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The service, known in Estonia as Kaitsepolitseiamet or “Kapo,” produces an Annual Review summarizing trends and internal threats to Estonia. The 2015 Annual Review, released last week, includes sections on cyber security, preventing international terrorism, and fighting corruption, among other issues.
However, the first page of the report makes it clear what the service considers the top threat to Estonian and European security: “In the context of Russian aggression, the security threat arising from a weakening of the European Union is many times greater than that arising from the refugees settling in Estonia.”
“This is the most important point,” Martin Arpo, Kapo’s deputy director general, told the Washington Free Beacon. “For Estonia, the report is a reminder: let’s think about real security threats, and not imaginary ones. The migration crisis is bringing focus away from real threats not only in Estonia but in Europe, as well. The only hope for Putin to fulfill his ambitions is that Europe and NATO are split or have controversies inside. The refugee crisis is really the only serious topic that can bring these controversies.”
The first page of the report references the Gerasimov Doctrine, a vision of war through non-military means published by Russian Chief of General Staff Valeriy Gerasimov in early 2013. More here.
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Spooked by Russia, Tiny Estonia Trains a Nation of Insurgents
Members of the Estonian Defense League set off for a patrol competition near the town of Turi in central Estonia. The events, held nearly every weekend, are called war games, but they are not intended to be fun.Credit James Hill for The New York Times
NYT’s/TURI, Estonia — Her face puffy from lack of sleep, Vivika Barnabas peered down at the springs, rods and other parts of a disassembled assault rifle spread before her.
At last, midway through one of this country’s peculiar, grueling events known as patrol competitions, she had come upon an easy task.
Already, she and her three teammates had put out a fire, ridden a horse, identified medicinal herbs from the forest and played hide-and-seek with gun-wielding “enemies” in the woods at night.
By comparison, this would be easy. She knelt in the crinkling, frost-covered grass of a forest clearing and grabbed at the rifle parts in a flurry of clicks and snaps, soon handing the assembled weapon to a referee.
A team loaded and removed cartridges from rifle magazines in a timed test.Credit James Hill for The New York Times
“We just have to stay alive,” Ms. Barnabas said of the main idea behind the Jarva District Patrol Competition, a 24-hour test of the skills useful for partisans, or insurgents, to fight an occupying army, and an improbably popular form of what is called “military sport” in Estonia.
The competitions, held nearly every weekend, are called war games, but are not intended as fun. The Estonian Defense League, which organizes the events, requires its 25,400 volunteers to turn out occasionally for weekend training sessions that have taken on a serious hue since Russia’s incursions in Ukraine two years ago raised fears of a similar thrust by Moscow into the Baltic States.
Estonia, a NATO member with a population of 1.3 million people and a standing army of about 6,000, would not stand a chance in a conventional war with Russia. But two armies fighting on an open field is not Estonia’s plan, and was not even before Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, said European members of NATO should not count on American support unless they pay more alliance costs.
Since the Ukraine war, Estonia has stepped up training for members of the Estonian Defense League, teaching them how to become insurgents, right down to the making of improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.s, the weapons that plagued the American military in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another response to tensions with Russia is the expansion of a program encouraging Estonians to keep firearms in their homes.
The Jarva competition entailed a 25-mile hike and 21 specific tasks, such as answering questions of local trivia — to sort friend from foe — hiding in a bivouac deep in the woods and correctly identifying types of Russian armored vehicles. On a recent weekend, 16 teams of four people had turned out, despite the bitter, late fall chill. The competition was open to men, women and teenagers.
Ms. Barnabas and her three teammates had spent the night hiding in a nest lined with pine needles and leaves on the forest floor, while men playing the occupying army stomped around, firing guns in the air and searching for them. Contestants who are found must hand over one of the 12 “life cards” they carry, which detracts from their final score.
“It’s cold and you lie on the ground, looking up at the stars and hearing shooting and footsteps nearby,” said Ms. Barnabas, a petite woman who is also a coordinator for the league in her day job. She was swathed in a few layers of long underwear and camouflage.
“It wasn’t so bad because we slept cuddled together,” she said, flirtatiously, of her female team. The footsteps came and went, and the women stayed quiet. “They didn’t find us.”
A team demonstrated its first-aid skills during the competition. Members bring their rifles and rucksacks packed with camping comfort foods like salami, Snickers bars and Gatorade, as well as first-aid kits.
Encouraging citizens to stash warm clothes, canned goods, boots and a rifle may seem a cartoonish defense strategy against a military colossus like Russia. Yet the Estonians say they need look no further than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to see the effectiveness today, as ever, of an insurgency to even the odds against a powerful army.
Estonia is hardly alone in striking upon the idea of dispersing guns among the populace to advertise the potential for widespread resistance, as a deterrent.
Of the top four nations in the world for private gun ownership — the United States, Yemen, Switzerland and Finland — the No. 3 and 4 spots belong to small nations with a minutemen-style civilian call-up as a defense strategy or with a history of partisan war.
“The best deterrent is not only armed soldiers, but armed citizens, too,” Brig. Gen. Meelis Kiili, the commander of the Estonian Defense League, said in an interview in Tallinn, the capital.
A team of military cadets won the competition.Credit James Hill for The New York Times
The number of firearms, mostly Swedish-made AK-4 automatic rifles, that Estonia has dispersed among its populace is classified. But the league said it had stepped up the pace of the program since the Ukraine crisis began. Under the program, members must hide the weapons and ammunition, perhaps in a safe built into a wall or buried in the backyard.
For the competitions, members bring their rifles and rucksacks packed with camping comfort foods like salami, Snickers bars and Gatorade, as well as first-aid kits.
But why bother with the stocking caps, the hidden ammunition and the rucksacks if, under Article 5 of the NATO charter, the United States is obliged to send the full might of its military hurtling into Estonia in an attack?
The Estonian government says that ignores Article 3, which stipulates that each member should also prepare for individual defense. But skeptics cite another reason: fears that the United States and Europe might not have the stomach for a confrontation with Russia, even though they are currently building up their military presence in the Baltics. That would leave Estonia to fend for itself.
A member of the team that placed second sank to the ground to recuperate after crossing the finish line.Credit James Hill for The New York Times
Whatever the reason, training for underground warfare is going ahead here, where partisans are still glorified for fighting the Nazis and Soviets in World War II.
“The guerrilla activity should start on occupied territory straight after the invasion,” General Kiili said. “If you want to defend your country, we train you and provide conditions to do it in the best possible way.”
Members of the community also take part in the drills.
The competition to identify edible and medicinal herbs, for example, was run by a high school biology teacher. The fire department staged a competition to put out a small blaze in a barrel. A horseback-riding school for children tested moving a “wounded” colleague by horse.
Jaan Vokk, a retired corporal with the Estonian Army, ran the competition to identify armored vehicles on a slide show on his laptop. “Sometimes it feels like they are getting us ready for something,” he said ominously, while quizzing a teenage girl in camouflage to identify Russian tanks.
The girl was ready, rattling off the names as pictures flashed on the computer screen — “T-72 main battle tank, BTR-80 armored personnel carrier” — and earning a nearly perfect score.
“Partisan war is our way,” Mr. Vokk said. “We cannot equal their armor. We have to group in small units and do a lot of destruction of their logistics convoys. We needle them wherever we can.”
Mr. Vokk served with the army in Afghanistan, where, he said, he gained an appreciation for the effectiveness of I.E.D.s.
“They scared us,” he said. “And a Russian is just a human being as well. He would be scared.”
