Category Archives: DOJ, DC and inside the Beltway

7 Questions on the Hillary Email Investigation, Only 7?

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At least some in Washington DC are asking some questions. What questions do you have? Here is a question…Where are the emails between Hillary and the White House especially Barack Obama?

7 lingering questions in the Clinton email investigation

TheHill: The FBI appears to be entering the home stretch of its investigation into Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton private email server.

Yet even as arrangements are reportedly being made to interview Clinton and her top aides, much remains unclear.

The FBI under Director James Comey refuses to publicly discuss the investigation, as is customary, but critics say the lingering questions show the review is anything but routine and could result in criminal indictments.
Here’s a look at what is still not publicly known.

When will the investigation end?

The FBI’s investigation had dogged Clinton’s presidential campaign since last summer. The longer it goes, the more likely it is to damage to her chances of winning the Democratic nomination and the White House.

Reports indicate that the bureau is sprinting to complete its work so it won’t be seen as meddling in the presidential election.

Still, according to Clinton, the FBI has yet to reach out to her to schedule an interview, despite reports that she and other top aides could soon be brought in for questioning.

“They haven’t,” Clinton said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” this weekend. “But, you know, back in August, we made clear that I’m happy to answer any questions that anybody might have. And I stand by that.”

What law(s) might have been broken?

Top officials at the FBI and Justice Department have refused to discuss what charges — if any — might result from the investigation.

Speculation about the charges has centered on federal statutes prohibiting against removing federal documents, especially 18 U.S.C. § 2071. A portion of that law bars officials from “willfully and unlawfully” concealing, removing or destroying federal records.

Other laws identified by the watchdog group Cause of Action include prohibitions against removing defense-related information “from its proper place of custody” and against removing classified information to keep “at an unauthorized location.”

Critics also say Clinton or her top aides may have violated internal State Department procedures about handling classified information.

Who’s in the crosshairs?

Clinton is the highest-profile name floated as a possible target of the FBI’s probe, but she isn’t alone.

According to Al Jazeera, the FBI is also seeking to interview Clinton’s former chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, and ex-spokesman Philippe Reines. Questions have also mounted about longtime aide Huma Abedin, Under Secretary for Management Patrick Kennedy and former State Department official Jake Sullivan, who authored more emails now considered classified on Clinton’s server than anyone else, according to an analysis by The Washington Post.

A conservative legal watchdog group has asked for eight people to testify in a separate court case relating to Clinton’s server, including Mills, Abedin, Kennedy and IT official Bryan Pagliano. In that case, a federal judge said current and former State Department officials could be questioned about whether the department willfully circumvented the Freedom of Information Act.

Pagliano, who is believed to have been responsible for setting up the server in Clinton’s Chappaqua, N.Y., home, was granted immunity in exchange for his cooperation with the FBI.

What would the government have to prove to file charges?

Perhaps the biggest question for the bureau is whether there was the intent to “willfully” remove government documents, or whether Clinton’s situation was merely an oversight, as she has claimed.

None of the thousands of emails that Clinton handed over to the State Department were marked as classified, the government has said, but classified information can appear in unmarked emails as well.

Upon entering office, Clinton signed a nondisclosure agreement vowing to protect classified information, whether it is “marked or unmarked.”

Last week, the State Department halted its internal probe of whether 22 emails that have been deemed top secret — the highest level of classification — were classified at the time they were sent. The department said it was deferring to the FBI’s investigation.

Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who served under President George W. Bush, has said the evidence suggests that Clinton knew at least some of the information was sensitive, and yet kept it on her personal server anyway.

“The simple proposition that everyone is equal before the law suggests that Mrs. Clinton’s state of mind … justifies a criminal charge of one sort or another,” Muksaey wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

How much will the FBI say?

The Justice Department is in a difficult spot, as it is likely to face a political backlash no matter what it decides in the Clinton case.

Many conservatives already doubt that the Obama administration is willing to pursue an indictment connected to the Democratic presidential front-runner. Lack of formal charges might merely be viewed as proof that the process was not above-board.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) has pressed for the FBI to release the evidence collected during its investigation once the probe is concluded — regardless of the outcome — to reassure the public that political considerations did not play a role in the Department’s decision.

