Category Archives: Hillary Clinton email

Hillary’s Top Security Clearance Status in Question

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While the FBI is performing a robust investigation on Hillary’s servers, emails and communications that include her inner circle of people, no one is publically asking about her present security clearance status. Consider the following facts and then question whether she should even has any clearance.

  1. There were emails between Hillary Clinton, the White House and Barack Obama himself. The White House has said they were aware of Hillary’s use of a private email but not her use of a covert communications server. Consequently, the White House is fully protecting all communications between Hillary and the White House until after Mr. Obama leaves office. There are legal challenges to this underway.
  2. Hillary was derelict and forgetful when it came to securing classified material at her office at Foggy Bottom. Classified material must be protected at all times and comply with protocol and procedures.
  3. Hillary and Susan Rice were warned NOT to use the excuse of the video, 2 days before Susan Rice trotted out to the 5 Sunday morning talk shows as there was no evidence the video played any role in the Benghazi attack.
  4. Per the House Committee on Benghazi and the CIA: “CIA Head: ‘Analysts Never Said the Video was a Factor in the Benghazi Attacks’.

There is more, but at this point, continue with the question, if Hillary has top security clearance, the objective must be to have it terminated. If Hillary does not have top security clearance at this point as she has been gone from the State Department since 2013, she should be forced to apply again if she becomes the Democratic nominee for President. Then given the existing facts and those that come from the FBI investigation, she should not be granted this clearance status, thus preventing her completely from holding the office of President in totality.

There was also a trail of communications that prove complete disdain of Israel by not only the White House but by Hillary’s State Department internal officials and those of her outer and more clandestine circle of advisors beginning in 2009.

Click here for that particular email.

For perspective and for some context as to the willful and derelict attitude and culture was at Hillary’s State Department, a handful of emails most recently released tell the story.

From Politico: (in part)

A White House official declined to say whether any of the Obama-Clinton emails related to Libya. If so, the White House’s position could cause an executive privilege clash with Congress, since the House Benghazi Committee subpoenaed all Clinton emails related to Benghazi in March of this year.

The new release of Clinton emails — the largest batch of messages made public since State began posting the messages online to comply with a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit — revealed more about Clinton’s knowledge of embassy security issues and provided a window into lighter moments like Clinton being instructed in the use of emojis.

Friday’s document release is the sixth of its kind and with it, more than half of the messages Clinton turned over to the agency from her private email account and server have now been made public. In the new batch, State deemed 268 emails classified at the lowest classification tier, according to spokesman John Kirby, who said that none of these emails “were marked classified at the time they were sent or received.” There are now between 600 and 700 emails newly marked as classified since the releases began in May.

Clinton, who has been battling the controversy regarding her exclusive use of a private email account and homebrew server during her tenure at Foggy Bottom, has contended that no emails on her account were marked as classified at the time she received them.

The emails released on Friday were sent and received largely during 2011 and 2012, with additional messages from 2009 and 2010 that were not part of previous batches.

Many of the early messages reflect difficulty coordinating between Clinton’s team and the White House. In April 2009, then-National Security Council communications adviser Denis McDonough apologized after senior State officials were left out of the loop on White House announcements about Armenia and Sri Lanka. Clinton told aides she had “forcefully” complained and asked a colleague to show “a little sternness” in confronting the White House about the snubs.

In one message in May 2011, Clinton vented to a longtime friend that not even “the allure of Mother Moon in all her glory” could impress Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Longtime Clinton friend Sid Blumenthal, who frequently gave advice that Clinton said was unsolicited, also offered up in May his analysis of the upcoming November 2010 election, making reference to Rand Paul, then a candidate for Kentucky Senate.

“In the short-term, post-May 18 primaries, the splits within the GOP need to be highlighted; the takeover by extremist forces emphasized; the rejection of traditional Republicans within their own party stressed; and the economic consequences of the extremists—not least now, the gift of Rand Paul, the Republicans’ new spokesman on the scene—who would shut down Social Seucrity [sic], Medicare, student scholarships, and the interstate highway system—constantly targeted as a threat to economic recovery. Run, Rand, run!” he wrote in a memo marked “CONFIDENTIAL.”

In another email chain, Clinton expressed hesitance about the protocol of helping out a famous friend. She received at least three emails from chief of staff Cheryl Mills pertaining to a request from a former ambassador asking the secretary of state to lobby for composer Marvin Hamlisch to receive Kennedy Center honors. Clinton, noted Fay Hartog Levin, was a friend and fan of the musician.

After the ambassador followed up again to see about a letter or a call, Mills asked Clinton her thoughts.

“Sure. I’ll do, but didn’t know that was appropriate. Can you ask Ann Stock. I’d like to support him in best way possible,” she wrote.

Hamlisch died in August 2012, four months after the exchange.

Clinton also got a crash course in emojis. “Here’s my question: on this new berry can I get smiley faces?” Clinton asked senior adviser Philippe Reines.

“For email, no, I don’t think so – you need to type them out manually like 🙂 for happy, or :-I I if you want to express anger at my tardiness,” Reines wrote, after his initial email apologizing for keeping her waiting.

Reines pointed out that for texting, “the chart might be there in the lower right, next to where you type the message.”