NEW DIRECTION: John Brennan at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on his nomination to be the director of the CIA in 2013. Brennan has restructured the agency to REUTERS/Jason Reed
The CIA director has put the U.S. spy agency through a historic restructuring to cope with the era of digital warfare. Many in the agency are unhappy with the shake-up. In a series of interviews, Brennan outlines his strategy. “I think CIA really needs to up its game.”
ReutersInvestigates:WASHINGTON – When America goes to the polls on Nov. 8, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials, it will likely experience the culmination of a new form of information war.
A months-long campaign backed by the Russian government to undermine the credibility of the U.S. presidential election – through hacking, cyber attacks and disinformation campaigns – is likely to peak on voting day, the officials said.
Russian officials deny any such effort. But current and former U.S. officials warn that hackers could post fictional evidence online of widespread voter fraud, slow the Internet to a crawl through cyber attacks and release a final tranche of hacked emails, including some that could be doctored.
“Don’t underestimate what they can do or will do. We have to be prepared,” said Leon Panetta, who served as CIA director and defense secretary in President Barack Obama’s first term. “In some ways, they are succeeding at disrupting our process. Until they pay a price, they will keep doing it.”
John Brennan, the current CIA director, declined to comment on the Russian efforts. But he said Russian intelligence operatives have a long history of marrying traditional espionage with advances in technology. More broadly, Brennan said, the digital age creates enormous opportunities for espionage. But it also creates vulnerabilities.
Citing an array of new cyber, conventional and terrorist threats, Brennan announced the most sweeping reforms of the CIA in its 69-year history 18 months ago.
Weakening the role of the Directorate of Operations, the agency’s long-dominant arm responsible for gathering intelligence and conducting covert operations, Brennan created 10 new “mission centers” where CIA spies, analysts and hackers work together in teams focused on specific regions and issues. He also created a new Directorate for Digital Innovation to maximize the agency’s use of technology, data analytics and online spying.
The information age “has totally transformed the way we are able to operate and need to operate,” Brennan told Reuters in a series of interviews. “Most human interactions take place in that digital domain. So the intelligence profession needs to flourish in that domain. It cannot avoid it.”
When a new American diplomat arrives for duty at the U.S. embassy in Moscow or Beijing, CIA official say, Russian and Chinese intelligence operatives run data analytics programs that check the “digital dust” associated with his or her name. If the newcomer’s footprint in that dust – social media posts, cell phone calls, debit card payments – is too small, the “diplomat” is flagged as an undercover CIA officer.
The Russian-backed campaign to discredit the U.S. election is not isolated. Hackers believed to have links to Chinese intelligence began stealing the personal information of 22 million federal employees and job applicants in 2014, the worst known data breach in U.S. government history. Islamic State’s online propagandists continue to inspire lone wolf attacks in the United States even as the group loses territory.
A senior official from the Directorate of Operations, who backs the shake-up, said the agency is experiencing its greatest test in decades.
“The amount of threats and challenges that are facing this organization and this nation are greater than at any time in the last 30 years,” said the official, who declined to be named. “The days of a black passport, a fistful of dollars and a Browning pistol are over.”
INNER CIRCLE: President Barack Obama with Brennan and Chief of Staff Denis McDonough at the White House in 2013. The president and the CIA chief are criticized by some former agents for being overly cautious in Syria, Russia and elsewhere. Courtesy Pete Souza/The White House/Handout via REUTERS
“Most human interactions take place in that digital domain. So the intelligence profession needs to flourish in that domain. It cannot avoid it.”
James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, praised Brennan and his efforts to retool the CIA for a new era in an interview. So did Lisa Monaco, Brennan’s successor as the President Obama’s Homeland Security and Counterterrorism adviser.
But some current and former officials question Brennan’s strategy, arguing his reforms are too digitally focused and will create a more cautious, top-heavy spy agency. At a time when the agency needs to refocus its efforts on human espionage, they say, the concentration of power in the new mission centers weakens the ability of the Directorate of Operations to produce a new generation of elite American spies.
The reforms have hurt morale, created confusion and consumed time and attention at a time of myriad threats, according to interviews with ten former officials.
Glenn Carle, a former CIA covert officer, supports Brennan and his reforms but said they have sparked a mixed reaction among directorate of operations officials who believe human intelligence is getting short shrift.
“The value the CIA can fundamentally add is to steal secrets, and the ultimate secret is intention,” the often inscrutable aims of foreign leaders, Carle said. “Obtaining that is a human endeavor.”
At the same time, Brennan has stirred a different sort of criticism – that he has defied Congressional oversight. Liberal Democrats and libertarian Republicans in Congress say the Brennan-Obama tenure has been tarnished by a lack of transparency with congressional oversight committees and the public regarding surveillance, drone strikes and the agency’s use of torture against terrorism suspects during the administration of George W. Bush.
“While I think John’s overall legacy will be as a reformer, that legacy will suffer from his refusal to come to grips with the CIA’s troubled torture program,” said Senator Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif, vice chair of the Senate’s intelligence committee. “I think the new president’s CIA director must prioritize a high level of trust between the CIA and Congress to insure proper oversight is conducted.”
It’s unclear how closely the country’s next president will hew to Brennan’s strategy.
The front-runner, Democrat Hillary Clinton, has an incentive to beef up American cyber-espionage: U.S. intelligence officials blame the continuing leak of emails from her campaign on Russian-backed hacking. Clinton also expressed support for covert action in a transcript of a 2013 speech she gave to Goldman Sachs that was recently released by Wikileaks.
Republican Donald Trump, meanwhile, pledged to make cybersecurity a top priority in his administration in an October 3 speech. “For non-state terror actors, the United States must develop the ability – no matter how difficult – to track down and incapacitate those responsible and do it rapidly,” Trump said. “We should turn cyber warfare into one of our greatest weapons against the terrorists.”
In interviews at agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia, Brennan declined to comment on either candidate or discuss operational details of the CIA. But he and eight other senior CIA officials gave the most detailed description yet of their rationale for the most radical revamp of the agency since its founding in 1947.
“I look out at the next 10, 20, 30 years, and I look at technology, I look at complexity, I look at the global environment,” Brennan said. “I think CIA really needs to up its game.”
JUST-WAR THEORIST
Brennan, a 61-year-old native of north New Jersey, looks like a linebacker but talks like a technocrat. He speaks excitedly about how the CIA and other government bureaucracies can be configured in “a way to ensure optimal outcomes.”
The son of devout-Catholic Irish immigrants, Brennan speaks reverently of CIA officers as public servants who risk their lives without public accolades. He joined the agency in 1980, at the age of 24, after receiving a Master’s Degree in government with a concentration in Middle Eastern studies from the University of Texas.
“The value the CIA can fundamentally add is to steal secrets, and the ultimate secret is intention. Obtaining that is a human endeavor.”
Educated in various Catholic schools, including Fordham University, Brennan says he is an adherent of just war theory – a centuries-old Christian theological argument that war is justified when it is waged in self defense, as a last resort and minimizes civilian casualties. Those beliefs, he says, have guided him in one of the most controversial aspects of his tenure in the Obama administration.
As Obama’s White House counter-terrorism adviser and CIA director, Brennan played a central role in carrying out 473 U.S. airstrikes outside conventional war zones between 2009 and 2015, primarily by drone. U.S. officials estimate the attacks have killed 2,372 to 2,581 people, including 64 to 116 civilians. Human rights groups say the totals are vastly higher. Last year, for instance, a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan accidentally killed American aid worker Warren Weinstein and Italian aid worker Giovanni Lo Porto, who were both being held captive by al Qaeda.
Brennan declined to comment on specific strikes, but said, “I still can look myself in the mirror everyday and believe that I have tried to do what is morally right, what is necessary, and what is important to keep this country safe.” He also acknowledged mistakes.
