That data should have never been on that server. The fact that it was is solid, indisputable evidence of the commission of multiple crimes. The only question is who all committed them.
39 thoughts on “Hillary’s Air-Gap Problem.”
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That data should have never been on that server. The fact that it was is solid, indisputable evidence of the commission of multiple crimes. The only question is who all committed them.
Comments are closed.
I disagree Rand. The Air-Gap problem likely goes a lot further than Hillary Clinton as a problem.
I don’t think I said otherwise.
Illegal transcription, as I said to Charlie Martin on Twitter. Find who did it, and … squeeze.
As has been the case so far in this story, I don’t think we know if these documents were Top Secret etc. already, or if they were just of such import that they were classified Top Secret as soon as the classifiers got to them. If the latter, these kinds of air gap issues don’t make sense.
Say Hillary gets a confidential email from Putin. So far, she hasn’t done anything wrong, just Putin has. The question then is, what is she supposed to do now to make sure that this very confidential email is properly protected, and what did she actually do.
Have you ever had a clearance?
Because, to be blunt, you are talking out of your ass.
“Say Hillary gets a confidential email from Putin. So far, she hasn’t done anything wrong, just Putin has. ”
You have erred.
None of you is responding to me. “The originator of a document (including an email) is legally responsible for determining the classification…” Right. That’s why the case I made up has Clinton being the recipient of the email, not the originator. Obviously, there is nothing wrong with receiving a classified email from Putin, assuming that there is no way for me to avoid it: one day he decides to send it to my gmail account. I have not committed a crime.
I am sure there are lots of rules on what I need to do after that. We don’t know whether Clinton followed those rules.
On the other hand, if she regularly was sending and receiving important emails on that server, or even just telling people that that was a good place to send her important emails, that’s different, probably indefensible. But we don’t have any information yet on the subject.
On the other hand, if she regularly was sending and receiving important emails on that server, or even just telling people that that was a good place to send her important emails, that’s different, probably indefensible. But we don’t have any information yet on the subject.
We have an abundance of information on that subject.
“None of you is responding to me.”
That’s because your premise is F%#ked.
“Obviously, there is nothing wrong with receiving a classified email from Putin, …”
It’s so obvious that it’s wrong….. This is the erroneous premise.
You aren’t making sense. You aren’t even thinking about it. Tomorrow Putin decides to send an unsolicited top-secret email with satellite photes to your Facebook account. Have you done something wrong?
You aren’t making sense.
Mike,
Your brain is stuck on looking at this from one direction only.
Mike, I’ll give you one thought experiment that might help you understand the problem. How would you be certain an email on a private server was really from Putin and not a Nigerian Prince?
Who says I don’t understand the problem? There are many problems; it’s a terrible idea to use a private server for this kind of diplomatic work, and probably very much illegal.
I am addressing a very specific type of fuzzy thinking here: top secret information can get onto a Secretary of State’s private mail through no fault of her own. It just needs someone to send it to her.
After that, it would depend on what she did about it.
And of course, if she was regularly using it for top secret or classified back-and-forth, no such excuse would work.
I am only pointing out that the mere presence of top secret info on her server is no proof of anything, no matter how often people talk about sealed rooms and air gaps, and someone illegally copying it… Things sent to the Secretary of State can get to be top secret in a much simpler way, just by virtue of who sent them and what they say.
Just because you’re right doesn’t mean you need to be incompetent. The other side is going to make this argument, and already has. Ignoring it or talking past it isn’t helpful. Address it: quote evidence that she originated traffic (see Reuters article), or encouraged it, or that she left top secret material on the server in an insecure situation.
Bye the bye: For those of us who don’t have experience w classified materials, what would happen, should happen, if Putin stupidly sent Clinton an important secret communication to her Facebook page or gmail account? Surely lots of very classified top secret materials get into the government network by very insecure means, what do they do then? Do they wipe out the Facebook server and the PC where the secretary with no clearance read it? I really don’t understand how that would work.