“If it’s not, I THINK that if you type 🙂 it MIGHT automatically convert it into a symbol. Try it,” he told the secretary of state.

Another email shows Clinton getting briefed on embassy security issues, despite her contention at last week’s House Select Committee on Benghazi hearing that she did not directly deal with security matters.

When Republicans tried to buttonhole Clinton because State declined numerous requests for additional security at the Benghazi compound that was later over-run, Clinton largely waved them off. Those requests for more protection, she argued several times that day, went to people who deal with security — not her, personally.

One email from April 23, 2009, however, shows top State aide Huma Abedin updating Clinton on a few embassy security issues. In a series of bullet points sent to “H2” at 8:34 a.m., Abedin listed steps State was taking to secure Afghanistan and Pakistan embassies, including “increasing the number of hooches, and doubling up staff in lodging.”
“[W]e need to improve the security perimeter — acquiring property adjacent to our current facilities in Kabul, which is now difficult to secure,” one bullet reads. “Long-term, we need embassies in these countries adequate to serve the mission. It’s not so long ago our Embassy in Islamabad was torched; we need a facility which is structurally sound. In Kabul, we need facilities adequate to size the mission needed.”

It was not clear, though, if Clinton responded to the email or followed up in any other way.

Another newly released Libya email forwarded to Clinton and her top policy staffer Jake Sullivan, dated about a year before the Benghazi attack, warned of Islamist threats in Libya that could turn eventually pose a serious danger. State Department policy planning official Andrew Miller sent Sullivan a memo warning that once Qaddafi was ousted, Islamist groups that had focused their energy on canning the brutal dictator could turn their attention elsewhere and become violent.

“Once operations against Qadhafi and the regime are wrapped up, this force for unity is likely to dissipate,” Miller wrote. Sullivan forwarded the memo to Clinton, who asked her staff to “pls print.” “It is at this point that militias, including the Islamists, will probably abandon caution and pursue a more aggressive campaign for power, perhaps including violence.”

Clinton emerged from last Thursday’s high-stakes, marathon 11-hour Benghazi committee hearing with her campaign and messaging intact. However, Clinton is not out of the woods as far as potential new discoveries in the email controversy that has dogged her campaign. Beyond the other thousands of emails that the State Department has yet to publicly release, there are myriad Freedom of Information Act lawsuits seeking the release of emails from not only Clinton but also her top aides, and at least two other Senate committees are probing Clinton’s email setup.

Additionally, the FBI is probing Clinton’s email arrangement to determine whether sensitive materials were mishandled, and investigators have reportedly successfully recovered some of the messages Clinton’s aides deleted from her server because they deemed them private.

In an interview in March, Obama said he was not aware of Clinton’s email arrangement until news reports about it emerged earlier this year. However, White House spokesman Josh Earnest acknowledged a short time later that Obama had exchanged emails with Clinton on her account, but was not aware that she had no official account and exclusively used her private one during her time as America’s top diplomat.

When producing records to the House Benghazi Committee, the State Department has repeatedly acknowledged that it was holding back a “small” number of documents that implicate “important executive branch confidentiality interests.” However, a New York Times report Friday was the first to make clear the Obama Administration is taking such a tack with respect to the Obama-Clinton messages.

While the White House seems eager to avoid asserting executive privilege over the Obama-Clinton messages, it may have little choice but to do so if it wants to protect them from disclosure. All of Clinton’s emails have been requested in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by Vice News. Lawyers said State will eventually have to account for all of those messages and identify a basis for any deletions or omissions. In that context, the Justice Department is likely to assert a version of executive privilege called the “presidential communications privilege.”

The White House could try to argue that the Clinton-Obama messages are not subject to FOIA at all, but that would be an aggressive stance that lawyers who fight for government transparency are sure to resist.

“I would take the view that the copy that is in Obama’s email account at the White House is a presidential record and the copy that went to Hillary Clinton and was maintained on her email server is a State Department record subject to the Federal Records Act and FOIA,” said Scott Nelson of Public Citizen Litigation Group.

Ultimately, the courts are unlikely to force the release of the contents of the Clinton-Obama exchanges through FOIA, although details about who was on the email chains and when they were exchanged will probably emerge in the coming months. Nelson noted that the substance of the messages will probably come out through Obama’s presidential library before they would be accessible under FOIA. Presidential records detailing advice to a president are usually subject to release 12 years after he leaves office.

“You might get access to the presidential records one sooner than the FOIA one,” Nelson said.

Congress could also press for the emails, but if they don’t relate to Libya or Benghazi, it’s unclear which committee would do so. A Hill subpoena could force Obama to formally assert executive privilege over the records, as it did in a House committee’s showdown with Attorney General Eric Holder over records relating to the government’s response to the Operation Fast and Furious gunwalking scandal.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hillary Emails: Deeper Fraud/Collusion at Foundation

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There have been calls for an investigative panel to dig much deeper on the Clinton Foundation, but there are many non-government organizations doing that already.

While the FBI is investigating portable devices, metadata and foreign telecom intrusions into Hillary’s server and those at the State Department, the released emails so far tell an additional story that there was a very blurred line between Foundation work, donors and for sure diplomatic agendas.

