03/11/15

Hillary’s Emailgate Explained

By: Bethany Stotts
Accuracy in Media

Exclusive to Accuracy in Media.

Clinton’s 2016 presidential chances undoubtedly have been harmed by the revelation that she exclusively used a private email address while serving as Secretary of State. But while the media remain mired in calculations about whether Mrs. Clinton can survive this latest crisis, and who the villains are in this unfolding story, additional questions call out for answers.

Mrs. Clinton made many claims at her press conference on Tuesday. The media shouldn’t simply regurgitate them wholesale, as the AP has done, but rather they should approach them with due skepticism.

“Well, the system we used was set up for President Clinton’s office, and it had numerous safeguards,” said Mrs. Clinton. “It was on property guarded by the Secret Service and there were no security breaches. So, I think that the use of that server, which started with my husband, certainly proved to be effective and secure.”

In contrast, Philip Bump reports for The Washington Post that the domain, clintonemail.com, was established “the same day that Clinton’s confirmation hearings began before the Senate.” That is suspicious timing for a system allegedly set up to support her husband’s office.

The professional assessment by security experts quoted in the media seems to be that Mrs. Clinton’s private email was vulnerable to hacking. “The system could have previously been hardened against attack, and left to get weedy and vulnerable after she left government,” writes Sam Biddle for Gawker. “We don’t know. … With Clinton’s off-the-books scheme, there are only questions.”

“We can only go by what Clinton says,” reports USA Today.

Mrs. Clinton told the press that she had set up the account for both private and work-related emails to avoid the inconvenience of having to set up two phones and two separate accounts, but that, in retrospect, she should have thought better about it. She offered few answers about the actual details of her server, and avoided questions about whether she would subject it to independent analysis, asserting that she had done her full duty by turning over 30,490 vetted emails to the State Department.

There were about 60,000 emails in total, she said—but after the private vetting process, controlled by her and her advisors, she has since deleted the private ones. “At the end I chose not to keep my private personal emails—emails about planning Chelsea’s wedding, or my mother’s funeral arrangements, condolence notes to friends, as well as yoga routines, family vacations—the other things you typically find in inboxes,” she said. Yet the Select Committee on Benghazi’s Chair Trey Gowdy indicated that no emails have been turned over to Congress covering the duration of her 2011 trip to Libya.

Mrs. Clinton apparently expects the media to swallow whole the argument that all her emails on that trip regarded personal affairs.

What can be established at this juncture is depressingly disturbing for national security.

“…security experts consulted by Gawker have laid out a litany of potential threats that may have exposed [Mrs. Clinton’s] email conversations to potential interception by hackers and foreign intelligence agencies,” writes Biddle. This, despite Mrs. Clinton’s assertion that there were no breaches.

Problems identified by Biddle’s sources include that the URL log-in was accessible by anyone in the world, and could have been linked to an “administrative console interface to the Windows machine or a backup,” allowing the possibility that Mrs. Clinton’s emails could have been copied in their entirety by hackers. And, as of March, reports Biddle, “the server at sslvpn has an invalid SSL certificate.” Without a valid SSL certificate there is no third-party indicating that the key is still good, and not hacked.

“An exact physical address could not be determined” for the server, but Internet records indicate that it’s in Chappaqua, New York, reported Bloomberg News.

The server, as of March 4, was on “factory default for the security appliance” when it could have been “replaced by a unique certificate purchased for a few hundred dollars,” making it vulnerable to hacking, it reports.

But, the paper hedges, “While Clinton didn’t have a classified e-mail system, she had multiple ways of communicating in a classified manner, including assistants printing documents for her, secure phone calls and secure video conferences.”

Similarly, Mrs. Clinton asserted at the press conference that she never sent classified information through her private email.

It is not necessary to reveal classified information directly to jeopardize national security or the international diplomatic process. As Thomas Patrick Carroll, formerly of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Operations, explained in 2001 for the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, “classification usually has relatively little to do with the information itself, but a lot to do with the protection of sources and methods.” His given example was how a foreign minister’s personal assistant might have a private conversation with that minister and obtain “the minister’s private observations on the matter,” later relaying this to U.S. intelligence for their exploitation. These types of inside observations prove invaluable for all foreign intelligence services.

If Mrs. Clinton’s email was hacked, then foreign governments such as Iran, China, Russia, and others, might have gained access to her private internal musings about diplomatic talks as she worked out the details with her staff—an intelligence treasure trove.

One must also ask, if Mrs. Clinton refused to set up a government email, how high was that refusal relayed? If it wasn’t relayed to the very top by security specialists, then why not?

