Posted on 10/22/2016 7:24:59 AM PDT by Beautiful_Gracious_Skies
FBI Data Dump Shows Clinton Is Criminal and Clueless Hillary is either dishonest or dumb—there is no third choice
Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. Today, on the Friday afternoon before the long Labor Day weekend, the Federal Bureau of Investigation released documents on its investigation of Hillary Clinton and her mishandling of email while she was secretary of state. The Friday afternoon data dump is a venerable Washington cliché, a shady way to bury a story that the bureaucracy doesn’t want covered in depth, but even by Beltway standards this was a shocker.
Nobody expected much from the FBI here, given the Bureau’s recent punting on its formal inquiry into Hillary’s dubious activities with her “unclassified” email of bathroom server infamy. I’ve been covering the EmailGate story for over a year, from the beginning, and I too didn’t expect the FBI to reveal much about what Hillary did that was unwise and perhaps criminal.
To be fair, a good amount of today’s release has been redacted. The original documents were classified at the Secret/Not Releasable to Foreign Nationals level, and to make it Unclassified about a third of the text has been cut out.
But what’s there is awful enough for Team Clinton. Although the FBI’s press release is terse, the documents themselves indelibly portray the Democratic presidential nominee as dishonest, entitled, and thoroughly incompetent.
Considering that Hillary has been accused of mishandling classified information on an almost industrial scale, what shines through is that Clinton is utterly clueless about classification matters, betraying an ignorance that is shocking when encountered in a former top official of our government—and one who wants to be our next commander-in-chief.
Our Federal classification system isn’t particularly complicated, the basics can be explained in a quarter-hour, and there are courses of instruction that exist precisely to explain how to identify classified information and properly handle it. In fact, they’re mandatory. Since Hillary blew off those courses, even though they are required for government workers at all levels, it’s not surprising that she has no idea what she’s talking about.
There are three basic classification levels (with a bunch of handling caveats that can be added): Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret. These are abbreviated in classified documents as C, S, and TS, respectively (for a quick primer on how this works in the real world, read this).
Since Hillary had been accused of mishandling a lot of classified information, in her July 2 interview with the FBI, agents understandably asked her about this, only to discover that America’s former top diplomat doesn’t have the smallest clue how classification works.
If Hillary actually is as dumb as she appears in these FBI documents, she is nowhere near smart enough to be our commander-in-chief.
When asked, “Clinton could not give an example of how classification of a document was determined,” the FBI recorded. Hillary could not explain what the (C)—for Confidential—classification marking at the beginning of a paragraph was. She thought it perhaps had something to do with alphabetical order.
This tragicomedy continued with the FBI pressing Hillary on specific examples of classified information that wound up in her “Unclassified” emails. She explained her position concisely. As the FBI noted, “Clinton stated that she did not pay attention to the ‘level’ of classified information.”
We can safely assume that the FBI agents present gasped at that one, since classification is all about the level. Simply put, compromising Confidential information will get you a letter of reprimand, while compromising Top Secret information can easily get you a trip to the Federal penitentiary. Not to mention that brave Americans have died to protect Top Secret information.
The Clinton follies continued, with Hillary’s lawerly position clear: “Clinton did not recall receiving any emails she thought should not be on an unclassified system,” the FBI recorded. She even stood her ground when asked about emails regarding drone strikes—a subject that the CIA and the Pentagon consider to be highly classified. Indeed, it’s Top Secret and part of a super-sensitive Special Access Program or SAP.
Not to Hillary. Such SAP information wound up in her “Unclassified” emails but Clinton would have none of it. As the FBI noted, “Clinton stated deliberation over a future drone strike did not give her cause for concern regarding classification.” This would be stunning news to the thousands of American military and intelligence personnel who have to treat such Top Secret SAP information according to the strict rules and regulations that apply to anybody not named Clinton.
Here Hillary has confirmed what many have long suspected—that there’s one set of laws for Clintons and Friends, and a very different set for the rest of us. Classes on how to handle classified materials—much less actually following those rules on pain of arrest and prosecution—are for Little People, not for Clintons and their charmed retinue.
The FBI inquiry descended into farce. The Bureau’s investigation determined that hundreds of the emails containing classified information had been sent by Hillary while she was out of the United States—including in Russia. Since these were sent on Clinton’s ubiquitous Blackberry, all of those should now be assumed to be in the hands of foreign intelligence agencies—particularly the security service of whatever country Hillary was in when she clicked “open” or “send.”