So, exactly what is this Clinton Foundation about? Well nothing like one would think and the laws broken fall on that pesky IRS division that Lois Lerner (Loretta Lynch, at the DoJ refused to prosecute) where no one seems interested in proceeding on IRS law violations.

Clinton Foundation Faces Revisions–and Possible Reckoning

By Ken Silverstein

The Clinton Foundation has gotten a good deal of unflattering attention as of late, which isn’t surprising given that its best known namesakes are Bill, a former president and Hillary, who hopes to be the nation’s next leader. The foundation portrays itself as do-gooder nonprofit organization but a cursory look reveals questionable and incomplete disclosures of its activities and accounts, as well as misspending of donor money, virtually since its inception.

Those lapses appear set to catch up with the foundation (now formally known as the Bill, Hillary, & Chelsea Clinton Foundation), which has until November 16 to amend more than ten years’ worth of state, federal and foreign filings. According to Charles Ortel, a financial whistleblower, it will be difficult if not impossible for the foundation to amend its financial returns without acknowledging accounting fraud and admitting that it generated substantial private gain for directors, insiders and Clinton cronies, all of which would be against the law under an IRS rule called inurement.

While inurement may sound obscure to the layman, it’s an ancient legal principle and the IRS is very clear that it is verboten. If you are familiar with it, it becomes immediately clear that Bill Clinton – and arguably Hillary and daughter Chelsea as family members and fellow Clinton Foundation trustees – could have big problems come November 16. So, too, could Clinton cronies like Ira Magaziner (see below) and Doug Band, a Clinton administration and former foundation insider who subsequently became a founding partner of a bipartisan business swamp called Teneo Holdings.

The Clinton Foundation’s returns show revenues of $359.3 million between 2001 and 2006 and claim spending of $164.5 million on all program services, which includes its spending to provide relief to victims of the Tsunami in Asia and of Hurricane Katrina. The same pattern of taking in vast sums from donors and spending far less to help victims has continued ever since.

“It’s illegal to set up a foundation whose primary purpose is to create financial gain,” said Ortel – who helped expose massive financial fraud by GE, GM and AIG, thereby helping trigger the 2008 financial collapse. “That’s bright line illegal.” (Ortel wrote an article at Breitbart.com earlier which showed how “associates of Bill and Hillary Clinton may have attempted to monetize their participation in Clinton family philanthropic activities.”)

Ortel, a former managing director of Dillon, Read & Co, said that under New York law tax authorities don’t have to show criminal intent to get convictions against foundation officials, they need only show that the foundation filed materially misleading financial information and kept fundraising nonetheless.

“The essence of what a charity does is take your money and show you how they spend it,” he told me. “The Clinton Foundation takes your money and obscures how they spend it.” (Note that the Clinton Foundation only started disclosing its donors in 2008, following years of pressure.)

Foundation spokesman Craig Minassian did not reply to repeated requests for comment for this story.

Ortel is hardly alone in raising questions about the Clinton Foundation’s accounting practices. Earlier this year, the watchdog group Charity Navigator put the Clinton Foundation on its “watch list” of dubious non-profit groups and politely described its business practices as “atypical.” A New York Post story about the development noted that in 2013 the family’s foundation “took in more than $140 million in grants and pledges…but spent just $9 million on direct aid.”

Charity Navigator is described by the Chronicle of Philanthropy as the country’s “most prominent” nonprofit watchdog and “ranks more than 8,000 charities and is known for its independence,” New York magazine reported at the same time. That story noted that Charity Navigator’s new ranking of the Clinton Foundation placed grouped it together with other “scandal-plagued charities like Al Sharpton’s National Action Network and the Red Cross.”

Detailed information provided to me by Ortel – and which I carefully reviewed and confirmed — shows that since its founding, the Clinton Foundation has received more than $1 billion to purchase HIV/AIDS drugs for poor people in Africa, Asia and elsewhere. The leading donors to the foundation to support this admirable goal include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and UNITAID.

However, a unit set up to receive the money – the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative Inc., which was run by Magaziner, a Clinton administration veteran with close ties to Hillary – appears to have spent far less than it took in. The unit’s accounting was so shoddy that in 2008, the state of Massachusetts revoked its license.

Furthermore, the accounting firm that handled much of the paperwork, BKD, has been implicated in a variety of misconduct. For example, last year the Securities and Exchange Commission sanctioned BKD for “violating auditor independence rules when they prepared the financial statements of brokerage firms that were their audit clients.”

(As reported by the Washington Free Beacon, BKD was replaced as the foundation’s accountant by – no, I’m not making this up – PricewaterhouseCoopers, whose previous clients included Enron. That firm’s CEO, Kenneth Lay, died of a heart attack before he was shipped off to prison after engineering one of the biggest financial frauds in American history, with the help of accounting firms like PricewaterhouseCoopers.)

Ortel has issued two little-read reports that strongly suggest that the New York-headquartered Clinton Foundation has violated federal and state laws that bar charities from enriching board members, officers or donors. “The Clinton Foundation is like a Turkish bazaar,” Ortel told me. “You think you’re going into a carpet shop but you’re really going into the back of a truck.” (Ortel says he is politically closer to the GOP than to the Democrats, but says he mostly hates “crony capitalism” as practiced by both parties.)