“Who says I don’t understand the problem? ”
I do.
You’re looking at one small rule and not looking at the Big Picture..the other rules…the responsibilities of the State Department and SoS.
Read cthulhu’s post
Well, excuse the hell out of us for not answering your exact question; I’ll remedy that now. It’s dirt simple: If anybody with a clearance gets a suspected classified email or other electronic document on an unclassified system, you (a) immediately unplug that computer from the network, and (b) immediately contact the relevant security authorities and await further instructions. The security folks have their own cleared IT people and have already developed procedures for how to handle a data spill.
Everything about classified information and security clearances operates on the “when in doubt, report it” principle. If you think something’s classified, treat it as classified until proven otherwise, and inform Security right away. If you think you screwed up, go to Security immediately and self-report. If you think somebody else screwed up, give them the chance to self-report but if they don’t, you have to.
Sounds reasonable. Also sounds like something that no Secretary of State ever did, or ever could do. As you say, I have no experience, but that doesn’t sound like something the American people is likely to expect of her. Which doesn’t mean that someone might not indict her for it…
There’s more to it than that. If the SoS expects “business” emails from Putin, then Putin better have the email address that lives on the US certified, secure, government run, protected, server.
Not a personal, unsecured server.
Hillary was responsible for arranging utterly expected government business/Stat Department emails from a foreign national to go elsewhere.
“sounds like something that no Secretary of State ever did, or ever could do.”
Huh? I’d be willing to bet that the State Department unclassified servers are no strangers to data spills; every business that deals with classified info has it happen from time to time (people aren’t perfect), so you have to have a plan in place to get accreditation. In the contrived scenario you concocted, all the SecState has to do is call the freaking IT and / or Security people. I guarantee that if some security or IT peon gets a page from the SecState, said peon is going to move it. This is literally the easiest thing a high official, public or private, can do.
I don’t know what you are trying to accomplish, Mike. Giving the most benefit to the doubt, I’ll suppose you are expressing what arguments Joe Citizen LIV might accept to excuse Clinton’s behavior. It might work with those people, but if Clinton tries such a defense, she will be admitting to violations of other laws. Right now, she is only facing loss of her clearance and ruin of her campaign, but a defense like you suggest would deserve harder sanctions.
Cthulhu is right, data spills happen. There are examples of accidents and intentional framing, but for all the examples, the routine training to avoid jail time is to self-report immediately.
I kinda get it; a SecState might think themselves above the law and scoff at the notion of having to self-report. That may be exactly the person that is Hillary Clinton. She won’t be the first or the last to make such a mistake. It is such a common issue, there is a term to describe such behavior.
“or if they were just of such import that they were classified Top Secret as soon as the classifiers got to them. ”
That’s nonsense. The originator of a document (including an email) is legally responsible for determining the classification of the document according to all of the applicable security classification guides. The originator is also legally responsible for knowing what are the applicable SCGs and what’s in them. There are no “classifiers” in the sense you are saying; every person who is originating a document is the “classifier”. If you get it wrong and it’s discovered later (which is always is; people pay attention to how a document is marked, and are all-too-willing to call you out if you mess it up), the consequences range from trivial (you re-mark the document correctly and send it out again) to significant (you get a security violation for improperly marking classified material; too many of those and you lose your clearance and maybe your job) to serious (an improperly marked document gets on an unclassified network and you get fired and maybe prosecuted, if you did it recklessly).
The big mystery to me is how the State Dept. email system operated: was it set up to “receive only” from unclassified sources, or could it received and sent to both classified and unclassified networks, or should it have had any kind of classified material on it at all? I confess I’ve never seen a network approved for any level of classified material that had any kind of connection with the outside world, except via TACLANE (which means you need a matching TACLANE at the other end to decrypt the traffic – this is the only way that classified material can be on an unclassified network, by being heavily encrypted with approved equipment using an approved security plan).