“You question yourself. You beat yourself up. You try to learn from it,” Brennan said, in a rare display of emotions. “But you also recognize that if you’re not prepared to make the tough decisions in the jobs that have been entrusted to you, you shouldn’t be in those jobs.”
Today, Brennan says the United States faces the most complex array of threats he has seen since joining the agency 36 years ago. As a CIA analyst, operative and executive, he has lived through the Cold War espionage duels of the 1980s; the disintegration of nation-states after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall; the rise of non-state terrorist groups since 2001; and the current digital disruption. Now, he says, all four dynamics are converging at once.
BOLD AND INNOVATIVE RIVALS
CIA officials say their greatest state competitors are the Russian and Chinese intelligence services. While smaller countries or terrorist groups may want to strike at the United States, Russia and China are the only two adversaries with the combination of skills, resources and motivation needed to challenge Washington.
In recent years, Moscow’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, has become adept at waging “gray zone” conflicts in Ukraine, Crimea and Syria, the officials said. In all three countries, Russian intelligence operatives have deftly shrouded protagonists, objectives and war crimes in ambiguity.
GREAT RIVALS: U.S. President Barack Obama with his Chinese and Russian counterparts, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, in Beijing in 2014. Washington has faced barrages of digital threats from Beijing and Moscow; CIA insiders say the two nations remain the biggest challenge for the United States. REUTERS/Pablo Martinez Monsivais
“You beat yourself up…. But you also recognize that if you’re not prepared to make the tough decisions in the jobs that have been entrusted to you, you shouldn’t be in those jobs.”
One target is America’s increasingly politically polarized democracy. As Russian-backed hacking unfolded this summer, the Obama White House’s response fueled frustration among law enforcement and intelligence officials, according to current and former officials. The administration, they said, seemed to have no clear policy for how to respond to a new form of information warfare with no rules, norms or, it seemed, limits.
White House officials said the administration is still considering various methods of responding, but the responses won’t necessarily be made public.
China presents another challenge. Chinese businessmen and students continue trying to scoop up American state and economic secrets. In one bright spot, Beijing appears to be abiding by a 2015 pact signed by Obama and Chinese leader Xi Jinping that the two governments would not conduct economic espionage against one another. Chinese hacking appears to have slowed from the voracious rate of the past, which included hacking into the computers of the 2008 presidential campaigns of John McCain and Barack Obama but not releasing what was found.
“The question is whether or not it is due to greater care in terms of covering one’s tracks,” Brennan said of the apparent change. “Or whether or not they realize that they’re brand is being tarnished by this very rapacious appetite for vacuuming up things.”
Regional powers are also increasing their digital espionage efforts.
In 2014, the Obama administration blamed North Korea for the hacking of Sony Pictures’ computer system. This spring, U.S. prosecutors indicted seven Iranian hackers for allegedly trying to shut down a New York dam and conducting a cyber attack on dozens of U.S. banks. They also indicted three Syrian members of the “Syrian Electronic Army,” a pro-Syrian government group, who hacked into the websites of U.S. government agencies, corporations and news organizations.
In a 2015 case that U.S. officials said marks a worrying new trend, federal prosecutors indicted a 20-year-old hacker from Kosovo. With the help of a criminal hacker, Ardit Ferizi stole the home addresses of 1,300 members of the U.S. military, providing the information to Islamic State and posting it online, and calling for attacks on the individuals. Ferizi was arrested in Malaysia, where he was studying computer science. In September, he pleaded guilty in a U.S. federal court and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
“This blend of the criminal actor, the nation-state actor and the terrorist actor, that’s going to be the trend over the next five years,” said John Carlin, who recently stepped down as head of the Justice Department division that monitors foreign espionage in the United States.
But some active clandestine officers argue that the intelligence community has grown too reliant on technology, a trend they trace back four decades to the directorship of Stansfield Turner. Satellite photography, remote sensors and communications intercepts have become more sophisticated, but so have encryption techniques and anti-satellite weapons.
More important, they argue, is that technology is no substitute for “penetrations” – planting or recruiting human spies in foreign halls of power. The CIA missed India’s 1998 nuclear tests and misjudged Saddam Hussein’s arsenal in 2003 because it lacked spies in the right places.
Today, these current and former CIA officials contend, American policymakers have little insight into the thinking of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle. Presidents, kings and dictators often don’t share their true intentions electronically, putting this valuable information largely beyond the scope of digital spying. The best sources are still people, and these officials believe the agency is not mounting the kind of bold human spying operations it did in the past.
Brennan and other CIA officials flatly denied downplaying human intelligence. They said aggressive, high-risk human spying is under way but they cannot go into operational detail.
One of Brennan’s predecessors, Michael Hayden, former CIA chief under President George W. Bush, says the agency strayed from its core mission during the Bush years. After the Al Qaeda attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Hayden said, the CIA had to shift to become a paramilitary organization that devoted its most talented officers to tracking and killing terrorists. It now needs to reverse that trend by focusing on espionage against rival nations, he said.
“The constant combat of the last 15 years has pushed the expertise of the case officer in the direction of the battlefield and in the direction of collecting intelligence to create physical effects,” said Hayden, using an intelligence euphemism for killing. “At the expense of what the old guys called long-range, country-on-country intelligence gathering.”
‘OPTIMIZING CAPABILITIES’
Brennan and the eight other senior CIA officials made the case that their modernization effort will address the needs and threats described by Hayden and others. Technological advances, they said, have leveled the intelligence playing field. The web’s low cost of entry, creativity and speed benefits governments, hackers and terrorists alike.
A veteran covert operative who runs a new CIA mission center compared Brennan’s reforms to the Goldwater-Nichols Act. The landmark 1986 legislation reorganized the U.S. military into a half dozen regional commands where the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines work together. It was a response to inter-service rivalries that bedeviled the American military in Vietnam.
The CIA equivalent involves having the agency’s five main directorates – Operations (covert spies), Analysis (trends and prediction), Science and Technology (listening devices and other gadgetry) and Digital Innovation (online sleuthing) and Support (logistics) – provide the personnel needed by each regional mission center.
CORE MISSION: Former CIA Director Michael Hayden says the agency went deeply into anti-terrorist operations during the Bush years and needs to return to its traditional mission of spying. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
Andrew Hallman, director of the new Directorate for Digital Innovation, said the CIA has embraced cloud computing as a way to better share intelligence. In a move that shocked insiders and outsiders, the CIA awarded an $600 million contract to Amazon in 2013 to build a secure cloud computing system where multiple CIA databases can be quickly accessed.
For decades, different directorates maintained their own separate databases as a security measure, said Hallman. Some of the applications the agency used were so old – up to 30 years – that the manufacturer was no longer in business.
Turning to Amazon was designed to immediately put private-sector computing advances at the fingertips of CIA operatives. It was also an admission that it was easier for the agency to buy innovation from the private sector than try to create it internally.
Several former CIA officials criticized the new team-focused system, saying it dilutes the cultures that made each agency directorate strong. The best analysts are deeply skeptical and need to be separated from covert operatives to avoid group-think, they said. And the best covert operatives are famously arrogant, a trait needed to carry out the extraordinarily difficult task of convincing foreigners to spy for America.
Richard Blee, a former CIA clandestine officer, said the agency needed reform but highlighted a separate problem created by technological change. Instant secure communications between CIA headquarters and officers in the field has centralized decision-making in Washington, Blee said. And regardless of administration, senior officials in Washington are less willing to take a risk than field officers – virtually all of whom complain about headquarters’ excessive caution.