The FBI could not find evidence of cyber-tampering with Hillary’s Blackberry, but that’s irrelevant here. As someone who used to do these things for a living when I worked for NSA, let me state that it’s easy for any marginally competent intelligence service to intercept unencrypted (or lightly encrypted) messages sent to or from a Blackberry. No “hacking” is required. Such routine intercepts would leave few, if any, traces for the FBI to find.
Not that Hillary and her staff took even the most rudimentary security precautions. They emailed each other everywhere, all the time, even in high-threat countries like Russia and China. Anybody who doesn’t understand that Moscow and Beijing—and probably many others—have those emails (and worse, may have used them to crack into other, even more sensitive U.S. Government systems) is uninformed about 21st century espionage.
In perhaps the most laughable of the FBI’s revelations, we learned that Hillary had a bad habit of losing her personal electronic devices. As many as thirteen of them went missing—including ones that possibly had classified emails on them. In a couple cases, Clinton staffers disposed of old devices by smashing them with a hammer. Which does nothing to render whatever classified information may have been on them unreadable to any competent spy service.
There are strict rules about how to destroy classified information systems that are no longer needed. Of course, Hillary followed those rules no more than she did any of the dozens if not hundreds of other security regulations she ignored altogether when she was secretary of state.
Saddest of all in this sordid saga is that Hillary had no excuse for any of it. It’s ok not to be a whiz at the nuances of classification. Cabinet secretaries are busy people. When you’re the secretary of state, you’ve got seasoned security personnel on call, 24/7, anywhere in the world, to answer questions and resolve security dilemmas like how to handle classified materials. Calling them apparently would have been too much trouble for Hillary and her inner circle.
It beggars belief that Hillary Clinton is really as clueless as she came across in her interview with the FBI. I’ve given classified briefings to cabinet officials. None of them were ever this out of it. Perhaps, accompanied by her lawyers, the Democratic nominee decided to play dumb to dodge possible prosecution. If that’s the case, Hillary repeatedly flat-out lied to the FBI—which, yet again, is something normal Americans go to prison for doing.
If Hillary actually is as dumb as she appears in these FBI documents—utterly clueless about basic classification matters even after years of Federal service at the highest levels—she is nowhere near smart enough to be our commander-in-chief.
In my time with NSA I worked in counterintelligence and I investigated people who mishandled classified information. It was rarely a pretty story and it seldom ended well. Let me state with 100 percent confidence, having now seen at least some of what the FBI discovered about Hillary and her emails, that anybody not named Clinton who did these things would be facing severe criminal charges and potentially years in prison. Democrats need to seriously ask themselves if this is the kind of person they want to represent them on November 8.
Both!
No reason she can’t be both.
The conjunctive is incorrect; “or” should be “and”.
There is a third choice...she’s both...she’s a clueless criminal.
Whether through wilful ignorance or deliberate espionage Secretary Clinton has opened the State Department to our enemies. Will she do any less as our President? Indeed, has Obama done any less?
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OF INTEREST TO LAW ENFORCEMENT L/E should interrogate Sidney Blumenthal and individuals in the Clinton Foundation for evidence of multiple schemes to falsify official documents to further fraudulent schemes. The FBI should investigate any and all official documents submitted by Sidney Blumenthal, the Brock n/p's, and The Clinton Foundation for falsified entries.
Crimes might include--govt fraud, conspiracy, collusion, falsifying official documents (a felony), money laundering, tax evasion, extortion, theft, misuse of public facilities. Examine Blumenthal's tax returns with a fine-tooth comb.....particularly entries for "interest income."
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Money Laundering Scheme Exposed: 14 Pro-Clinton Super PACs & Non-Profits Implicated
zerohedge.com ^ | Sep 20, 2016 / FR Posted by Helicondelta
David Brock has 7 non-profits, 3 Super PACs, one 527-committee, one LLC, one joint fundraising committee, and one unregistered solicitor crammed into his office in Washington DC.
Uncovered records expose a constant flow of money between these organizations. The Bonner Group, his professional solicitor, works off a commission. Every time money gets passed around, Bonner receives a 12.5% cut.
