The Letter to James Comey, Director of the FBI

Posted on October 25, 2016October 25, 2016 by Denise Simon

October 25, 2016

A Retired FBI Agent Addresses James Comey on the Hillary Clinton Investigation

Mr. James Comey, Director

Federal Bureau of Investigation

J. Edgar Hoover Building

935 Pennsylvania Avenue N.W

Washington, D.C. 20535-0001

Sir,

I am writing regarding your public statement in July, 2016 informing the American people that the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton was being closed without referring it to a Federal Grand Jury or the Attorney General of the U. S. for a decision whether or not to indict her. Strangely, you eloquently laid out enough of the evidence deduced from the investigation to strongly indicate there was abundant evidence uncovered during the investigation and interview of her to not only indict but to convict her in Federal Court. However, you personally re-worded and soft-pedaled the actions she took as Secretary of State describing her actions as “extremely careless” in using a personal email and un-secured server for her communications while Secretary of State. You rewrote the statute, which is not your job.

As a retired Special Agent of the FBI, I have standing to write this letter. My thirty years in law enforcement, including 22 years as a Special Agent with the FBI have given me the knowledge, expertise and experience to question and confront you for your perplexing actions, which (as you well know) were outside the normal standard operating procedure of the FBI and Federal judicial procedures. Some of the finest people in the world proudly carry the credentials of FBI Agent and you have soiled them and not allowed them to speak. But I will not be silent.

Sorry, but NO SIR, MS Clinton was not merely careless or extremely careless. She was not even negligent or grossly negligent (as the statute requires). Hillary Clinton was knowingly purposeful in her decisions and actions to set up a server under her exclusive control and possession in order to control what information was available to the American public and Congress regarding her actions as Secretary of State. Furthermore, she took those government owned communications into her personal possession after leaving her position and knowingly and willingly attempted to destroy them so her nefarious actions could never be known or used as evidence of her corrupt moral character against her.

Sir, what possessed you? Did you cave in to political pressure to unilaterally come to this decision? I fear that is the case, and Rule of Law be damned. I am embarrassed for and ashamed of you. You have set a precedent that can never be rectified… and certainly not justified. Shame on you, Sir. You ought to resign right now in disgrace for what you have done to tarnish the reputation of the finest Law Enforcement Agency in the world… for entirely political reasons.

Normally, an investigation will be assigned to an agent, or team of agents with one being the Case agent, or the lead investigator. When the investigation is complete, an investigative report will be presented to the U.S. Attorney for the Federal District involved. It would be the U.S. Attorney who decides whether to decline prosecution for that investigation… NOT the FBI agent. But in the Clinton investigation, YOU (unilaterally) decided not to forward the investigation to the U.S. Attorney or the Attorney General of the U.S., but instead personally made the decision not to prosecute her or even provide the information to a Federal Grand Jury. You were wrong to take this upon yourself.

Sir, in order to indict a subject, only a preponderance of evidence, or 51% is needed for probable cause to exist. You did not think even that level of probability existed? Who do you think you are fooling? What judicial proceeding did you think you were following?

Throughout my years with the FBI, I (along with my fellow agents) took great pride in conducting each investigation in an unbiased manner regardless of the subject’s position or standing in the community.

All were treated equally under the law. But you, Sir, decided to allow this corrupt, evil and nasty human being to go free and unchallenged for her treasonous actions (yes, treasonous, in my opinion) which threatened the security of this nation. Furthermore, you stopped short of investigating the Clinton Foundation as a RICO case (Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organization. This is a RICO case if

there ever were one. Even an untrained person can tell from the communications which were recovered that Hillary Clinton spent more time working for the Clinton Foundation while Secretary of State than on State Business. It may be argued that Hillary did not do any State business UNLESS the Clinton Foundation benefitted. You decided to just let this uncomfortable truth alone without addressing it.

I will conclude with this: Following my retirement from the FBI, I volunteered for a 12 month tour of duty in Afghanistan as a Law Enforcement Professional, embedded with U.S. forces as a subject matter expert in counter-terrorism investigations. For most of that year I operated “outside the wire” patrolling with the troops, interviewing witnesses to IED incidents and gathering evidence on the bad guys. The results of my work would then be reported through secure channels to the Commanding Officer. All reports and communications were required to be transmitted via secure and encrypted devices. Occasionally my remote location in the mountains of Afghanistan made transmission impossible and I would have to fly back to Bagram Air Base in order to securely report to the Commander of the battle space. It would have been convenient if I could have just called the Commander on my personal cell phone or written him an email on my personal laptop. But, had I done so I would have been reporting classified information via an unsecured device and it could have been compromised. These were, relative to Secretary of State communications, low level classifications of Secret. Had I ever sent even one in such a manner I would have been prosecuted and sent to Federal Prison for 20 years or so. That is how serious this violation is considered.