“The mentality across the board in Washington is to take the lowest common denominator, the easiest option, the risk-free option,” Blee said. “The Chinese are taking tough decisions, the Russians are taking tough decisions and we are taking risk-averse decisions. And we are going to pay a price for that down the road.”
Brennan says his reforms will empower CIA officers: The integrated teams in each new mission center will improve speed, adaptability and effectiveness.
“To me, that’s going to be the secret of success in the future, not just for CIA but for other organizational structures,” Brennan said. “Taking full advantage of the tools, capabilities, people and expertise that you have.”
The old ways of spycraft, Brennan argues, are no longer tenable. Asked what worries him most, he gave a technocratic answer: Twentieth century American government management practices are being rendered obsolete in the digital age.
“U.S. decision making processes need to be streamlined and accelerated,” he said. “Because the problems are not going to wait for traditional discussions.”
THE LONG VIEW: CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. “I look out at the next 10, 20, 30 years, and I look at technology, I look at complexity, I look at the global environment,” Brennan says. “I think CIA really needs to up its game.” REUTERS/Jason Reed
SEPARATION OF POWERS: Brennan at his Senate Intelligence Committee confirmation hearing with Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA). The two later crossed swords over the Senate’s probe into the Bush era CIA’s use of torture. REUTERS/Gary Cameron
Supporters hail CIA director John Brennan as a devoted public servant with a strong moral core and a tenacious work ethic. He has increased the recruitment of minority intelligence officers and promoted women to senior posts. He wears a lanyard around his neck every day that celebrates LGBT diversity at the CIA.
But some former covert operatives say Brennan is too cautious and political. Liberals accuse Brennan of protecting the CIA instead of forcing it to become more accountable to Congress. In particular, they blame Brennan for convincing President Barack Obama to oppose the release of the full 6,000-page U.S. Senate report detailing torture by the CIA during the presidency of George W. Bush. In private hearings, they said, Brennan bristled at questions from senators regarding the report.
After CIA officials searched the computer of a Senate staffer investigating torture, an outraged Sen. Dianne Feinstein accused Brennan’s CIA of provoking a “constitutional crisis” by thwarting Congress’ ability to perform its mandated right to oversee the executive-branch agency. Two other Democratic Senators called for Brennan’s resignation. Obama and White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough aggressively defended Brennan, who eventually apologized to Feinstein.
“The exhaustive 6,000-page Senate Intelligence Committee report fully documented the program,” Feinstein told Reuters, “but the CIA under John’s leadership has had difficulty confronting this dark chapter and learning from its mistakes.”
Leon Panetta, who served as President Obama’s first CIA director, said he understood Brennan’s desire to protect CIA officers who carried out interrogation methods deemed legal at the time by the Bush administration. But he said it was important to also be open with Congress and the public.
“I think you can do both,” Panetta said. “You can protect people there [at the CIA]. And be honest with the American people.”
Brennan and his aides vehemently defend his reforms, his transparency and his response to the Senate torture investigation, which they say exaggerated the scale of CIA abuse. They say Brennan, who opposes waterboarding, successfully struck a middle course – ending torture while protecting the identities of CIA operatives.
“He did more to stand up for human rights than any other official in the administration,” said Harold Hongju Koh, a Yale Law School professor who served as Hillary Clinton’s top legal adviser in the State Department.
In the interview, Brennan said the actions of CIA officials who exceeded the Bush-era interrogation guidelines were “reprehensible.” But he said the Senate report exaggerated the scale of abuse. Brennan contended that the vast majority of CIA officers followed the Bush-era guidelines and were being unfairly “maligned by individuals who have political agendas.”
“When we do things that are within our authorized mandate, things that we are directed to do by our presidents, things that are deemed lawful by our Department of Justice,” Brennan said, “for us to be dragged through the coals on that, I find that reprehensible as well.”
Friends say Brennan say he has privately expressed frustration with the White House’s cautious response to the war in Syria and growing Russian assertiveness. But, they add, he is in many ways similar to Obama himself, questioning America’s ability to unilaterally change the world.
Brennan declined to comment on his own policy views. But he said, “I really feel as though my moral compass is pretty similar” to Obama’s. And he echoed a central tenet of Obama’s worldview.
The U.S. should act as the “world’s organizer of support to countries that are in desperate need,” Brennan said, but “recognize that our influence and power over the course of events is limited.”
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Digitizing the CIA
By David Rohde
Additional reporting by John Walcott and Jonathan Landay
LWJ: As activity in the Red Sea has heated up this month, debate rages on in Washington about Tehran’s role in attacks against US forces there. The Pentagon confirmed this month that the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen were responsible for launching cruise missiles at the USS Mason on Oct. 9 and 12, while it still investigates a potential third attack on Oct. 15. The confirmed attacks, which prompted US strikes against Houthi installations on the coast, were reportedly in retaliation for US backing of the Saudi-led coalition aimed at expelling them from the capital.
It is not definitively known whether Iran supplied the missiles, but the motives are clear as to why they would have supported the attack.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Hezbollah have provided the Houthis with money, training, advising, and sophisticated weaponry for more than a decade, according to the State Department’s Country Reports on Terrorism 2012 (though that language was dropped in 2015). The Guard is believed to have transferred rocket and missile capabilities, as well. The US and its allies have intercepted five shipments from Iran to the Houthis since April 2015 that have included coastal defense systems, according to a senior U.S. official who spoke with NBC News. Tehran has stepped up its assistance since May 2016, sending anti-ship missiles, explosives, and personnel through Oman, according to Reuters, who spoke with Western and Iranian intelligence officials.
Some senior US defense officials say the missile system used against US forces may have been supplied by Iran, identified as the Chinese-made C-802, which was supplied to Iran and not to Yemen. Other senior military officials, however, say that the missiles could have been models that the Houthi forces already possessed. Yemeni military units under the command of former President Ali Abdullah Saleh that defected to the Houthis had access to the C-801, which was supplied by China to Yemen in 1995, and unsuccessfully launched several at Saudi-led coalition between Oct. and Dec. 2015, according to Tom Cooper in War is Boring.
Analysts who spoke with The Long War Journal believe the Houthi-Saleh forces may have used C-801 or C-802 against the US Navy, and that the C-801 was likely fired at the United Arab Emirates-operated vessel on Oct. 1, based on video footage posted by the Houthis. Iranian and Hezbollah media publicized a drill held by the Houthi-Saleh Yemeni coast on Oct. 4 in reaction to the US Navy dispatch of the Mason, Nitze, and Ponce, warning “the enemies” and “invading Saudi coalition” that any ship approaching Yemen’s waters “without permission” would be targeted.
Although there is no conclusive evidence yet on the weapons system used against US forces, Tehran’s political posturing following the Oct. 8 bombing in Sanaa foreshadowed its support for the missile launches against U.S. forces. On Oct. 9, the IRGC released a statement holding “America, the Zionist regime, and the House of Saud” responsible for the bombing in Sanaa. Top IRGC officials also held the US directly responsible for the attack and for selling weapons to Saudi Arabia. Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, slammed the bombing, and claimed that the attack against the UAE ship was a “legitimate defense” of Yemen’s territory.
Then, on Oct. 13, the IRGC-affiliated agency Tasnim announced that a conventional Iranian Navy group had earlier departed for the Gulf of Aden and the Bab el-Mandeb on Oct. 5 in response to the US dispatch of Navy warships. Iran’s 44th flotilla, comprised of the Alvand frigate and Bushehr support vessel, reportedly intends to “protect shipping lines under attack by pirates” in that area. The deployment, however, was also intended to reinforce Tehran’s commitment to the Houthis, as well as signal Iran’s reach into the Gulf of Aden. Read more here from LWJ.