Follow the money. Say, for example, you donate $1,062,857 to Media Matters for America. This is how David Brock would have used your charitable donation in 2014:
1- Media Matters would receive your $1,062,857 donation The Bonner Group would earn a $132,857 commission; Media Matters would retain $930,000
2- Next, Media Matters would give what’s left of your entire donation, $930,000, to the Franklin Education Forum The Bonner Group would ‘earn’ a $116,250 commission.The Franklin Education Forum would retain $813,750
3- The Franklin Education Forum would then forward the remaining $813,750 to The Franklin Forum. The Bonner Group would ‘earn’ a $101,718 commission. The Franklin Forum would retain $712,031
In the end, Brock’s solicitor would have pocketed $350,825, almost a third of your initial donation! That’s a far cry from the advertised 12.5% commission.
more at zerohedge.com
According to Comey she’s just dump - dishonesty would have been a prosecutable crime.
Well said. My very first thought.
True. Likewise, one can be both ugly and stupid.
The opportunities here are endless.
EmailGate and the Mystery of the Missing GAMMA
As I told you in this column back in January, Hillary emails included very highly classified intelligence from NSA. In early June 2011, the secretary of state received a long email from her longtime friend and factotum Sid Blumenthal regarding Sudan. This was an astonishingly detailed assessment of high-level political and military machinations in that country, specifically inside information about coup plotting.
This explosive information was timely and deep in the weeds on Sudanese happenings. It’s difficult to see how Blumenthal—a lawyer and Washington fixer, no sort of Africa hand or James Bond—got his hands on such juicy intelligence. As I’ve noted, “Blumenthal’s information came from a top-ranking source with direct access to Sudan’s top military and intelligence officials, and recounted a high-level meeting that had taken place only 24 hours before.” How did Sid obtain this amazing scoop for Hillary?
Not to mention that, in terms of verbiage and format, Blumenthal’s email read exactly like classified NSA reporting, as anybody acquainted with our SIGINT would immediately recognize. As one veteran agency official told me back in January, Blumenthal’s email was NSA information with “at least 90 percent confidence.”
Which was no coincidence, since an NSA investigation subsequently determined that Blumenthal’s Sudan assessment was derived from their reporting—in some cases verbatim. As I reported in March, NSA concluded that Blumenthal’s Sudan report came from four different agency SIGINT reports, all classified Top Secret/SCI. Then it got worse:
At least one of those reports was issued under the GAMMA compartment, which is an NSA handling caveat that is applied to extraordinarily sensitive information (for instance, decrypted conversations between top foreign leadership, as this was). GAMMA is properly viewed as a SIGINT Special Access Program, or SAP, several of which Clinton compromised in another series of her “unclassified” emails.
NSA had no doubt that Blumenthal somehow got his hands on some of their “crown jewels” information. “It’s word-for-word, verbatim copying,” an agency official of them explained. “In one case, an entire paragraph was lifted from an NSA report” that was classified Top Secret/SCI. To add to the mystery, Sid emailed Hillary his “personal” assessment on Sudan only hours after some of those classified NSA reports were issued.
Somehow Sid Blumenthal—who in 2011 was not working for the U.S. government in any capacity and had not held security clearances in a decade—was reading above-top-secret NSA reports just hours after they appeared in tightly restricted GAMMA channels.
Suspicion quickly fell on Tyler Drumheller, a retired senior CIA official with a somewhat dodgy reputation. He served as a case officer of sorts for Blumenthal’s private intelligence shop, peddling information of sometimes dubious provenance. Possessing contacts with several spy services, the former CIA man seemed like a plausible source for this NSA leak. Conveniently for the Clintons, Drumheller died of cancer in August 2015, just as EmailGate was becoming big news.
The FBI asked Hillary about this odd situation. She downplayed it all, stating that she often didn’t read Sid’s emails, implying her old friend was wordy and long-winded. She told the FBI she had “no concerns” that the information Blumenthal sent her might be classified. Although his name was redacted, it’s obvious that the FBI brought up Tyler Drumheller as well in their interview with the Democratic nominee. Only adding to this mystery, Hillary told the FBI that she considered Blumenthal’s private intelligence assessments to be “journalistic” because Sid “did not have a clearance and was not in government at that time.”
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PS - WHY is Sid Blumenthal not in BIG trouble? Why is he not being 'waterboarded' (at a minimum) to disclose who in the NSA is feeding him such high level classified info? I'm sure the NSA is investigating & we'd never hear about it, but they have a more than a major problem with this stuff getting out - whoever is doing it should be doing the rest of their life in jail, if not getting the penalty for treason.