Now, because of you, Hillary Clinton is allowed to continue her RICO activities and is running for President of the United States, the most powerful position in the world. You have trampled on the Rule of Law and destroyed the trust of the American people in the FBI and in unbiased enforcement of the law. How do you sleep at night? It is time for you to go and work for the Clinton Foundation.

Sincerely,

Hugh W. Galyean

(FBI Agent, Retired)

Hat tip to Mr. Galyean and American Thinker

POTUS Lied about Knowing of the Private Hillary Email Server

Posted on October 25, 2016October 25, 2016 by Denise Simon

…and Cheryl Mills knew Obama lied…

Politico: A top Hillary Clinton aide expressed alarm in early 2015 that President Barack Obama claimed he was unaware of Clinton’s private email server until he learned about it in the news.

“We need to clean this up – he has emails from her – they do not say state.gov,” said Clinton adviser Cheryl Mills in a hacked email posted Tuesday on WikiLeaks.

As the scandal over Clinton’s use of a private email server was still emerging in March 2015, Obama told CBS News that he learned about the arrangement through the media. “The same time everybody else learned it through news reports,” Obama told CBS News’ Bill Plante.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest later clarified that while the president knew about Clinton’s email address, he “was not aware of the details of how that email address and that server had been set up.”

Clinton’s campaign declined to confirm the authenticity of the emails. White House spokesman Eric Schultz pointed to Earnest’s comments from March when asked for comment about the email exchange.

In part from FreeBeacon:

The email came less than a week after the New York Times broke the story on Clinton’s use of a private email address to conduct official State Department business.

Subsequent interviews by the FBI in the course of its probe into Clinton’s email practices revealed that Obama had emailed Clinton at her personal address using a pseudonym.

Two days after Mills’ email, White House press secretary Josh Earnest acknowledged that Obama had emailed Clinton at her personal address, but said that was consistent with his public remarks.

“The point that the president was making is not that he didn’t know Secretary Clinton’s email address, he did,” Earnest said. “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.”

However, the wording of the question to Obama appears to contradict that explanation.

Though personal email accounts can be hosted by virtually every major email provider—services such as Gmail and Yahoo—Obama was asked specifically about Clinton’s use of an email system “outside the U.S. government,” which would include not just a private email server but an account hosted by anyone other than the State Department.

Mills’ email was one of thousands released by the group Wikileaks after hackers believed to be acting in concert with the Russian government breached Podesta’s personal email account.

Additional hacked emails show Clinton confidantes worried about the fallout from the Times story, including one who suggested that Clinton and other aides using her private email system knew what they were doing could land them in hot water.

“Why didn’t they get this stuff out like 18 months ago? So crazy,” wrote Center for American Progress president and informal Clinton adviser Neera Tanden in an email to Podesta on the day the Times story broke.

“I guess I know the answer,” she wrote in a follow-up. “They wanted to get away with it.”

Podesta appeared to acknowledge that Mills and Clinton aides David Kendall and Phillip Reines had been misleading about their roles in about the email controversy.

“Speaking of transparency, our friends Kendall, Cheryl and Phillipe sure weren’t forthcoming on the facts here,” he wrote to Tanden.

Reines was later denied an official role on the Clinton campaign after a long email diatribe in response to Washington Free Beacon inquiries into his and Clinton’s email practices.

**** What may have been was exponentially worse:

Friday’s Web Outage, Gonna Be Worse due to Selling Access

Posted on October 24, 2016October 24, 2016 by Denise Simon

Hackers Sell $7,500 IoT Cannon To Bring Down The Web Again

Forbes: Think Friday’s massive outage was bad? Worse is expected, as hackers are selling access to a huge army of hacked Internet of Things (IoT) devices designed to launch attacks capable of severely disrupting web connections, FORBES has learned. The finding was revealed just days after compromised cameras and other IoT machines were used in an attack that took down Twitter, Amazon Web Services, Netflix, Spotify and other major web companies.

In what is a first for the security company, RSA discovered in early October hackers advertising access to a huge IoT botnet on an underground criminal forum, though the company declined to say which one. (F-Secure chief research officer Mikko Hypponen said on Twitter after publication that it was the Tor-based Alpha Bay market). “This is the first time we’ve seen an IoT botnet up for rent or sale, especially one boasting that amount of firepower. It’s definitely a worrying trend seeing the DDoS capabilities grow,” said Daniel Cohen, head of RSA’s FraudAction business unit.