How much money was donated to the Clinton Foundation in return for Hillary exposing financial, diplomatic, and military secrets in her email?
It’s just a coincidence that the Clinton foundation enjoyed hundreds of millions in foreign donations while Hillary was SecState. It’s just a coincidence that the foreign donations to the Clinton foundation were more during her tenure as SecState than before or after. It’s just coincidence that the Clinton foundation’s IRS filings showed zero foreign donations during those years, because they, purely coincidentally, forgot to file the forms (hey, who amongst us hasn’t repeatedly forgot to inform the IRS of tens of millions of foreign money?).
As for that private felonious e-mail server, surely that’s just a coincidence too?
Or, alternatively, it’s all just a vast right-wing conspiracy, headed up by the Obama administration.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/08/21/us-usa-election-clinton-emails-idUSKCN0QQ0BW20150821
This article sure makes it sound like she and her staff initiated conversations that were obviously slated to be classified.
“Clinton and her senior staff routinely sent foreign government information among themselves on unsecured networks several times a month, if the State Department’s markings are correct. Within the 30 email threads reviewed by Reuters, Clinton herself sent at least 17 emails that contained this sort of information. In at least one case it was to a friend, Sidney Blumenthal, not in government.
The information appears to include privately shared comments by a prime minister, several foreign ministers and a foreign spy chief, unredacted bits of the emails show. Typically, Clinton and her staff first learned the information in private meetings, telephone calls or, less often, in email exchanges with the foreign officials.”
In a nation where approximately everyone is a criminal, pointing out that Hillary Clinton is a criminal is going to be entirely unpersuasive. The only people who care about this particular crime, compared to all the ones they ignore every day, are the ones who already agree with you.
“Criminal” should at this point be mostly reserved for people who commit common-law felonies. Otherwise you just wind up giving yourself a heart attack over the fact that nobody cares about these here criminals who are mishandling classified information and those criminals who overstayed their visa and why are The Other Guys making such a fuss about the perfectly harmless people who didn’t turn in their high-capacity magazines or offered paleo diet advice without a license?
To convince anyone, you’ll need to show that Hillary did real, not potential, harm. That documents which seriously compromise national security, as opposed to just being rubber-stamped Secret, were actually leaked to China or Iran or some such place.
If you want to let Hillary off the hook for this, you have to explain the treatment of David Petraeus. No demonstrable harm occurred in that case.
What do people make of rumors/insider gossip of Vice President Joe Biden moving closer to running?
Vice President Biden has long had the ambition to be president, but the sense I get this time is that the call has to be made “Help me, Oljo-Bi Dehn, you’re our only hope!”
For all of the defiant talk about the “so-called e-mail scandal” being a fever dream of Republicans, there has to be important Democrats who worry about this privately, no? If the Democrats are indeed “circling the wagons” around Ms. Clinton, Mr. Biden is not, in the style of Cleavon Little in “Blazing Saddles”, planning on being somewhere else circing his one wagon on his own? (OK, OK, I am mixing metaphors here.)
But seriously, why would there even be discussion about Mr. Biden if everyone was happily ready for Hillary?
I think Biden would have no chance against Hillary without her baggage. Biden would be such a disaster to the US that even Bin Laden recognized this and threatened anyone who might harm Biden. But for establishment Democrats, they are in trouble. Sanders is an Independent in Congress, thus not one of them. O’Malley couldn’t win a general election. Kennedy and Byrd are dead. So Biden is an option.
I think Biden was smart to tag up with Warren, because she could try to be the next Obama, come from nowhere to win it all. She also would likely succeed if she tried, at least among Democrats. I heard someone propose Biden takes Warren as a VP, promise to run for one term only, and you get a package that would probably resonate to Democrats looking at WH control for the next 16 years.