I do think it was a Parkinson’s blurt .... that plus & a combination of trying to appear more knowledgeable & experienced than Trump - Hilly Hubris as only she can do it. It’s a deadly combination .... I cannot imagine that in the WH - it would be a disaster (one of many if Hilly wins) for the country.
*Ping* to my comment #13. I’d be interested in your thoughts. This situation has fascinated me since I saw Schindler’s first article on it .... this is a really big deal & he seems to be the only one talking about it & the significance of it.
I am also wondering if the recent arrest of the NSA contractor is somehow related ... he had some “juicy” documents (in addition to source code). The 2014 docs were after the 2011 emails from Sid.
The FBI has arrested a National Security Agency contractor on suspicion of the theft of top secret classified data and documents in an alleged security breach at the same intelligence agency whose spy secrets were exposed by Edward Snowden.
During execution of the warrants, investigators found hard-copy documents and digital information stored on various devices and removable digital media.
“A large percentage of the materials recovered from Martin’s residence and vehicle bore markings indicating that they were property of the US government and contained highly classified information, including Top Secret and Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI). In addition, investigators located property of the US government with an aggregate value in excess of $1,000, which Martin allegedly stole,” a justice department press statement said.
Martin is said to have had six classified documents obtained from sensitive intelligence and produced by a government agency in 2014.
“These documents were produced through sensitive government sources, methods and capabilities, which are critical to a wide variety of national security issues. The disclosure of the documents would reveal those sensitive sources, methods and capabilities,” the justice department said.
The documents have been reviewed by a government agency and designated as top secret, “meaning that unauthorized disclosure reasonably could be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security of the US”, the justice department statement said.
There's a reason why there have been so many tentacles involving the White House, the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Justice Department, and the Clinton Foundation over the last eight years, and it's not just a matter of blatant corruption.
The picture I get from reading through all of these Wikileaks and Anonymous e-mail materials is a scenario where two different groups of people are forced to interact with each other in order to get anything done. The first group includes the people who actually have brains and know how to get things done -- for better or for worse. The second group is a bunch of political hacks (including Hillary Clinton) who couldn't even stock a shelf at Wal-Mart if left to their own devices, but who have mastered the art of prostituting themselves to any outside interest group that buys influence in the Beltway.
The first group comes across as exasperated at times over the ineptitude of the second group, while the second group is perfectly content to walk through life with a leash around their necks, napping next to the fireplace and licking their b@lls while their owners run the house and keep the bowl of dog food filled.
Clintons surrendering US land to Russians, Uranium for speaking fees!
Hillary's bizarre behavior video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqbDBRWb63s
Hillary laughing at dead Americans in Benghazi.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmD-4F6JI6w
Who told Hillary to lie about Benghazi video???
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C__gRs_qDs8
Comey has proven himself to be horse crap.
There is absolutely NO other conclusion that Hillary Clinton is either too corrupt to be US president or too incompetent. There is no third option. We know there is really no second option — she plays dumb but is not. She is corrupt, rotten to the core. Thoroughly.
And this corrupt demon will likely be our next US president and selecting the next 3 members of the Supreme Court.
I am terrified.
“The first group includes the people who actually have brains and know how to get things done — for better or for worse. The second group is a bunch of political hacks (including Hillary Clinton) ....”
Totally agree with your classification of Mrs. Bill in the second group (hate to say it - Bill is probabaly in the first). Mrs. Bill failed the bar exam despite having the benefit of a Yale law school education. The one thing she appears to have learned there was how to cheat the system when she couldn’t compete on intelligence.
Recall stories of first year law students ripping pages from textbooks (or otherwise removing the books - before internet) to keep others from finding the needed case law information. Most likely an approach someone of Mrs. Bill’s character found useful. This was the approach she used while working on the Watergate committee - when she conspired with others to deny Nixon the availability of legal representation by removing files clearly showing precedent (in the 1970 impeachment attempt against Justice Douglas - who hired a lawyer) and then writing a brief arguing there was no precedent for legal representation.
Go forward a few years to Whitewater. Missing files (until after the statute of limitations had run out) ultimately found in her White House bedroom closet.
Case after case of information missing, can’t remember, files (physical and electronic) destroyed. No wonder she is worried that she and others may ultimately be hanging from the gallows if she is not elected.
FBI Data Dump / Hillary criminal....
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