The seller claimed they could generate 1 terabit per second of traffic. That would almost equal the world record DDoS attack, which hit French hosting provider OVH earlier this month at just over 1 terabit. For $4,600, anyone could buy 50,000 bots (hacked computers under the control of hackers), whilst 100,000 cost $7,500. Together, those bots can combine resources to overwhelm targets with data, in what’s known as a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

Cohen said he didn’t know if the botnet for hire was related to Mirai, the epic network of weaponized IoT computers used to swamp DYN – a domain name system (DNS) provider and the chief target of Friday’s attack – with traffic. But FORBES was able to find a forum post on Alpha Bay from the seller, who went by the name loldongs, which noted they had created a Mirai-based botnet. The original post was on 4 October, just a few days after the Mirai source code was made available to everyone. In a later post, in response to another user’s request, loldongs claimed: “I can take down OVH easily.”

RSA uncovered a botnet for hire, made up of IoT devices like connected cameras and fridges. It could generate an astonishing amount of power, the company warned.

Statement By Secretary Johnson On Recent Cyber Incident

Release Date:

October 24, 2016

For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
Contact: 202-282-8010

The Department of Homeland Security is closely monitoring events arising from the distributed denial of service attack on Dyn on Friday, October 21. Later that day, the Department convened a conference call of about 18 major communication service providers to share information about the incident. At this time, we believe the attack has been mitigated. We have shared relevant information with our partners and through our Automated Indicator Sharing program.

We are aware of one type of malware potentially used in this incident. This malware is referred to as Mirai and compromises Internet of Things devices, such as surveillance cameras and entertainment systems connected to the Internet. The NCCIC is working with law enforcement, the private sector and the research community to develop ways to mitigate against this and other related malware.

The Department has also been working to develop a set of strategic principles for securing the Internet of Things, which we plan to release in the coming weeks.

FBI Assignments for November 2016 Elections

Posted on October 24, 2016October 24, 2016 by Denise Simon

There was a time this would have been a good thing, but given recent history, events, collusion and more…one must question this…right?

Of particular note in this announcement:

U.S. Attorney Oberly said, “Every citizen must be able to vote without interference or discrimination and to have that vote counted without it being stolen because of fraud. The Department of Justice will act promptly and aggressively to protect the integrity of the election process.”

****Related Reading: Election officials in three states say they’ve received and rejected requests to have Russian diplomats present at polling places when U.S. voters cast ballots for their next president Nov. 8.
Russia’s consul general in Houston, Alexander K. Zakharov, outlined the requests in letters sent to election officials in Oklahoma, Texas and Louisiana that said he wished to deploy representatives “for a short period of time, when convenient,” with the “goal of studying the U.S. experience in organization of voting process.”
The requests were refused by all three states and addressed by the Obama administration Friday during press briefings at both the White House and Foggy Bottom.
“I think it is unclear exactly what the Russians were intending to do in this case. I think it’s appropriate that people might be suspicious of their motives, or at least their motives might be different than what they have publicly stated, given the nefarious activities that they’ve engaged in in cyberspace,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Friday.
“There’s nothing for us to fear from having Russian observers observing our election,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said at a separate briefing. “But those requests that go to the states are for the states to decide. We’ve got nothing to fear and nothing to hide from that.” More here from the WashingtonTimes.

Back to the FBI announcement:

November 2016 Elections

WILMINGTON, Del. – United States Attorney Charles M. Oberly, III announced today that Assistant United States Attorney (AUSA) Patricia C. Hannigan will lead the efforts of his Office in connection with the Justice Department’s nationwide Election Day Program for the upcoming November 8, 2016 general elections. AUSA Hannigan has been appointed to serve as the District Election Officer for the District of Delaware, and in that capacity is responsible for overseeing the District’s handling of complaints of election fraud and voting rights abuses in consultation with Justice Department Headquarters in Washington.

U.S. Attorney Oberly said, “Every citizen must be able to vote without interference or discrimination and to have that vote counted without it being stolen because of fraud. The Department of Justice will act promptly and aggressively to protect the integrity of the election process.”

The Department of Justice has an important role in deterring election fraud and discrimination at the polls, and combating these violations whenever and wherever they occur. The Department’s long-standing Election Day Program furthers these goals, and also seeks to ensure public confidence in the integrity of the election process by providing local points of contact within the Department for the public to report possible election fraud and voting rights violations while the polls are open on election day.

Federal law protects against such crimes as intimidating or bribing voters, buying and selling votes, impersonating voters, altering vote tallies, stuffing ballot boxes, and marking ballots for voters against their wishes or without their input. It also contains special protections for the rights of voters and provides that they can vote free from acts that intimidate or harass them. For example, actions of persons designed to interrupt or intimidate voters at polling places by questioning or challenging them, or by photographing or videotaping them, under the pretext that these are actions to uncover illegal voting may violate federal voting rights law. Further, federal law protects the right of voters to mark their own ballot or to be assisted by a person of their choice.