America paid Iran $1.7 billion in cash—funds that by law were not to be released unless and until Iran paid what it owed to American victims of its terrorism.
Mosaic: On the morning of January 17, 2016, President Obama declared that this was “a good day, because, once again, we’re seeing what’s possible with strong American diplomacy.”
The Iran nuclear deal had been implemented the day before—an example, the President said, of his “smart, patient, and disciplined approach to the world.” Now Iran was releasing five American hostages, the result of the administration’s “tireless” efforts. “On the sidelines of the nuclear negotiations,” the president explained, “our diplomats at the highest level, including Secretary [of State John] Kerry, used every meeting to push Iran to release our Americans.” In return for that gesture, the president continued, he was making a “reciprocal humanitarian gesture”: namely, clemency for seven Iranians imprisoned or awaiting trial for criminal violations of American sanctions. Later it was announced that the U.S. had also dropped outstanding warrants against another fourteen Iranians.
The president then added something else: with the nuclear deal implemented, and the hostages released, “the time was right” for “resolving a financial dispute that dated back more than three decades.” That dispute involved an Iranian claim regarding money advanced by the government of the Shah for military equipment that Washington did not deliver after the 1979 revolution. Now, the president asserted, we were returning Iran’s “own funds,” including “appropriate interest,” but “much less than the amount Iran sought.” The savings, he said, came potentially to “billions”—a figure quantified by his press secretary as “up to $6 billion or $7 billion” in a “very good deal for taxpayers.” In other words, now that the larger issues had been resolved, the U.S. was simply issuing a long-delayed refund to Iran, and in the process saving Americans a significant amount of money.
The president’s statement, however, omitted a great deal of relevant information. The president was returning $400 million in Iran’s “Foreign Military Sales” (FMS) account with the Pentagon, plus $1.3 billion in interest, but he failed to mention that in 1981, when Iran filed its claim before the Claims Tribunal at The Hague, the U.S. had responded with a counterclaim for $817 million for Iran’s violations of its obligations under the FMS program. In 2016, with both the claim and the counterclaim still pending, it was possible that Iran owed billions of dollars to the U.S., not the reverse.
Nor did the president mention the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act, signed by President Bill Clinton in 2000 and stipulating that Iran’s FMS account could not be refunded until court judgments held by the U.S. government against Iran for damages from terrorist acts against American citizens were resolved to America’s satisfaction. Those judgments, including interest accumulated between 2001 and 2016, totaled about $1 billion. The president did not explain how, under the 2000 law, with those judgments still outstanding, he could pay Iran anything at all.
Nor did the president mention that his “refund” to Iran was being paid in untraceable European cash, a fact discovered by reporters seven months later. He would then contend that, in light of the sanctions on banking transactions with Iran, “we had to give them cash.” But the sanction regulations expressly authorize bank payments to settle Iran’s claims at The Hague, as Michael Mukasey, the former U.S. attorney general, later testified to Congress, adding that there was “no legitimate reason why [Iran] should want cash other than to pursue terrorism.” Indeed, the Hizballah International Financing Prevention Act, passed by Congress in December 2015, had resulted in Tehran’s needing significantly more cash to continue funding its terrorist organization in Lebanon, Syria, and elsewhere.
In a February 3 letter, Ed Royce, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, asked the administration to provide the legal basis for paying Iran’s claim, as well as a specific computation of the interest paid. He repeated the request in a June 1 letter, adding that according to information provided to him by the Congressional Research Service, the Hague tribunal paid 10-percent simple interest on such claims. Computed at that rate, and before considering the U.S. counterclaim under the FMS and the terror judgments still outstanding, Iran’s total claim on the FMS account was virtually identical to the $1.7 billion the administration paid, with no “billions” in savings.
To date, the administration has released no legal analysis to support its payment, no evaluation of the U.S. counterclaim, no text of the settlement agreement, no computation of the interest, no credible explanation for issuing the payment in cash, and no document showing the approval of the attorney general as required for issuing such a payment. For months, the administration hid important facts—including how the settlement was paid—even in response to direct congressional inquiries.
The $1.7-billion payment thus appears to have been a ransom, just as an Iranian general claimed it was at the time—a huge cash payment to accompany the lopsided exchange of 21 Iranians, duly charged or convicted under American law, for five American hostages who had been seized by Iran and held on fabricated charges in secret proceedings.
As for the outstanding claims against Tehran for the terror judgments, the administration has asserted that these were satisfied “by securing a favorable resolution on the interest owed to Iran.” What favorable resolution? In effect, the settlement cost the United States $2.7 billion—the $1.7 billion in cash plus about $1 billion in forgiven court judgments—to pay a claim that was not yet due, may not in fact have been owed, and may have been more than offset by the U.S. counterclaim that exceeded Iran’s own claim.
And therein lies the most troubling aspect of President Obama’s settlement, which is neither its amount nor its appearance as ransom but the fact that Iran succeeded in having U.S. taxpayers bear the cost of the damages owed by Iran for committing despicable acts of terrorism against them. To understand the magnitude of what the President did on January 17, some background is necessary.
In April 1995, Alisa Flatow, a twenty-year-old Brandeis University honors student spending her junior year abroad in Israel, boarded a bus in Jerusalem bound for a popular resort area in Gaza. It was the height of the “peace process,” celebrated the year before with Nobel Peace prizes. As the bus entered Gaza, a van filled with explosives slammed into it. Eight people, including Alisa, were killed, and more than 40 others were injured. The attack was carried out by a faction of Islamic Jihad controlled, financed, and directed by the highest levels of Iran’s government.
Alisa’s father, Stephen M. Flatow, filed suit in U.S. federal court against Iran, pursuant to legislation Congress had enacted permitting such suits against state sponsors of terrorist attacks on American citizens. A federal district court issued a 35-page opinion, Flatow v. Islamic Republic of Iran (1998), awarding a total of $20 million in compensatory damages as well as punitive damages, with both types of damages specifically authorized by the U.S. Congress. The court noted that expert testimony had “detailed an annual expenditure [by Iran] of approximately $75 million for terrorist activities” and that Iran “is so brazen in its sponsorship of terrorist activities that it carries a line item in its national budget for this purpose.” Accordingly, the court awarded punitive damages of $225 million—three times Iran’s publicly-disclosed annual terrorist budget. It was the minimum amount the expert had testified was necessary to have a significant deterrent effect, which was what Congress had intended to achieve in its authorizing legislation.
Over the next four years, a series of cases held Iran liable for similarly horrific terror operations. Cicippio v. Islamic Republic of Iran (1998) involved Joseph Cicippio (comptroller of the American University of Beirut), David Jacobsen (CEO of the medical center there), and Frank Reed (who operated two private schools in Beirut)—all abducted by Hizballah, an entity the court found was “sponsored, financed, and controlled by Iran.” Jacobsen had been chained and blindfolded for eighteen months; Reed had been held blindfolded or in darkness for more than three-and-a-half years; Cicippio had been held for over five years, chained in scorpion-infested cells and randomly beaten throughout his captivity. The court awarded them a total of $65 million in compensatory damages.
Anderson v. Islamic Republic of Iran (2000) involved Terry Anderson, chief Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press, who was kidnapped in Beirut by Hizballah and held shackled in filthy conditions for nearly seven years, fed only bread and water. The court again found Iran responsible, and awarded $41.2 million in compensatory damages and $300 million in punitive damages.