Biden even has a similar message to Hillary. Instead of “if you like Bill, you can get another term by electing me,” Biden can say “if you like Obama…”. Neither Hillary or Joe have there own gravitas to be a winner.
The General Petraeus thing is easy — it is one of those intrigues in ancient China that “spandrell” blogs about, of palace eunechs (insiders) conspiring against a mandarin who has become dangerous in in popularity and influence (outsider with technical skills that the Emperor relies upon out of necessity.)
If Secretary Clinton “goes down” for doing a similar thing, it will also be one of those intrigues from ancient China “spandrell” blogs about from his insights into East Asian history, which is really about a threat to the Emperor’s “legacy” and the charges of law violation are a formality.
you have to explain the treatment of David Petraeus
The prosecutors had Petreaus on tape telling Paula Broadwell that the information he was giving her was “highly classified.” That let them prove intent.
You don’t need to “prove intent” to indict her under the relevant law. Her actions were illegal. And unlike Petraeus’s, harmful.
Here’s former Asst. U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Toobin on the subject:
Is Toobin misinformed about the “intent requirements” of the statutes in question?
I don’t know, but criminal or not, she should lose her clearance simply for the poor judgment and incompetence. Which means she would be ineligible to be commander-in-chief.
“Is Toobin misinformed about the “intent requirements” of the statutes in question?”
Toobin believes what Clinton says:
“Because Clinton has said that she did not believe the information was classified, and because she turned it over only to cleared State Department employees, the comparison is inapt.”
Since the whole point is that Clinton story has changed over time (e.g. first NO classified data on server…then yes there was classified data on server etc), and who
lied about being named after Sir Edmund Hillary
lied about being under sniper fire in Tuzla
lied about being instrumental in the Northern Ireland peace process
lied about not being supoena’d by Gowdy
lied about not breaking rules by using a personal server for business
lied about being dead broke when she left the White House
and on and on and on….
The Lioness of Tuzla is not to be believed.
Toobin tacitly believes her. Otherwise his if-then fails.
Toobin believes what Clinton says
It isn’t about who you believe. To prove a violation of the law you’d have to prove that Clinton knew the material was classified, and deliberately shared it with people she knew to not have clearance. That’s what Petraeus did, and the prosecutors could prove it because Paula Broadwell taped him saying that he was doing just that. We don’t (at this point, anyway) have a tape or email in which Clinton admits to deliberately sharing classified information with someone who she knows lacks the clearance to view it. Unless and until we do, her case won’t be like Petraeus’.
I don’t know, but criminal or not, she should lose her clearance simply for the poor judgment and incompetence. Which means she would be ineligible to be commander-in-chief.
If you’re a natural-born U.S. citizen over 35 who hasn’t already served two terms, you’re eligible to be elected president, and serve as commander-in-chief.
I’m familiar with the Constitutional requirement. I was expressing an opinion, which most sane people would share.
“It isn’t about who you believe. To prove a violation of the law you’d have to prove that Clinton knew the material was classified, ”
Are you really truly that dense?
You use a statement from Toobin which claims the charges are inapt because of a Clinton statement, and then you say what he believes, about Clinton’s statement, isn’t relevant.
You CANNOT be that dense…..can you?
And to answer your question, just because Toobin wrote it doesn’t mean he knows a damn thing about the rules.
His biographer had security clearance of some form and she was writing a book on him. It’s not like he outed SEAL Team 6 like Biden or actively worked with movie producers like the Obama administration did for Zero Dark Thirty.
Call me crazy but it sure looks like Democrats are living above the laws that others are forced to obey.
I think the thing most likely to convince people is if the FBI and the NSA try to indict her. Lots of them are liberals, but they take this kind of stuff terribly seriously – it’s what they do for a living – and are probably outraged at these clowns who think that all their silly rules are for everyone else. Here they have their funny sealed rooms with guards, and the head of State is chatting away on facebook.
NSA try to indict her
“That’s not how it works, that’s not how any of this works.”