To avoid concerns about impartiality, Grassley and other prominent Republicans have pressed for Attorney General Loretta Lynch to appoint a special independent prosecutor to handle the Clinton investigation.

So far, she has denied the request.

Was the server secure?

Clinton’s camp has refused to outline precisely which digital protections she used to safeguard the information on her private server.

Independent cybersecurity analysts have concluded that the server went at least two months without using standard encryption protections that make data inaccessible to hackers.

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates in January said “the odds are pretty high” that foreign spies in China, Russia or Iran would have gotten access to Clinton’s data.

Adm. Michael Rogers, the head of the National Security Agency and the U.S. Cyber Command, testified before Congress that, for foreign intelligence agencies, the server “would represent opportunity.”

Clinton only gave about half of the approximately 60,000 emails she sent while secretary of State to the federal government for record keeping. The rest of the messages, she said, were purely personal in nature and were deleted.

The claim set off a firestorm in Washington, with many Republicans and transparency advocates fretting that Clinton and her team had unilaterally decided to delete half of her email correspondence, without affirming with the government that it was truly personal.

It remains unclear whether those messages can be recovered from the server or if they will ever be released.

 

Who are Those Wearing Blue Helmets?

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I have been saying for years that those that make up the U.N. Peacekeepers are the worst of the worst that member nations offer up and finally, The New York Times figured it out. I bet that Donald Trump actually meant the United Nations rather than NATO when he spoke about breaking it up or did he?

Armies Used by U.N. Fail Watchdog Group’s Test

NYT: The militaries of the 30 countries that provide the most soldiers and police officers to United Nations peacekeeping operations also are among those most susceptible to corruption, according to a study released Sunday by an anti-corruption monitoring organization.

The organization, Transparency International, known for its annual corruption rankings of governments around the world, said that in its A-to-F grading for the armed forces of the top troop-contributing countries, only Italy scored higher than a D.

Six of the countries — Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Egypt, Morocco and Togo — received F grades, Transparency International said.

The three countries that contribute the most troops, Bangladesh, Ethiopia and India — which together provide about 25,200 uniformed personnel, roughly a quarter of the total in United Nations peacekeeping operations — also scored poorly in the study’s rankings. Bangladesh and India each received a D, and Ethiopia an E.

The organization cited poor anti-corruption practices and inadequate training as factors in assessing the rankings.

The study comes against a backdrop of new allegations against some peacekeepers. The most recent catalyst for concern has been a growing sex-abuse scandal that has implicated peacekeepers deployed to the Central African Republic, in episodes dating to 2013, many involving children.

Transparency International did not cite any examples of peacekeeper corruption in the study.

United Nations officials did not dispute the findings but said the study did not reflect steps the organization had taken to prevent corruption by peacekeepers.

“There are a full range of audit and independent oversight systems that are in place to protect against such risks once individual units deploy to peacekeeping operations,” Nick Birnback, a spokesman for United Nations peacekeeping, said.

A few years ago there was the genesis of the Syrian civil war, Somalia, Libya and more. This speaks to not only the peacekeepers being criminals and corrupt but the leadership of the United Nations as well. Neither Kofi Annan or Ban Ki Moon have taken the UN up to levels where it becomes meaningful. It is not for lack of intelligence, the UN building in New York is full of international spies and well connected to world leaders, it becomes a lack of will and management.

2012, Ignatius of WaPo in part: The Somalia mess made the United Nations so nervous about intervention that it ignored an appeal a few months later from its own representative in Rwanda that a genocidal massacre was about to begin there.

In January 1994, Gen. Romeo Dallaire, the French Canadian commander of a small force called UNAMIR, cabled New York that the Hutu-led government in Kigali was planning the “extermination” of Tutsis. He concluded his message, “Allons-y.” Let’s go. The United Nations did nothing. Three months later, 800,000 Rwandans were dead.

Annan was running peacekeeping operations at the time, and his deputy cabled the brave Dallaire insisting on “the need to avoid entering into a course of action that might lead to the use of force and unanticipated consequences.” That’s a sorry U.N. chapter, and it’s to Annan’s credit that he tells this and other stories so honestly.