Eisenfeld v. Islamic Republic of Iran (2000) was brought by Leonard Eisenfeld for the death of his son Matthew, a twenty-five-year-old Yale graduate studying at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Israel, and by Arline Duker for the death of her twenty-year-old daughter, Sara, a Barnard College graduate enrolled in a program at the Hebrew University. They had been on an Israeli bus, en route to visit the archeological site at Petra, Jordan, when a passenger—acting under directions from a Hamas official funded and trained by Iran—detonated a bomb that destroyed the bus and killed them and others. The court awarded $22.5 million in compensatory damages and $300 million in punitive damages.
In still other cases, Iran was held legally responsible for the kidnapping, torture, and death of CIA station chief William Buckley in Beirut; the kidnapping of Father Lawrence Jenco, the director of Catholic Relief Services in Beirut, held for 564 days in conditions described by the court as “little better than [for] a caged animal”; the kidnapping of Thomas M. Sutherland, the dean of Agricultural and Food Sciences at the American University of Beirut, tortured for more than six years; the murder of Petty Officer Raymond Wagner in the 1983 car bombing of the American embassy in Beirut; the murder of Petty Officer Robert Stethem, beaten during the hijacking of TWA Flight 847, his body dumped on the tarmac, and the holding of nine other American hostages on that flight; and many other hostage-takings, with one court noting that Tehran “virtually directed the terms and conditions under which hostages would be held or released.”
In all, sixteen cases were decided against Iran by courts in the United States between 1998 and 2004, with awards of compensatory damages totaling some $400 million and punitive damages totaling $3.5 billion.
Of course, the problem faced by each victorious plaintiff was collecting the judgment. Stephen Flatow, after unsuccessfully seeking to have the damages paid out of various Iranian assets held in the United States, learned of the $400 million in the FMS fund. The Clinton administration had supported the legislation that allowed suits such as Flatow’s, but then strenuously opposed any effort to have the judgments satisfied from that fund. In its 1999 brief in federal court, the administration stated that the U.S. had a $817-million counterclaim against Iran, that the “current cash balance in Iran’s FMS program account [was] about $400 million,” and that “It is unknown how much, if any, of that amount will be owed to Iran by the United States until the claims before the [Hague] Tribunal are resolved” (emphasis added).
The court rejected Flatow’s contention that the FMS funds were the property of Iran, which could satisfy his judgment, on the grounds that “the United States does not share [his] characterization of these U.S. Treasury funds as ‘Iranian property.’” The court held instead that the FMS fund was U.S. property.
With Flatow’s subsequent appeal pending, Congress and the Clinton administration agreed on legislation directing the U.S. Treasury to pay the American holders of terror judgments against Iran for the amount of their compensatory damages plus 10 percent of their punitive damages, up to the amount in the FMS fund. The law subrogated the United States—meaning that the terror judgments became direct U.S. government claims against Iran to the extent the Treasury had paid them. Finally, the law included a provision to ensure that Iran would ultimately have to bear the cost of those payments: “no funds shall be paid to Iran . . . from the [FMS] fund until such subrogated claims have been dealt with to the satisfaction of the United States.”
Sixteen years later, with the $400 million still held by the U.S. government, and with no payments by Iran of a single cent of any of the sixteen court judgments against it, President Obama nevertheless gave the $400 million in the FMS account to Iran, plus interest. His statement that he was merely refunding Iran’s “own funds” directly contradicts the court’s determination in 1999. Indeed, since he made no mention of “resolving” the unpaid terror judgments in his January 17 statement, it is reasonable to conclude that the president simply ignored the 2000 statute as well.
January 17, 2016, was thus very far from “a good day . . . [for] strong American diplomacy.” It was a day of extraordinary diplomatic deception, practiced not against Iran—which knew exactly what the administration was doing—but against the American people, who were intentionally kept in the dark by the administration about critical aspects of the deal. President Obama paid Iran $1.7 billion that may not have been owed; paid it in cash—the currency of international terror; did not tell the American people he had relieved Iran from longstanding court judgments; did not add the cost of those judgments to the $1.7 billion payment that he announced; and did not faithfully execute the 2000 law—all the while congratulating himself on his accomplishment and claiming he had saved the U.S. billions.
The president’s actions with respect to the lawsuits won by American victims of Iranian terror, after years of litigation, stand in stark contrast to the resolution of the court cases concerning Libya’s terrorism, including the 1988 Pan Am 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland. In 2008, Libya sought to re-establish relations with the United States, but Congress and the State Department blocked action until Libya satisfied the terror claims of American citizens against it. Libya agreed to pay and did pay the U.S. $1.5 billion to resolve those claims. Nothing of the sort accompanied the seemingly endless negotiations with Iran over the nuclear deal, as the administration made concession after concession to obtain it.
January 17, 2016 was in fact a shameful day in the history of American diplomacy. The only question is which aspect was most shameful: the craven abandonment of American claims against the Islamic Republic of Iran for past terrorism, the provision of a huge amount of cash enabling it to engage in future terrorism, the systematic mendacity about the process and the willful failure to inform the American people of everything that had been done, or the underlying policy of appeasing Iran that precipitated both the process and its cover-up.
What happened on January 17, 2016 was much worse than paying ransom.
Controls in place at the DoJ…uh huh and it is part of the Executive Branch..uh huh again.
So, what we have here are political operatives that have established a covert governmental mafia operation that works the system by a limitless team of lawyers, damage control organizations and by manipulating media, all of which are willing accomplices. While most that are paying attention consider the missing Hillary emails relate to Benghazi, it is more likely the larger inventory of communications deal with the Clinton Foundation of which the Department of Justice is a government funded operation protecting RICO collusion. Andy McCarthy describes it all in a perfect summary.
Why is Lynch rushing the search for classified e-mails but blocking the pay-to-play corruption probe?
The Wall Street Journal’s report that, for over a year, the FBI has been investigating the Clinton Foundation for potential financial crimes and influence peddling is, as Rich Lowry said Monday, a blockbuster.
As I argued over the weekend, the manner in which the State Department was put in the service of the Foundation during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary is shocking. It is suggestive of a pattern of pay-to-play bribery, the monetizing of political influence, fraud, and obstruction of justice that the Justice Department should be investigating as a possible RICO conspiracy under the federal anti-racketeering laws.
The Journal’s Devlin Barrett buries the Clinton Foundation lede in the 14th paragraph of his report. Even more astonishing are his final three paragraphs:
In September, agents on the foundation case asked to see the emails contained on nongovernment laptops that had been searched as part of the Clinton email case, but that request was rejected by prosecutors at the Eastern District of New York, in Brooklyn. Those emails were given to the FBI based on grants of partial immunity and limited-use agreements, meaning agents could only use them for the purpose of investigating possible mishandling of classified information. Some FBI agents were dissatisfied with that answer, and asked for permission to make a similar request to federal prosecutors in Manhattan, according to people familiar with the matter. [FBI Deputy Director Andrew] McCabe, these people said, told them no and added that they couldn’t “go prosecutor-shopping.”
Not long after that discussion, FBI agents informed the bureau’s leaders about the Weiner laptop, prompting Mr. Comey’s disclosure to Congress and setting off the furor that promises to consume the final days of a tumultuous campaign. Let me unpack this. Readers are unlikely to know that the Eastern District of New York in Brooklyn is not just any United States attorney’s office. It is the office that was headed by Attorney General Loretta Lynch until President Obama elevated her to attorney general less than two years ago. It was in the EDNY that Ms. Lynch first came to national prominence in 1999, when she was appointed U.S. attorney by President Bill Clinton — the husband of the main subject of the FBI’s investigations with whom Lynch furtively met in the back of a plane parked on an Arizona tarmac days before the announcement that Mrs. Clinton would not be indicted. Obama reappointed Lynch as the EDNY’s U.S. attorney in 2010. She was thus in charge of staffing that office for nearly six years before coming to Main Justice in Washington. That means the EDNY is full of attorneys Lynch hired and supervised. When we learn that Clinton Foundation investigators are being denied access to patently relevant evidence by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn, those are the prosecutors — Loretta Lynch’s prosecutors — we are talking about.