Last April, Clinton Foundation acting CEO Maura Pally acknowledged “mistakes” in its tax filings and promised they would be corrected by November 16.

The problem for the foundation, Ortel says, is that filing correct returns is impossible for the Clinton Foundation without admitting to criminal felonies. “The foundation has never filed a legitimate, independently certified and complete audit of their financial statements since it was founded, as is required under state, federal and foreign law,” he said.

In 2001, Bill helped set up the Clinton Foundation within weeks of leaving office – after surrendering his law licenses in January for lying under oath during the Monica Lewinsky investigation. That’s not much of a qualification to help run a foundation since those in charge of charities are legally bound to always make truthful declarations.

Bill clearly was in position to exercise significant influence over the foundation and referred to it publicly as “his” charity on numerous occasions. And even though he was not an officer or director of the main foundation until 2013, he had from the very beginning signed legal agreements on the foundation’s behalf and traveled the globe bragging about its alleged good deeds.

Hillary and daughter Chelsea, whom has accomplished little of note in her life but was made a foundation vice chair, basked in the glory. From a branding standpoint, the foundation has been pure gold for the Clintons.

The Clinton Foundation was initially authorized by the IRS to act as a library and research center about Bill Clinton’s presidency. In apparent violation of IRS rules, the foundation expanded its purposes and began raising billions of dollars for other purposes without asking the IRS for permission to do so.

According to the Clinton Foundation’s website, it started its efforts in the HIV/AIDS arena with the “transformational goal” of helping “save the lives of millions of people living with HIV/AIDS in the developing world by dramatically scaling up antiretroviral treatment.”

The Foundation geared up to make HIV/AIDS drug purchases beginning in 2002, but its activities in this area were not disclosed in its 2002 and 2003 tax filings, presumably because it was not legally allowed to engage in such activities at the time.

The Clinton Foundation’s website says it is committed to transparency, but the organization omits much key information from its website, including audits for 2001 to 2004. Its application to form the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative Inc. and the IRS determination letter for that entity are also omitted.

Since the early-2000s, the Clinton Foundation has taken in at least $1 billion in donations to fight AIDS — from groups like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation and UNITAID, as well as governments including, Australia, Canada, France, Ireland, Sweden and the United Kingdom – Ortel estimates.

The Clinton Foundation’s tax forms are so opaque and convoluted that there’s no way to know the precise figure for sure; Ortel bases this number on his review of statements and filings from foundations and governments that have donated to the Clinton’s charity.

Meanwhile, the Clinton Foundation set up a related non-profit — the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative, Inc. — to take in cash for its anti-AIDS initiatives. It was an Arkansas non-profit corporation based in Massachusetts and Magaziner – a chief healthcare policy advisor under President Clinton – got paid an undisclosed amount of money to run it out of the offices of his private consulting firm–an arrangement that, Ortel says, crossed the line of legality. In addition to the U.S., the Clinton Foundation set up anti-AIDS entities in at least a score of other countries.

Figures provided by UNITAID show it has given grants to the Clinton Foundation totaling $341.5 million for anti-AIDS drug purchases between 2006 and 2009 (see last page at this link), while the Clinton Foundation claims it spent about $215.4 million.

The fact that that UNITAID apparently donated about $126 million more to the Clinton Foundation for ant-AIDS pharmaceuticals than the Clinton Foundation acknowledges spending on them is alarming enough. And based on this analysis by Judicial Watch, that understates the magnitude of the problem dramatically.

In an emailed statement, Andrew Hurst, a spokesman for UNITAID, said that, “UNITAID is satisfied that the disbursements to William J. Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative/Clinton Health Access Initiative, Inc. have always been fully reconciled and expenditures made in line with grant agreements. Consistent with standard policy, UNITAID commissions independent assessments, audits and programmatic reviews of its grants. The results of all audits conducted so far have been entirely satisfactory.”

When Massachusetts shut down the HIV/AIDS Initiative unit, the Clinton Foundation simply folded its operations into its own and pretended nothing had happened. All of this was flatly illegal, but the IRS, whose tax-exempt wing was led during most of the relevant period by Lois Lerner, did zero. Obama’s Justice Department investigated Lerner on unrelated charges, but never filed charges.

The general shadiness of the whole Clinton Foundations AIDS initiative may well explain why Sir Elton John turned down without explanation an award for fighting AIDS from Bill Clinton during the recent Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting in New York.

“Using a charity that exploits victims of AIDS for your personal gain and advancement puts you in the lower circles of hell, but New York and the IRS haven’t done anything to stop them,” Ortel said.

 

Per FBI: Foreign Telecoms Likely Hacked Hillary Emails

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The Justice Department officials also used the words “reckless”, “stunning,” and “unbelievable” in discussing the controversy swirling around Clinton’s use of a private, nongovernment email account.

FBN Exclusive: DOJ Officials Fear Foreign Telecoms Hacked Clinton Emails, Server

FBN: Officials close to the matter at the Department of Justice are concerned the emails Hillary Clinton sent from her personal devices while overseas on business as U.S. Secretary of State were breached by foreign telecoms in the countries she visited—a list which includes China.

“Her emails could have easily been hacked into by telecoms in these countries. They got the emails first, and then routed them back to her home server. They could have hacked into both,” one Justice Department official close to the matter says.