Mrs. Clinton was sworn in on January 21, 2009. A couple months after she took office, in March of 2009, the University of Toronto and TheSecDevGroup issued their report on Ghostnet, a cyberespionage network established by an unknown party to mine data from the Tibetans. They found “real-time evidence of malware that had penetrated Tibetan computer systems” which was connected to a large network of 1,295 infected computers in 103 countries—almost 30 percent of which were high-value targets such as ministries of foreign affairs.

The authors of the report found “that GhostNet is capable of taking full control of infected computers, including searching and downloading specific files, and covertly operating attached devices, including microphones and web cameras,” and was sent through “contextually relevant emails” that look like real emails.

Granted, the mechanism of action for Ghostnet would not have been the same as that which could have compromised the server that Mrs. Clinton was using. But few can claim ignorance about the degree of threat posed by the use of insecure systems at the time.

The Ghostnet network compromised computers at the “ministries of foreign affairs of Iran, Bangladesh, Latvia, Indonesia, Philippines, Brunei, Barbados and Bhutan; embassies of India, South Korea, Indonesia, Romania, Cyprus, Malta, Thailand, Taiwan, Portugal, Germany and Pakistan.”

Even if the Obama administration’s appointees lacked the know-how to anticipate cyber threats when they took office, they were undoubtedly immediately educated about the dangers by the government’s more knowledgeable members. Bob Gates, the former Director of Central Intelligence, and later Defense Secretary under Obama, commented in his 2014 book, Duty, that “A number of the new appointees, both senior and junior, seemed to lack an awareness of the world they had just entered.” He noticed that “fully half” of those in the Situation Room had their “cell phones turned on during the meeting, potentially broadcasting everything that was said to foreign intelligence electronic eavesdroppers” and he ensured that such behavior stopped.

The Ghostnet story made page A1 of the New York Times in March 2009. Can this administration really claim innocence about the security threats posed by an insecure, private email server when Clinton served as Secretary of State? How much did President Obama know, and when?

It now appears that the Obama administration received questions from Gawker’s John Cook about the ramifications of Clinton’s private email use back in 2013. The Obama administration has likely spent at least those two years—if not much longer—covering for Mrs. Clinton. Her press conference to explain her exclusive use of private email fails to satisfy, and the press should continue demanding answers until this presidential hopeful provides some real ones.

03/10/15

Obama and Hillary: What Did They Know, and When Did They Know It?

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

The latest revelations about Hillary Clinton’s use of private emails while Secretary of State for the Obama administration have proven “politically problematic,” and invited discomfort by some of her fellow Democrats, possibly encouraging other ambitious Democratic hopefuls to contend for the presidential primary, according to some in the media.

By defining the problem as just “political,” these reporters can cast the issue as one dividing political parties to distract from the pressing issues of the day. This media frenzy works in the Obama administration’s favor. “…why did Hillary Clinton become the Obama administration’s bête noire this very week…? questions Lee Smith writing for Tablet Magazine. Perhaps because Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent speech before Congress reflected badly on the administration’s plan for an Iran deal. “This week’s tarring of Hillary Clinton is part of the White House’s political campaign to shut off debate about its hoped-for deal,” he asserts.

Smith’s suspicions are raised by the fact that Gawker’s John Cook emailed then-deputy White House press secretary Josh Earnest, now White House press secretary, about the issue of Clinton’s private email account back in 2013—two years ago!

Yet on Saturday, President Barack Obama told CBS News’ Bill Plante in an interview that he learned about Mrs. Clinton’s private email system at “The same time everybody else learned it through news reports,” much like he claims to have learned about so many others of his scandals.

The most recent claim apparently didn’t stand up to common sense scrutiny. After all, one needed only to ask if the President and Secretary of State hadn’t exchanged emails for years. On Monday Josh Earnest told the press that President Obama and Secretary Clinton had exchanged emails, that the President had noticed the private address, and that “The point that the President was making is not that he didn’t know Secretary Clinton’s email address… But he was not aware of the details of how that email address and that server had been set up or how Secretary Clinton and her team were planning to comply with the Federal Records Act.” Yeah, that’s the ticket.

But few in the media seem to be asking about who actually saw Cook’s email back in 2013. Either the White House has known about the potential political fallout for years, or someone failed to pass the word up the chain of command.

Some members of the media prefer to view this latest scandal, like so many others, as some sort of right-wing conspiracy, with conservatives out to get Mrs. Clinton. Michael Tomasky of The Daily Beast stubbornly refuses to define this growing debacle as a “scandal,” writing instead, “If she does become president, the right is going to be gunning for her from Day One, sniffing around for impeachable offenses from the second she takes the oath.” This implies, again, that opposition to Clinton’s lack of transparency is rooted in politics and ideology, as if real outrage were impossible or unjustified.

It’s not just the right this time, with people like Ruth Marcus, Mark Halperin, Mika Brzezinski, Maureen Dowd and Ron Fournier also taking Hillary to task. It’s enough to suggest a different conspiracy theory: that the left wants to dump Hillary for Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), or someone they believe would be more electable, and more to their liking.