Recall, moreover, that it was Lynch’s Justice Department that: refused to authorize use of the grand jury to further the Clinton e-mails investigation, thus depriving the FBI of the power to compel testimony and the production of evidence by subpoena; consulted closely with defense attorneys representing subjects of the investigation; permitted Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson — the subordinates deputized by Mrs. Clinton to sort through her e-mails and destroy thousands of them — to represent Clinton as attorneys, despite the fact that they were subjects of the same investigation and had been granted immunity from prosecution (to say nothing of the ethical and legal prohibitions against such an arrangement); drastically restricted the FBI’s questioning of Mills and other subjects of the investigation; and struck the outrageous deals that gave Mills and Samuelson immunity from prosecution in exchange for providing the FBI with the laptops on which they reviewed Clinton’s four years of e-mails.
That arrangement was outrageous for three reasons:
1) Mills and Samuelson should have been compelled to produce the computers by grand-jury subpoena with no immunity agreement; 2) Lynch’s Justice Department drastically restricted the FBI’s authority to examine the computers;
and 3) Lynch’s Justice Department agreed that the FBI would destroy the computers following its very limited examination.
As I have detailed, it was already clear that Lynch’s Justice Department was stunningly derelict in hamstringing the bureau’s e-mails investigation. But now that we know the FBI was simultaneously investigating the Clinton Foundation yet being denied access to the Clinton e-mails, the dereliction appears unconscionable. It had to be screamingly obvious that the Clinton State Department e-mails, run through a server that also supported Clinton Foundation activities, would be critically important to any probe of the Foundation. Consider, for example, the issue of criminal intent, over which much has been made since Director Comey stressed the purported lack of intent proof in recommending against an indictment of Mrs. Clinton for mishandling classified information.
I believe, to the contrary, that there is abundant intent evidence. The law presumes that people intend the natural, foreseeable consequences of their actions: When you’re the secretary of state, and you systematically conduct your government business on private, non-secure e-mail rather than the government’s secure servers, you must know it is inevitable that classified information will be transmitted through and stored on the private server.
Still, even though Clinton’s misconduct was thus willful and grossly negligent, no sensible person believes she was trying to harm the United States; the damage she did to national security was an easily foreseeable consequence of her scheme, but that damage was not what motivated her actions. In such circumstances, it is a common tactic of defense lawyers to confound motive and criminal intent. Every criminal statute has an intent element (i.e., a requirement to prove that conduct was knowing, willful, intentional, or grossly negligent). Prosecutors, however, are virtually never required to prove motive. To be sure, they usually do introduce evidence of motive, because establishing a motive often helps to prove intent. But motive can sometimes confuse matters, so proving it is not mandatory. A common, concrete example is helpful here: the guy who robs a bank because he is strapped for cash and his mom needs an operation. Although it was not the robber’s purpose to petrify the bank teller, proving that he had a desperate need for money helps demonstrate that his theft of money was quite intentional — not an accident or mistake. So even though we can all agree that our bank robber did not have a motive to do harm, his benign motive does not absolve him of guilt for the bank robbery he fully intended to commit.
Yet, such absolution is exactly what Comey offered in claiming there was insufficient proof of criminal intent to charge Clinton with mishandling classified information. It was a rationale that echoed public comments by President Obama and Lynch’s Justice Department. They would have you believe that because Clinton was not motivated by a desire to harm national security she cannot have intended to violate the classified-information laws. It is sleight-of-hand, but it was good enough for Democrats and the media to pronounce Clinton “exonerated.” Now, however, let’s consider the Clinton Foundation. While Clinton may not have been motivated to harm our national security, she was precisely motivated to conceal the corrupt interplay of the State Department and the Clinton Foundation.
That was the real objective of the home-brew server system: Mrs. Clinton wanted to shield from Congress, the courts, and the public the degree to which she, Bill, and their confederates were cashing in on her awesome political influence as secretary of state. That is exactly why she did business outside the government system that captures all official e-mails; and, critically, it perfectly explains why she deleted and attempted to destroy 33,000 e-mails — risibly claiming they involved yoga routines, Chelsea’s wedding, and the like. While knowing the purpose of the private server system may not advance our understanding of the classified-information offenses, it greatly advances our understanding of the scheme to make the Clinton Foundation a State Department pay-to-play vehicle.
Consequently, the Clinton e-mails generated in the course of this scheme are apt to be highly probative of public-corruption offenses. With that in mind, let’s go back to the Journal’s account of why Loretta Lynch’s EDNY prosecutors have blocked the FBI’s Clinton Foundation investigators from examining the Clinton e-mails found on the laptop computers of Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson: Those emails were given to the FBI based on grants of partial immunity and limited-use agreements, meaning agents could only use them for the purpose of investigating possible mishandling of classified information.
The Journal’s report says the FBI’s Clinton Foundation team was “dissatisfied” with this explanation — as well they should have been. The grants of immunity and limited-use agreements were disgraceful for the reasons outlined above. Significantly, however, the limitations imposed on the classified-information investigation should not, in the main, be binding on the Clinton Foundation investigation. Of course, the immunity grants to Mills and Samuelson must be honored even though they should never have been given in the first place. But those agreements only protect Mills and Samuelson. They would not prevent evidence found on the computers and retained by the FBI from being used against Hillary Clinton or any other possible conspirator.
Clearly, that is why agents on the FBI’s Clinton Foundation team wanted to get their investigation out of the EDNY’s clutches and move it to the U.S. attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York (my office for many years, as well as Jim Comey’s). The SDNY has a tradition of relative independence from the Justice Department and a well-earned reputation for pursuing political-corruption cases aggressively — a reputation burnished by U.S. attorney Preet Bharara’s prosecutions of prominent politicians from both parties. Alas, the Clinton Foundation agents were said to be barred from “prosecutor shopping” by FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe — the official whose wife’s Virginia state senate campaign was infused with $675,000 in cash and in-kind contributions by political committees controlled by Governor Terry McAuliffe, a notorious Clinton fixer and former Clinton Foundation board member.
Because of Democratic and media furor over Director Comey’s reopening of the Clinton e-mails investigation last week, the FBI is now under enormous pressure to review tens of thousands of e-mails stored on the laptop shared by Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner. The point is to hound the bureau into announcing before Election Day (seven days from now) whether any new classified e-mails have been found. If none are found, this outcome will be spun as yet another “exoneration” of Hillary Clinton.
Here, however, is the real outrage: Beneath all this noise, Loretta Lynch’s Justice Department is blocking the FBI from examining Clinton e-mails in connection with its investigation of the Clinton Foundation — an investigation that is every bit as serious. Were it not for the Clinton Foundation, there probably would not be a Clinton e-mail scandal. Mrs. Clinton’s home-brew communications system was designed to conceal the degree to which the State Department was put in the service of Foundation donors who transformed the “dead broke” Clintons into hundred-millionaires.
At this point, the reopened classified-information investigation is a distraction: Under the Comey/DOJ “insufficient intent evidence” rationale, there would be no charges even if previously undiscovered classified e-mails were found on the Abedin/Weiner computer. Instead, what is actually essential is that the FBI’s Clinton Foundation investigators get access to all the thousands of Clinton e-mails, including those recovered from the Mills and Samuelson laptops. The agents must also have the time they need to piece together all the Clinton e-mails (from whatever source), follow up leads, and make their case. No one seems to notice that they are being thwarted. Hillary hasn’t even been elected, but already we are benumbed by Clinton Scandal Exhaustion Syndrome.