Another Justice Department official adds: “Those telecommunications companies over there often have government workers in there. That telecom in that foreign country could then follow the trail of emails back to her server in the U.S. and break into the server” remotely over the Internet. At various points in this process, there were multiple entry points to hack into Clinton’s server to steal information, as well as eavesdrop, the Justice Department officials say.

This is the first indication that officials at the Justice Department are concerned that foreign telecom workers may have broken into Clinton’s emails and home server. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is currently investigating the national security issues surrounding Clinton’s emails and server.

The Justice Department officials also used the words “reckless”, “stunning,” and “unbelievable” in discussing the controversy swirling around Clinton’s use of a private, nongovernment email account, as well as her use of a personal Blackberry (BBRY), an Apple (AAPL) iPad, and home server while U.S. Secretary of State. The officials did not indicate they have any knowledge of a breach at this point.

As for the effort to designate Clinton’s emails as classified or unclassified, the Justice Department officials agreed that, as one put it: “Every email she sent is classified because she herself is classified, because she is both Secretary of State and a former first lady.”

In addition, there’s a growing belief among cyber security experts at web security places like Venafi and Data Clone Labs that Clinton’s emails were unprotected in the first three months of her tenure in 2009 as the nation’s top diplomat, based on Internet scans of her server Venafi conducted at that time.

“For the first three months of Secretary Clinton’s term in office, from early January to late March, access to her home server was not encrypted or authenticated with a digital certificate,” Kevin Bocek, vice president of security strategy and threat intelligence at Venafi tells FOX Business. “That opens the risk that Clinton’s user name and password were exposed and captured, particularly in places she traveled to at this time, like China or Egypt. And that raises issues of national security,” adding “Attackers could have eavesdropped on communications, particularly in places like China, where the Internet and telecom infrastructure are built to do that.”

Digital certificates are the bedrock of Internet security. They verify the Web authenticity and legitimacy of an email server, and they let the recipient of an email know that an email is from a trusted source. Essentially, digital certificates are electronic passports attached to an email that verifies that a user sending an email is who he or she claims to be.

Because it appears Clinton’s server did not have a digital certificate in the first three months of 2009, “a direct attack on her server was likely at this time, and the odds are fairly high it was successful,” says Ira Victor, director of the digital forensic practice at Data Clone Labs.

In and around January 13, 2009, the day of Clinton’s Senate confirmation hearings, the clintonemail.com domain name was registered. An estimated 62,320 emails were sent and received on Clinton’s private email account during her tenure as U.S. Secretary of State. Later, 31,830 emails were erased from her private server because they were deemed personal.

Although Clinton previously has argued that there was no classified material on her home server in Chappaqua, N.Y., the U.S. Department of State has deemed 403 emails as classified, with three designated “top secret” (the State Dept. itself has been the subject of cyber hacking).

Clinton has maintained her home server did have “numerous safeguards,” but it’s unclear specifically what security measures were installed, and what those layers were. In September, Clinton apologized on ABC News for using a home server to manage her U.S. Department of State electronic correspondence.

Although Clinton and her team have indicated her emails were not hacked, not knowing about a breach is different from being hacked, cyber analysts tell FOX Business. Her campaign staffers did not return calls or emails for comment. “Even the NSA, the CIA, and Fortune 500 companies know they cannot make that claim that they have not been hacked. Everyone can be hacked,” says Bocek.

FOX News recently reported that an intelligence source familiar with the FBI’s probe into Clinton’s server said that the FBI is now focused on whether there were violations of the federal Espionage Act pertaining to “gross negligence” in the safeguarding of national defense information. Sets of emails released show that Clinton and top aides continuously sent information about foreign governments and sensitive conversations with world leaders, among other things, FOX News reported.

Secure communications and devices are routine in the federal government. For example, President Barack Obama received a secure Blackberry from the National Security Agency after he was elected, a former top NSA official tells FOX Business.

“I could not recall that I ever heard that a secure Blackberry was provided to Hillary Clinton.  No one else can either,” the former NSA official says, adding, “There is no way her calls were properly secured if she used her [personal] Blackberry.” Blackberry declined comment.

The former NSA official says the same issue is at play for Clinton’s iPad. “While there have been recent advances in securing iPhones and iPads, these were not available, in my opinion, when she was Secretary of State and there would have to be a record that she sought permission to use them with encryption,” the former NSA official says.

When traveling overseas, U.S. secretaries of states use secure phones that ensure end-to-end encryption, and in some cases, mutual authentication of the parties calling, the former NSA official said. Communications are conducted via secured satellite, digital networks or Internet telephony.

“I think I can say, with some confidence, that once any decent foreign intelligence service discovered she was using her personal phone and iPad, she would be targeted and it would be a high priority operation,” the former NSA official said, adding, “if the calls were unencrypted, it would be no challenge at all while she was overseas — they just have to get to the nearest cell tower.”

The first three months of her tenure as Secretary of State would have been an ideal time for hackers to break in, cyber security experts say.

Specifically, experts point to work done by cyber security experts at Venafi, which has revealed a three-month gap in security for Clinton’s home server after the Palo Alto, Calif. firm’s team had conducted routine, “non-intrusive Internet scanning” in January 2009.