And while some in the media may have tacitly admitted that there is already blood in the proverbial water, and that Clinton may see greater challenges coming from other candidates, the narrative persists that the Select Committee on Benghazi was established simply to damage Mrs. Clinton. So the villain in this growing scandal, for Clinton acolytes, is not Clinton herself. It is, instead, the Select Committee on Benghazi, which apparently had known about her multiple private email accounts since at least last summer, according to National Review’s Andy McCarthy.

“The panel’s Republican House members are seizing on the revelations regarding Clinton’s private e-mail domain to expand their committee’s mandate, delay Clinton’s testimony and extend their investigation indefinitely,” write Josh Rogin and Eli Lake for Bloomberg. Similarly, Tomasky writes that “… it smells like the Times may have been rolled by the Republican staff of the Benghazi panel. And hey, great work by them and Chairman Trey Gowdy to use the nation’s leading liberal newspaper in this way.”

Mrs. Clinton and President Barack Obama were some of the main decision-makers during the 2012 Benghazi attacks, and have always dominated the heart of the Benghazi scandal—as inconvenient as this may be for some in the media.

The media are, once again, accusing the Republicans on the Select Committee of engaging in run-away politicking during an election season. “Republican Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy has insisted he wants his investigation to be impartial, not to be partisan nor about Hillary Clinton personally,” reports The Daily Beast. “But the pull of conservatives clamoring for answers regarding the scandal has focused the committee’s attention on the presumptive front-runner for the Democratic nomination.”

These politicized assessments ignore and minimize the valid security and transparency concerns raised by Clinton’s exclusive use of a private email account during her entire term as Secretary. But the lack of transparency revealed by this latest Clinton scandal demonstrates that Mrs. Clinton has a problem with humility, and as “heir apparent” for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination may have internalized a feeling of invincibility—as if she is above public accountability and standards of conduct.

The additional debate about fairness to Mrs. Clinton in The New York Times reporting also ignores the larger, overlooked picture: the Obama administration’s culpability in enabling Mrs. Clinton’s behavior. In cases where Clinton’s email was requested by citizens’ groups and news reporters, “the State Department acknowledged receipt of the [Freedom of Information Act] requests and assigned case numbers but did not produce any of the requested documents,” The New York Times reported.

According to the Associated Press, the State Department “never suggested that it didn’t possess all her emails” when the A.P. requested records more than a year ago. That is a scandal in and of itself.

To put it mildly, the fact that there were no records to produce from Mrs. Clinton’s service until this recent date likely proved politically convenient for the administration, and provides further evidence of a government cover-up on Benghazi. Now-public records have already demonstrated Mrs. Clinton’s guilty knowledge about the attacks. Her pro-active attempts at concealing her communications through the use of a private email server have already been thwarted by the Freedom of Information Act.

The newly released Judicial Watch emails documenting correspondence sent to Cheryl Mills (then-Chief of Staff to Sec. Clinton), Jacob Sullivan (then-Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy), and Joseph McManus (then-Hillary Clinton’s Executive Assistant) provided ample evidence that Mrs. Clinton had guilty knowledge of the nature of the terrorist attack in Benghazi as early as a half an hour after the attack.

“Also littered throughout the State Department emails, obtained by conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, are references to a so-called Benghazi Group,” reports Catherine Herridge for Fox News. “A diplomatic source told Fox News that was code inside the department for the so-called Cheryl Mills task force, whose job was damage control.”

And as I have previously reported, the President was told this was an attack by terrorists—not the result of a spontaneous demonstration that got out of control—by his military advisors on September 11, 2012, shortly after the attacks began.

Mrs. Clinton has now requested her emails’ public release, and may hold a press conference in the next several days, according to Politico. Perhaps it was the ridicule from Saturday Night Live that convinced her to speak up, or the sting from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) on Meet the Press calling on Hillary to come clean if she expects to be the party’s standard bearer. But the process of releasing her emails could take months, according to Reuters, which reports that “The email controversy could intensify long-standing Republican criticism of Clinton’s transparency and ethics.”

Clinton’s request to make her emails public should be treated with urgency, and may yet yield additional information regarding the Benghazi attacks and other administration policies during her time as Secretary. But in a real sense it may not matter now whether the State Department actually releases this set of emails, as they were first vetted by Clinton’s advisers. One must ask: What did these advisers choose to omit?

The media shouldn’t be fooled by these “latest [Clinton] efforts to demonstrate transparency” if they are designed to conceal politically damaging material from the public while appearing to be open and fair. Neither should they accept platitudes from Mrs. Clinton if and when she does hold her press conference. But in an even greater sense, the media spotlight shouldn’t be on Mrs. Clinton—it should be on President Obama. What did he know, and when did he know it?