— Andrew C. McCarthy is a policy fellow at the National Review Institute. His latest book is Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment.
Irma Maldonado in her dorm room at Grand Canyon University in Phoenix.
All photographs by Caitlin O’Hara
PHOENIX — In an office suite not far from the airport, Irma Maldonado, 18, expertly role-played what she’d be doing on the city’s streets in half an hour: knocking on the doors of residents and exhorting them to vote. But not everything was a game. Before a group of young canvassers headed out for the day, a team leader at the community organizing group LUCHA mentioned that someone had earlier pulled a gun on two members of the team.
“Everything was OK,” the organizer said, but Maldonado and the 15 or so other teens and 20-somethings were given safety whistles before hitting the streets.
Maldonado has a personal stake in America’s immigration debate, which has been making headlines throughout the election, particularly because of Donald Trump’s description of Mexicans as rapists and his desire to have Mexico pay for a border wall.
“Before going into high school — it was the summer of 2012 — my mother decided to self-deport to Mexico” with her two youngest children, Maldonado said. Maldonado, who was born and grew up in New Mexico, had a hard time adjusting to life in Nayarit, Mexico, a small state on the Pacific coast north of Puerto Vallarta, especially given that she hadn’t known her family’s status. “I think it was right when we had to move when I actually realized that my mom wasn’t actually legal here in the United States, when I was 14 years old,” she said. Her father, who has a green card, continues to work in New Mexico; Maldonado now is a first-year nursing student and lives with her 23-year-old sister in Arizona. Her mother and brother remain in Mexico.
Mexican-Americans such as Maldonado may help determine the political future of Arizona — and the nation — in a landmark election year. In an August survey, respondents were asked if Trump and Clinton made their respective parties more welcoming or more hostile to Latinos. Nine percent of Mexican-Americans said Trump made the GOP more welcoming; 74 percent said he made it more hostile. By contrast, 59 percent said Clinton made the Democratic party more welcoming; 9 percent said more hostile. An October poll by Latino Decisions found that 17 percent of Latino voters nationwide said they support Trump or are leaning toward him; 70 percent supported Clinton.
In Arizona, a state long dominated by Republicans, Clinton and Trump are in a virtual tie, according to a Monmouth University Poll released last week. Latino voters, who make up a fifth of the state’s electorate, are supporting Clinton over Trump by 35 percentage points. And critical to the electoral vote, only 9 percent of Latino voters who support Trump are in battleground states. Overall, 13 percent of the eligible voters in battleground states are Latino.
Arizona “was this strong, powerful red,” said Pita Juarez, 29, the communications director for the One Arizona coalition, an umbrella group of 14 advocacy groups, including LUCHA, that is working to boost Latino voter turnout. “Just today, we saw on FiveThirtyEight … it’s a light blue. And that’s something that I thought, really, I would never see.” (Arizona has gone back and forth between light blue and light red in FiveThirtyEight’s forecast over the last few weeks. Currently, Trump has a slight edge in the state’s forecast.)
Gabriel Sanchez, a professor of political science at the University of New Mexico and a principal at the opinion research firm Latino Decisions, said Latinos are more enthusiastic about voting this year than in 2012, having been mobilized by Trump’s comments targeting Mexicans. He added that the Republican Party will have a hard time winning over Mexican-Americans in subsequent elections unless it supports comprehensive immigration reform.
Like black millennials, younger Latinos show much weaker enthusiasm for Clinton than their elders. According to the October GenForward survey, conducted over the first half of the month, 44 percent of Latinos ages 18-30 plan to vote for Clinton and 8 percent will vote for Trump, with 10 percent going to third-party candidates. Nineteen percent said they didn’t plan to vote, and 12 percent were undecided.1GenForward, a survey by the Black Youth Project at the University of Chicago and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, queries 18- to 30-year-olds and oversamples for Latino and nonwhite respondents, in this case with a total cohort of 1,832 respondents.
Irma Maldonado in math class and walking to her dorm room at Grand Canyon University.
Mark Hugo Lopez, director of Hispanic research at the Pew Research Center, said that much of the growth in the Latino electorate in coming years will be from U.S.-born Latinos entering adulthood. Like other cohorts of younger voters they tend to be more supportive of bigger government, in contrast to older Mexican-Americans, who are more likely to hold conservative views. “Mexican-Americans are more likely to be Catholic than other groups of Latinos,” he said. “They are also more likely to be third or higher generation than other U.S. Latino groups and as a result to have served in the military. Both of these characteristics correlate with conservative views on many issues.” He noted that George W. Bush won at least 40 percent of the Latino vote in 2004.
Nationwide, 11 percent of eligible voters are Latino, but in Arizona, 22 percent of eligible voters are. The state is currently going through a fierce local battle involving Sheriff Joe Arpaio that is arguably fanning the fires of Latino voter turnout as much as the national election.
Arpaio is an outsize figure who has served as Maricopa County sheriff for 23 years; run jails where the men must wear pink underwear and striped uniforms; and organized citizen border patrols with actor Steven Seagal. Arpaio also has a December court date on a contempt charge for violating a 2011 injunction against stopping people on the suspicion that they were not in the country legally. (He alleges the prosecution is politically motivated because of his support for Trump.) And just one week from now, Arpaio faces perhaps an even bigger challenge: a re-election bid with polls showing him trailing his challenger by 15 points.
LUCHA’s canvassers are campaigning against Arpaio, and there are indications that his presence on the ballot is motivating new voters. In Maricopa County, Democratic voter rolls rose by 13 percent since 2012, according to figures released in August, compared to a 7.6 percent increase for Republicans. And many Latinos register as independents but lean Democratic.
Some of the young activists who are canvassing for LUCHA are undocumented, according to One Arizona’s Juarez, and in other areas around the country with significant Latino populations, immigrants who are not yet on a path to citizenship are playing a role in the political process. One of them is Yessica Vasquez Moctezuma, 25, a bank teller, who will graduate this fall with a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Texas at San Antonio. She has been in the United States for 19 years, which means she was undocumented until 2012, at which point an executive order qualified her for temporary but renewable DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) status.
Vasquez Moctezuma is frank in her assessment of her family’s legal status, since her parents are not eligible for DACA and continue to work without documentation.
“We are breaking some laws just by being here illegally, but we bind to the laws here,” she said. “We pay our taxes every year, like any other citizen would.” She worries that her parents, who have paid into the Social Security system — which receives an estimated $12 billion a year from undocumented immigrants and their employers — will never receive benefits and will never be able to truly retire. Still, she said, “This is why I studied political science, because I love the government here. I feel like in so many ways it’s so great.”
For her part, Irma Maldonado said she is excited about voting in her first presidential election. After remaining undecided until early October, she decided to vote for Clinton. But she added, “Honestly, this election, a lot of people are not that pumped to vote. It’s really kind of sad.” The number of Mexican-American and Latino voters who show up on Nov. 8 could determine the outcome in her state, and possibly in the nation.
Members of the Estonian Defense League set off for a patrol competition near the town of Turi in central Estonia. The events, held nearly every weekend, are called war games, but they are not intended to be fun. Credit James Hill for The New York Times
A team loaded and removed cartridges from rifle magazines in a timed test. Credit James Hill for The New York Times
A team demonstrated its first-aid skills during the competition. Members bring their rifles and rucksacks packed with camping comfort foods like salami, Snickers bars and Gatorade, as well as first-aid kits.
A team of military cadets won the competition. Credit James Hill for The New York Times
A member of the team that placed second sank to the ground to recuperate after crossing the finish line. Credit James Hill for The New York Times