Venafi’s Bocek tells FOX Business that he and his team had picked up Clinton’s domain, clintonemail.com, at that time, and found that her home server had not been issued a digital certificate. That means email traffic to and from her server was unprotected from early January to late March 2009. During that time, Clinton traveled as U.S. Secretary of State to China, Indonesia, South Korea, Japan, Egypt, Palestine, Israel, Belgium, Switzerland, and Turkey.

“It also means anyone accessing her home server, including Clinton and other people, would have unencrypted access, including from devices and via web browsers,” says Bocek. “This means that during the first three months of Secretary Clinton’s term in office, web browser, smartphone, and tablet communications would not have been encrypted.”

Digital certificates are vital to Internet security. All “online banking, shopping, and confidential government communications wouldn’t be possible without the trust established by digital certificates,” says Bocek. “Computers in airplanes, cars, smartphones, all electronic communications, indeed trade around the world depend on the security from digital certificates.”

The Office of Management and Budget has now mandated that all federal web servers must use digital certificates by the end of 2016, Bocek notes.

If cyber hackers broke into Clinton’s server, they also could have easily tricked it into handing over usernames, passwords, or other sensitive information, Bocek noted.

“The concern is that log-on credentials could have been compromised during this time, especially given travel to China and elsewhere,” Bocek says opening the door to more lapses. “As we’ve seen with so many other breaches, to long-term, under-the-radar compromise by adversaries, hacks that Clinton and her team may not be aware of.”

Bocek adds: “Essentially, the cyber hacker would have looked to Clinton’s server like it was Secretary Clinton emailing.”

Digital forensic analyst Victor agrees. “It’s highly likely her emails sent during this time via her devices and on her server were not encrypted. More significantly, her log-on credentials, her user name and passwords, were almost certainly not encrypted,” says Victor, who has testified in cyber security cases as an expert forensic witness. “So that means emails from Clinton’s aides, like Huma Abedin, or anyone who had email accounts on her server, their communications were also likely unencrypted.”

Victor adds: “It’s highly likely all of their user names and passwords were being exposed on a regular basis to potential cyber attackers, with the high risk they were stolen by, for instance, government employees who could get the passwords for everyone Clinton was communicating with.”

Victor explains how Clinton’s emails from her devices could have been hacked, and malware could have been planted on her server. “Say Clinton emailed from her device during her Beijing trip in that 2009 period. Her emails would first get routed through the local, state-controlled Chinese telecom. The Chinese telecom captures those bits of emails that are broken up into electronic packets by the device she uses,” Victor explains.

Any device Clinton emailed from, Victor says, was constantly “polling and authenticating communications” between her device and her server. But all of the back-and-forth communication goes through, say, the Chinese telecom. When the device is polling her server with non-secure communications, it’s giving attackers repeat opportunities to breach.”

He continues: “If the connection was not protected, a state actor at the China telecom transmitting her email back to her server in the U.S. could breach both the device and the server at that point.”

Martin C. Libicki, a senior management scientist and cyber expert at Rand Corp., says that security on Clinton’s devices could have been higher than feared. But he says that, while the Blackberry device does have strong encryption, once Clinton zoomed emails from her Blackberry through the foreign telecom networks during those first three months of her tenure, “it was much easier to hack both the device and the server then.”

Venafi’s team, which included analysts Hari Nair and Gavin Hill, found Clinton and/or her team did eventually purchase digital certificates for the server and the clintonemail.com domain name starting in March 2009.

Victor added: “But the question that needed to be asked then was, once the certificate was installed, did Clinton and her team warn anyone she had emailed during those first three months about the poor security during that time, did they warn them to reset their security passwords on all their devices?”

Clinton Lincoln Bedroom, 2017 Re-Run?

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Buying of the President 2016

Clinton White House sleepover guests still writing checks

Friends who slept in Lincoln Bedroom shift donations from Bill to Hillary

by: Liz Essley Whyte

Oct. 26, 2015: This story has been updated.

Click here for the top 34 donor list.

For a first family, inviting guests to spend a night in the Lincoln Bedroom can pay dividends for decades.

Among donors to Democrat Bill Clinton’s campaigns first revealed as overnight guests of his White House and today still living, more than half are still giving — this time to Hillary Clinton.

The Center for Public Integrity published the first list of donors who nabbed a night in the Clinton White House — and whose stays sparked outrage and investigations — in its 1996 report, “Fat Cat Hotel.”

Of the 66 original “Fat Cats” still living, 34 have donated a total of $1.15 million to Hillary Clinton’s campaign or the super PACs supporting her since January 2013. With more than a year before the general election, the number of supporters and their donations may rise.

Most of the generous former guests contributed $2,700 to Hillary Clinton’s campaign account — the maximum amount allowed under federal law during the primaries. The Clinton campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

At least one of the faithful 2016 givers, who celebrated his 10th wedding anniversary in 1993 with a stay at the White House, is looking forward to a return stay in the chief executive’s mansion, courtesy of the Clintons.

“Last time I stayed in the Queen’s Bedroom, so I need to be upgraded to the Lincoln Bedroom,” said former Florida state Rep. Dick Batchelor, who orchestrated the first Florida fundraiser for Bill Clinton in 1991.