The third debacle was Bosnia. In April 1993, the Security Council demanded that the town of Srebenica, filled with 60,000 Muslim refugees and encircled by Bosnian Serb forces, become a “safe area . . . free from armed attacks.” The refugees waited more than two years for the United Nations to deliver. In July 1995, Gen. Ratko Mladic committed his infamous massacre. A month later, UNPROFOR finally intervened.

When Annan became secretary-general, the United Nations tried to bolster its peacekeeping efforts. It did better in East Timor, Kosovo and Libya in putting some teeth in the concept of a “responsibility to protect.” But the abiding story has been the United Nations’ limitations — in dealing with Iraq, the Palestinian issue, Iran and now Syria.
What to do? Albright and 15 other former foreign ministers just sent a letter to President Vladimir Putin saying they were “gravely disappointed” by Russia’s failure to support the U.N. mission and pleading for action to stop the war in Syria. Albright’s office says that the Russians responded negatively. As the whole of this revealing book demonstrates, there’s got to be a better way to prevent ruinous conflicts.

Who is APT6?

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Darkhotel APT hackers campaign ‘followed’ global CEOs using hotel networks

A state-backed espionage group has spent years targeting senior executives from large global companies using a specialised Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) that can follow and steal data from them as they move around the globe from hotel to hotel, Kaspersky has revealed.

TechWorld: Interestingly, despite some smarts, the sophistication level isn’t always top drawer, which points towards China rather than the US or Russia. The victim list is another hint at that too.

“Overall, victims in our sinkhole logs and KSN data were found across the globe, with the majority in Japan, Taiwan, China, Russia, Korea and Hong Kong,” (in that order) noted Kaspersky Lab’s researchers.

US executives were on the list but far below the prevalence for targeting Japanese CEOs and managers. And the attackers seem to go after almost everyone with the right job title, with sectors hit including electronics, finance, manufacturing, pharma, cosmetics, chemicals, automotive, defence, law, military and even NGOs – the last one has been an obsession for Chinese actors. More here.

FBI Says a Mysterious Hacking Group Has Had Access to US Govt Files for Years

Motherboard: The feds warned that “a group of malicious cyber actors,” whom security experts believe to be the government-sponsored hacking group known as , “have compromised and stolen sensitive information from various government and commercial networks” since at least 2011, according to an FBI alert obtained by Motherboard.

The alert, which is also available online, shows that foreign government hackers are still successfully hacking and stealing data from US government’s servers, their activities going unnoticed for years. This comes months after the US government revealed that a group of hackers, widely believed to be working for the Chinese government, had for more than a year infiltrated the computer systems of the Office of Personnel Management, or OPM. In the process, they stole highly sensitive data about several millions of government workers and even spies.

In the alert, the FBI lists a long series of websites used as command and control servers to launch phishing attacks “in furtherance of computer network exploitation (CNE) activities [read: hacking] in the United States and abroad since at least 2011.”

Domains controlled by the hackers were “suspended” as of late December 2015, according to the alert, but it’s unclear if the hackers have been pushed out or they are still inside the hacked networks.

“Anybody who’s been in that network all this long, they could be anywhere and everywhere.”

“Looks like they were in for years before they were caught, god knows where they are,” Michael Adams, an information security expert who served more than two decades in the US Special Operations Command, and who has reviewed the alert, told Motherboard. “Anybody who’s been in that network all this long, they could be anywhere and everywhere.”

For Adams, this alert shows that the US government still is not in control of what’s going on inside its most sensitive networks. This alert, he said, is an admission of that.

“It’s just flabbergasting,” he told me. “How many times can this keep happening before we finally realized we’re screwed?”

The FBI wouldn’t comment on the alert, only saying that it was just another example of a routine notice to private partners, “provided in order to help systems administrators guard against the actions of persistent cyber criminals.”

This group of “persistent cyber criminals” is especially persistent. The group is none other than the “APT6” hacking group, according to sources within the antivirus and threat intelligence industry. There isn’t much public literature about the group, other than a couple of old reports, but APT6, which stand for Advanced Persistent Threat 6, is a codename given to a group believed to be working for the Chinese government.

“This is one of the earlier APTs, they definitely go back further than 2011 […] more like 2008.”

“This is one of the earlier APTs, they definitely go back further than 2011 or whatever—more like 2008 I believe,” Kurt Baumgartner, a researcher at the Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab, told me. (Baumgartner declined to say whether the group was Chinese or not, but said its targets align with the interest of a state-sponsored attacker.)

