief. She will be the first Latina to hold this position. Katherine shares President Obama’s vision for diversity and inclusion in the federal workforce…
[…]OPM has recognized and acknowledged the underrepresentation of Hispanics in the federal work force, and the potential and talent they have to offer. OPM has made it a point to expand outreach and recruitment within the Hispanic community…
[…]Katherine also worked as the National Political Director for President Obama’s reelection campaign…
[…]Katherine served as the Executive Director of the National Hispanic Cultural Center Foundation…
So, her main qualification for the job of safeguarding government personnel records from hackers seems to be that she helped Obama get re-elected by reaching out to Hispanic voters.
And in fact this new story in The Weekly Standard shows that diversity was her focus at the OPM.
Excerpt:
The day before the Office of Personnel Management first announced a massive data breach of personal information, now former OPM director Katherine Archuleta’s attention was focused elsewhere. Archuleta published a blog post on June 3 entitled “Celebrating Every Member of Our Federal Family” in recognition of “LGBT Pride Month.” The White House reposted Archuleta’s article the same day.
In her post, Archuleta announced the release of an updated guide called “Addressing Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Discrimination in Federal Civilian Employment: A Guide to Employment Rights, Protections, and Responsibilities.”
As we celebrate LGBT Pride Month, I want to proudly reinforce my continued commitment to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender members of our federal family, and recognize the incredible contributions this community has made in service to the American people…
That’s why I’m so excited to announce that the Office of Personnel Management is joining our partners at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Merit System Protections Board, and the Office of Special Counsel to release an updated guide titled “Addressing Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Discrimination in Federal Civilian Employment: A Guide to Employment Rights, Protections, and Responsibilities.” This informative resource will help LGBT federal employees make more informed choices about how best to pursue their individual claims when they believe they have suffered from discrimination.
On the OPM website, the agency has seven “top priorities” listed. The first two are “Honoring the Workforce” and “Build a More Diverse and Engaged Workforce”.
Obama didn’t hire this woman because she had any qualifications related to the job. He hired her because she was a radical leftist who helped him get re-elected. And when she was appointed, she focused on what she was good at – pushing a leftist ideological agenda instead of doing her job. And we taxpayers had to pay her to do that.
We have had FOUR catastrophic security breaches under this government: Snowden, Bradley Manning, Hillary’s unsecure e-mail server, and this China hack. Is that by accident? Or is there something about being feelings-obsessed that makes it harder to take threats from our enemies seriously?
WINTERY KNIGHT 