“I have no idea whether that would take place or not, but anybody who says they don’t want to visit the White House and spend the night is probably not telling the truth. If I had an opportunity to go back, I would absolutely go back,” he added. “I need to return the towels.”

The original 80 Fat Cats, including those who are now deceased, are only a portion of those who ultimately crashed at the Clinton White House.

The Clinton administration released records in 1997 showing that 938 guests had stayed at the mansion during the president’s first term, dwarfing the 284 who stayed during the previous administration.

And a Democratic National Committee memo showed that President Bill Clinton personally endorsed the idea of using sleepovers at the White House as a fundraising tactic — “Ready to start overnights right away,” he wrote.

At least another 404 guests stayed the night at the Clinton White House and Camp David after Hillary Clinton began campaigning for U.S. Senate in July 1999.

The invitations for sleepovers in the Lincoln Bedroom two decades ago drew fire during Bill Clinton’s presidency, as the press dug up details and Congress probed the chief executive’s fundraising efforts.

Many of the original Fat Cats were Clinton friends from Arkansas. But only eight of them have given to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Another 18 Arkansas friends have not, while 10 are no longer living.

But that doesn’t mean Arkansan attitudes toward Hillary Clinton have cooled, said Skip Rutherford, a longtime Clinton strategist and former White House overnight guest.

“The people that I know that were friends of Bill’s are friends of Hillary’s,” said Rutherford, who said he hasn’t contributed to politicians since becoming dean of the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service. His wife, Billie, gave $2,700 to the 2016 Clinton campaign. “Politics is very personal in this state. And the Clintons touched a lot of people over the years. And so there’s a lot of loyal, good friends of the Clintons here.”

There are some turncoats: At least four of the former Clinton guests, on top of turning lukewarm on Hillary Clinton, have contributed to her Republican rivals for the nation’s highest office.

Texas oil magnate Truman Arnold, who served as finance chair for the Democratic Party in 1995 and has contributed to Democrats as recently as last year, gave $25,000 to Right to Rise USA, a super PAC backing former GOP Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. Arnold, who was in charge of Democratic fundraising in his role as finance chair, was caught up in the Lincoln Bedroom scandal as more than just a guest.

He once told journalists that he used a Clinton White House database to make sure donors were rewarded with perks, including Lincoln Bedroom stays. Arnold did not respond to requests for comment.

Little Rock bank executive Curt Bradbury and his wife Charlotte both gave to the campaign of Republican U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina; in addition, Curt Bradbury gave $25,000 to a super PAC supporting New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie and $100,000 to Right to Rise USA, the pro-Bush super PAC.

Bradbury said staying in the White House was “a little bit like sleeping in a museum.” Though he’s a lifelong conservative, he supported Bill Clinton because he is a “native son” of Arkansas.

“Bill’s politics in Arkansas don’t resemble anything I see in the Democratic Party now,” he said. “He was very pragmatic in Arkansas.”

Arkansas banker Warren Stephens, who has given mostly to Republicans but supported Bill Clinton’s first bid for the presidency, has contributed more than $216,000 to support the presidential bids of several GOP candidates, including Bush, Christie, Graham and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who has since dropped out of the race.

“The entire Democrat party has shifted pretty hard to the left,” Stephens said. “Our politics are a lot different.”

Several of the Hollywood honchos who once stayed at the Clinton White House have donated to Hillary Clinton, but others have yet to commit.

Director Steven Spielberg gave $1 million to a super PAC supporting the former secretary of state, as well as $2,700 to her campaign. And actor Tom Hanks, singer Barbra Streisand, producer David Geffen and actress Mary Steenburgen also supported the former first lady’s 2016 run.

“I don’t think there’s a human being in this world more qualified because of all of her experiences,” Steenburgen, an Arkansas native, told the Arkansas Times earlier this year. She has given $2,700 to the campaign fund. “I will be campaigning mightily.”

But comedian Chevy Chase, actor Richard Dreyfuss and producer Mike Medavoy have not given.

Dreyfuss called his kids from the Lincoln Bedroom and was awoken by Bill Clinton at 7:20 a.m. so they could talk politics, the Center for Public Integrity previously reported.

Even Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, a documentary filmmaker who stayed in the Lincoln Bedroom for the first night of Bill Clinton’s presidency and ended up sleeping there a total of 101 nights, has yet to donate to Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid.

Producer Medavoy, who supported Obama during the 2008 presidential primaries, said he plans to give soon.

“I will contribute at the time of my choosing,” he said. “When is none of your business.”

Medavoy said he supports Clinton this year because he doesn’t expect another viable candidate to emerge, not because he wants a return visit to the White House.

“I thought the president and Mrs. Clinton were gracious, nice. I thought the family was nice. I was very lucky, and I know it, to have been invited,” he said. “And I hope that it wasn’t just because I supported them and early, but because we basically agreed about what needed to be done in the world.”

Medavoy’s ex-wife Patricia Duff also stayed at the White House; she has given a total of $7,700 to Hillary Clinton’s campaign account and Ready PAC, formerly known as Ready for Hillary, which supports Clinton. One of Duff’s claims to fame is that she called Bill Clinton “one full-service president” after her stay in the executive mansion, reportedly angering the president.