Kyrk Storer, a spokesperson with FireEye, confirmed that the domains listed in the alert “were associated with APT6 and one of their malware backdoors,” and that the hackers “targeted the US and UK defense industrial base.”

Another researcher at a different security company, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly about the hacker’s activities, said this was the “current campaign of an older group,” and said there “likely” was an FBI investigation ongoing. (Several other security companies declined to comment for this story.)

At this point, it’s unclear whether the FBI’s investigation will lead to any concrete result. But two years after the US government charged five Chinese military members for hacking US companies, it’s clear hackers haven’t given up attacking US targets.

1 Person a Year Ago, Lead to Panama Papers, Ripple Effect

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What banks aided in the accounts of the global elites to hide their wealth? Did our own governmental financial gurus know about this? Well yes. Encryption was also used. Ahem….
Ah yeah sure —>>  WSJ: The U.S. Justice Department said Monday it is reviewing documents published by international media outlets to see if the papers constitute evidence of corruption that could be prosecuted in the U.S. Also Monday, French prosecutors opened an investigation into whether French nationals or financial institutions have used Panama to evade taxes.
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IndiaExpress: Two global companies were under mounting pressure, and threats were flying. For years, the Swiss banking giant UBS and a Panama law firm named Mossack Fonseca embraced each other in a mutually profitable relationship. UBS had customers who wanted offshore shell companies to keep their finances hidden. And Mossack Fonseca, one of the largest creators of offshore companies in the world, was happy to sell them.
Oh, ousted Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak’s son is on the investigation list.
AhramOnline: Mubarak’s eldest son Alaa was revealed to be involved in dealing with Mossack Fonseca through his British Virgin Islands firm Pan World Investments Inc., which is managed by Credit Suisse. Alaa and Gamal were released from prison in January 2015 after serving the maximum pre-trial detention period of 18 months.Their release decision overturned a lower court conviction that saw the pair given four-year jail sentences and a three-year sentence for the elder Mubarak. They were charged with embezzling public funds earmarked for the renovation of presidential palaces and using the money to spruce up private properties. A Cairo court dropped other graft charges against the two sons in late 2014. More here.

OneIndia: New Delhi, April 5:The Panama Papers leak, claimed by many as the “world’s biggest”, has created ripples across the world, upsetting the rich and mighty with accounts in tax havens. But there is confusion about who actually leaked the papers.The leak turned out to be a Monday mayhem for around 214,000 hidden offshore companies after a group of global journalists, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), got hold of the papers of the practically unknown law firm Mossack Fonseca based in Panama.
So who leaked the ‘Panama Papers’ — a collection of over 2,600 GB of data comprising more than 11 million documents?According to reports, over a year ago, an anonymous source contacted German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) and submitted encrypted internal documents from Mossack Fonseca, detailing how the firm set up and sold anonymous offshore companies around the world.In the months that followed, the number of documents continued to grow far beyond the original leak.Ultimately, Süddeutsche Zeitung acquired about 2.6 terabytes, or 2,600 GB, of data –making the leak the biggest that journalists had ever worked with.The source, who contacted the German newspaper’s reporter, Bastian Oberway, via encrypted chat wanted neither financial compensation nor anything else in return, apart from a few security measures, the daily said on its website.
After getting their hands on the data, the Süddeutsche Zeitung decided to analyse the data in cooperation with the ICIJ as the consortium had already coordinated the research for past projects that the daily was also involved in.In the past 12 months, around 400 journalists from more than 100 media organisations in over 80 countries have taken part in researching the documents. The team included journalists from the Guardian and the BBC in England, Le Monde in France, La Nación in Argentina and The Indian Express in India.In Germany, Suddeutsche Zeitung journalists cooperated with their colleagues from two public broadcasters, NDR and WDR. Journalists from the Swiss Sonntagszeitung and the Austrian weekly Falter have also worked on the project, as have their colleagues at ORF, Austria’s national public broadcaster.The international team initially met in Washington, Munich, Lillehammer and London to map out the research process.

China would rather its citizens didn’t talk too much about the Panama Papers.

CNN: A coalition of news organizations has seized global attention with a barrage of reports based on a massive document leak from a law firm in Panama. The reports, which CNN hasn’t been able to independently verify, allege top officials and people connected to them around the world hid wealth through secret offshore companies.