The franchise is the cornerstone of American democracy. We all must ensure that those who are entitled to the franchise exercise it if they choose, and that those who seek to corrupt it are brought to justice. In order to respond to complaints of election fraud or voting rights abuses on November 8, 2016, and to ensure that such complaints are directed to the appropriate authorities, United States Attorney Oberly stated that AUSA Hannigan will be on duty in this District while the polls are open. She can be reached by the public at the following telephone numbers: (O) 302-573-6117 or (C) 302-507-1607.

In addition, the FBI will have special agents available in each field office and resident agency throughout the country to receive allegations of election fraud and other election abuses on election day. The local FBI field office can be reached at 302-658-4391.

Complaints about possible violations of the federal voting rights laws can be made directly to the Civil Rights Division’s Voting Section in Washington, DC by phone at 1-800-253-3931 or (202) 307-2767, by fax at (202) 307-3961, by email to [email protected]

Email links icon

or by complaint form at http://www.justice.gov/crt/complaint/votintake/index.php.

U.S. Attorney Oberly said, “Ensuring free and fair elections depends in large part on the cooperation of the American electorate. It is imperative that those who have specific information about discrimination or election fraud make that information available immediately to my Office, the FBI, or the Civil Rights Division.”

USAO – Delaware

Jester Hacked the Russians Sending a Message

Posted on October 24, 2016October 24, 2016 by Denise Simon

hacker

In an interview with CNNMoney, the Jester remarked that he had chosen to hack into the Russian website due to his frustration over the cyber-attack of many American websites on Friday. It has since been revealed that Wikileaks supporters were actually behind the attack, not the Russian government.

This past Friday, the Jester hacked into MID.ru, the official website of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He found a vulnerability in the website’s code and injected his own code into it. He inserted the shriek of the American civil alert sound (aka “The Emergency Broadcast System” or EBS) and the following message: “Comrades! We interrupt regular scheduled Russian Foreign Affairs Website programming to bring you the following important message. Knock it off. You may be able to push around nations around you, but this is America. Nobody is impressed.” More here.

The popular American hacker The Jester defaced a Russian Government website in retaliation for the recent attacks against US targets.

SecurityAffairs: We are in the middle of a battle in the cyberspace, with the advent of Presidential elections experts observed an intensification of the hacking attacks.

While hackers target parties and personnel involved in the Presidential campaigns, the US Government threatens Russia is blaming its cyber army for the attacks.

There aren’t only nation state actors involved in the battle, there are also hacktivists and patriotic hackers that could power cyber attacks against the adversary.

This week, hackers from NewWorldHackers crew and Anonymous targeted the Dyn DNS service to launch a message to Russia, and in the same hours, the notorious American cyber vigilante The Jester has defaced the website of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, MID.ru.

The hack was not so complicated for the expert hacker that has found a flaw in the website and exploited it to hack the Russian Government portal.

The Jester targeted the website of the Russian Government in retaliation for attacks against the American entities.

#ICYMI MSG ‘From Russia with Love’ – I’m Jester & I approve this message via the Russian Foreign Affairs Website >> http://bit.ly/2egvpiM

The popular hacker gained access to the Russian government ministry’s website and posted the following message:

“Stop attacking Americans.”

“Comrades! We interrupt regular scheduled Russian Foreign Affairs Website programming to bring you the following important message,” he wrote. “Knock it off. You may be able to push around nations around you, but this is America. Nobody is impressed.”

“His hacking of the website included this gag: Visitors are subjected to the ear-piercing sound of an American civil alert message — that shrieking dial tone that accompanies emergency weather broadcasts.” reported the CNNmoney.

The Jester sent a message to President Putin to blame him for lying about the involvement of Russian hackers in the recent attacks against the American organizations.

“Let’s get real, I know it’s you, even if by-proxy, and you know it’s you,” he wrote. “Now, get to your room. Before I lose my temper.”

In the past, The Jester vigilante has conducted several operations against jihadist communities online. The popular hacker said the CNNMoney journalists he chose to attack the Russian Government Website in response to the massive DDoS against the Dyn DNS service that cut off a large portion of US netizens from the Internet.

“I wanted to poke them in the eye and stop feeling like US is just taking it on the chin. Again,” he said. “I’m not gonna sit around watching these f—-rs laughing at us.”

“It’s 4 a.m. in Moscow right now and a weekend. I’m hoping they can’t fix the hole til Monday,” he said.

“Think of this as a professional courtesy,” his public warning states. “Or if you prefer message from ‘USA with love.’”

the-jester-hacked-russian-gov-website