(Update, Oct. 26, 2015, 5:51 p.m.: Duff did not respond to an initial request for comment, but contacted the Center for Public Integrity after the report was posted. She said via an emailed statement that the earlier accounts of her remarks perpetuated “an offensive myth that has been running for too long and completely fumbles the facts.” She added that her comment was taken “completely out of context.”

Duff said that she was at the White House with then-husband Medavoy and that the president knew that Medavoy had to get up early the next morning.

“We were both totally charmed when the President knocked on our door and brought Mike a cup of coffee as his wake up call. My sincere surprise at this homespun hospitality occasioned my completely sincere and innocent remark,” she wrote in her email. “We were delighted — and said so. I have never heard from anyone that the President was angry with me. Then, as now, I maintain a cordial relationship with both Secretary Clinton and the President.”)

Some of the former guests who have not yet donated to the Clinton 2016 effort may be waiting for the Democratic Party to choose a nominee. Others said they plan to give soon.

“Well of course I support Hillary because I’m crazy about her,” said Diane Carroll, whose husband Phillip Carroll once worked with the candidate at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock. “I just haven’t really gotten around to it, to tell you the truth.”

This story was co-published with Slate.

 

Those 2 Defense Contractors and Manpads in Benghazi

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In part from CBSNews: The U.S. has been unable to secure thousands of potentially dangerous shoulder-fired missiles known as “MANPADS” that were leftover from the Qaddafi regime in Libya, CBS News has learned.

MANPADS stands for “Man-portable air-defense systems.” According to a well-placed source, hundreds of the missiles have been tracked as having gone to Al Qaeda Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), an Algeria-based Sunni Muslim terrorist group fighting for control in Mali.

“I would imagine they’re trying to get their hands on as many weapons such as MANPADS as they can,” says CBS News national security consultant Juan Zarate. “It’s a danger both to the military conflict underway in Mali and a real threat to civilian aircraft if, in fact, terrorists have their hands on these MANPADS.”

Before his overthrow and death in the fall of 2011, Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi was believed to have purchased 15,000-20,000 Soviet MANPADS. Concern over the whereabouts of the missiles – and the possibility that terrorists could buy them on the black market and even use them to shoot down American passenger jets – drove a U.S. effort to recover as many as possible. But only about 2,000 were accounted for prior to the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attacks on Benghazi, Libya, according to the source. He describes those working to locate the missiles as “beside themselves” and “frustrated.”

The program to recover MANPADS in Libya was funded by the U.S. and said to have been run by South African contractors. The contractors attempted to appeal to Libyans, many of them ex-Gaddafi loyalists, to turn over or destroy the MANPADS as a matter of patriotism and pride.

“We told them that ‘if planes start dropping out of the sky, it will trace back to you and you’ll have the international reputation for terrorism,'” says the source. “We offered them money, we tried talking them out of it … The only successes they had were in western Libya, the Tripoli area. In the eastern half toward Benghazi, they were getting nowhere.”

The full emails are here from Judicial Watch regarding the 2 Defense contractors hired by the State Department to collect weapons in Benghazi, specifically manpads.

In part, 2 pages are below, the interaction between the State Dept. OpsCenter and Benghazi

Sent:

To:

Subject:

Classification:

SensitivityCode:

Tuesday, September 11, 2012 7:27 PM

DSCC_Watch Team; DSCC_Management_ Team

Benghazi Contractors

UNCLASSIFIED

Sensitive

Further regarding Contractors on the ground in Benghazi

SBU

This email is UNCLASSIFIED.

From: Operations Center

Sent: Tuesday. Seotember 11. 2012 7;26 P:

To:l.__ __________ _,j

Cc: SES-0

Subject: RE: proposed teleconference call – PM/WRA– Libya Thursday

‘c:!llo gentlemen,

~—–~ RELEASE IN PART

B7(C),B6

~-i (..• .. \ ‘”‘ ;1 J

86

B7(C)

rhe Operations Center spoke with! ~arlier this evening ~nd has noted that he and [ [are in the

hotel in Benghazi. Please let us know if there are any further updates, and do not hesitate to call the Operations Center

if you need anything at all.

Take care,

Esther

Esther Pan Sloane

From:I

To

Subject: proposed teleconference call – PM/WRA- Libya Thursday

Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2012 20:35 :06 +0000

Hello All,

PM/WRA, led by Jim Lawrence, would like to host a conference call to discuss our current and future work on the ground

in Easf and West Libya, as well as other relevant issues regarding the coordination with our Libyan and UN partners.

I liave scheduled the call for 1000 EST (Washington) on Thursday, September 13. I am waiting for details to ·pass on to

the participants to .call in. I should have those shortly. –

I just wanted to give you a heads up and we hope you can participate. For participants in our o~ce CC’d on this mail,

this call will be held in WRA’s Conference Room. ·

Thanks,

D

SBU

This email is UNCLASSIFIED.

***  Taken in part from page 7 of the journal marking the retirement of Jim Lawrence.

His quiet brand of leadership has been as effective in waging peace as his father’s efforts were in waging war; consequently, PM/WRA and the Department of State are prepared as never before to face the evolving challenges in the fields of humanitarian demining and the destruction/disposition of MANPADS [man-portable air-defense systems] and other conventional weapons.