China’s online censors are restricting many search results and discussions on social media involving the terms “Panama Papers” and “Panama.” They’re also censoring use of the names of relatives of current and former Chinese leaders — including President Xi Jinping — that are mentioned in the reports.

At a news briefing Tuesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei declined to comment in response to repeated questions about the reports, which he described as “pulled out of nowhere.”

It’s not against the law to have offshore financial holdings, and the leaked documents don’t necessarily indicate illegal activity. But the personal finances of Chinese leaders and their family members is a hugely sensitive issue for the ruling Communist Party, which is in the midst of a sweeping anti-corruption campaign led by Xi. More here.

 

 

Guccifer Appears in U.S. Court, Remember Hillary and Sid

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Are we to make anything of the timing of this court appearance? We cant get our hopes up but this is for sure curious.

The grand jury indictment full text is here.

Romanian Hacker “Guccifer” Appears in U.S. Court

SecurityWeek: Lazar Lehel, the 44-year-old Romanian national accused of hacking into the online accounts of many public figures, has been extradited to the United States where he made his first court appearance last week.

Romania’s High Court of Cassation and Justice agreed to extradite Lehel, known online as Guccifer, to the United States for a period of 18 months. U.S. authorities said the man hacked into the email and social media accounts of two former presidents, a former cabinet member, a former presidential advisor, and a former member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff between December 2012 and January 2014. The indictment does not name any of the victims and refers to them as “victim” 1 through 5.

The hacker has been accused of releasing private emails, personal photographs, and medical and financial information belonging to his victims.

Lehel has been charged in the United States with three counts of wire fraud, three counts of gaining unauthorized access to a protected computer, cyber stalking, aggravated identity theft, and obstruction of justice. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of Virginia said the man faces up to 20 years in prison, with a two-year mandatory minimum for the identity theft charges.

In an interview last year with a Romanian journalist, Lehel said that if he is extradited to the United States, he will “plead guilty, no problem.”

During the time he was active, Guccifer also hacked into the accounts of various actors, journalists and businessmen, but the charges filed by U.S. authorities appear to focus on the attacks targeting officials.

Lehel was arrested by Romanian authorities in January 2014 after hacking into the email accounts of Romanian politician Corina Cretu and George Maior, the head of the Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI). He was sentenced by a Romanian court to seven years in prison for these attacks.

The hacker had been known by Romanian law enforcement as “Little Fume.” He had previously received a three-year suspended sentence for hacking into the accounts of many Romanian celebrities.

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2013, Daily News:

Online hacker ‘Guccifer’ breaks into email accounts of former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal

Guccifer got into the email account of Sidney Blumethal, a former aide to Bill Clinton and a senior adviser to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. The attack comes just days after breaking into Colin Powell’s Facebook account.

He’s a real political hack, all right.

The online prankster known as “Guccifer” has crossed party lines and hacked the AOL account of a former Bill Clinton aide — just days after the cyber creep breached former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s Facebook and email accounts.

“Guccifer” had seemed to be targeting the GOP before his latest round of online assaults — he’d spent recent weeks hacking into the emails of George W. Bush’s family and friends.

But last week “Guccifer” got into former Clinton aide Sidney Blumethal’s email account, according to thesmokinggun.com.

Blumenthal, 64, worked as an assistant and senior adviser to Clinton during the President’s second term.

He was also a senior adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign and has stayed close with her since.

“Guccifer” accessed Blumenthal’s correspondence with Clinton dating back to 2005, including sensitive foreign policy and intelligence memos shared while Clinton was secretary of state in the Obama administration, according to thesmokinggun. The hacker sent screen grabs of the sensitive Clinton emails — stamped with his “Guccifer” logo — to the website, it reported.

His cyber assault on the high-profile Democrat came just a few days after “Guccifer” defaced Powell’s Facebook page.

“Guccifer” hacked in Monday morning and uploaded messages berating former President George W. Bush.

“You will burn in hell, Bush!” read one post.

“Kill the illuminati! Tomorrow’s world will be a world free of illuminati or will be no more!” he wrote in another.

Powell later apologized on his Facebook page for “all the stupid, obscene posts that are popping up.”