Perkins Coie Lawyer Sussman Took Orders from Hillary in Russian Collusion Fabrication

Joe Biden’s National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan is not exempt either. He was always Hillary’s secret agent man including the back channel in the beginnings of the Iran nuclear deal. His fingerprints are all over the Perkins Coie, Clinton campaign and Russian collusion lies. He needs a subpoena along with dozens of others and should be stripped of his security clearance.

Hillary Clinton attends Jake Sullivan-Maggie Goodlander ...

In part from Yahoo News: In the closing days of the 2016 race, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tweeted: “Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank.”

She also shared a lengthy statement from Sullivan, one of her top advisers.

“This could be the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow,” Sullivan claimed. “Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank. This secret hotline may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump’s ties to Russia… This line of communication may help explain Trump’s bizarre adoration of Vladimir Putin.”

Sullivan added: “We can only assume that federal authorities will now explore this direct connection between Trump and Russia as part of their existing probe into Russia’s meddling in our elections.”

“Alfa Bank” is mentioned nine times in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, but never in reference to the alleged Trump-Russia server story. In his December 2019 report, DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz said the FBI “concluded by early February 2017 that there were no such links” between Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization.

A bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report from 2020 did not find “covert communications between Alfa Bank and Trump Organization personnel.” The Senate said that “based on the FBI’s assessment, the Committee did not find that the Domain Name System activity reflected the existence of substantive or covert communications between Alfa Bank and Trump Organization personnel.”

INDICTMENT

But read on.

FNC: Former Director of National Intelligence Ric Grenell said the indictment of Perkins-Coie attorney Michael Sussmann by Special Counsel John Durham is an important development in the probe into the origins of the FBI’s investigation into connections between the Trump campaign and Russia, but is not necessarily key to the entire genesis of the Russia investigation.

Grenell, who also served as President Trump’s ambassador to Germany, called the entire probe “such a ‘swamp’ situation” and added that Sussmann was simply one of the subjects of 63 transcripts released while he was DNI, after Durham requested them.

“I hope that we have a lot of time to focus on these issues going forward. The media that pushed this, I don’t believe that the FBI officials were duped by an outside lawyer working with Hillary Clinton who lied about his client,” Grenell, speaking on “Fox News Primetime,” said of Sussmann.

“Michael Sussmann, whoever he is and whatever lie he told, we released his transcript … There is a treasure trove of information of people lying under oath in these,” Grenell said.

As Durham, a former Connecticut federal prosecutor, is investigating the origins of the Russia investigation, Grenell advised that the original Russia probe continued past September of 2016 not because of “some lawyer [lying] to the FBI about who he was working for – because the FBI leadership knew this information was wrong –  they continued the investigation because it would help Hillary Clinton.”

RELATED READING:

The First Possible Prosecution from the Durham Investigation

“Everybody in Washington — lobbyists, newsrooms, a whole bunch of people — wanted Hillary to win. So what did they do? They allowed this opposition research to become part of the DOJ and FBI. That is so scary to think that politics permeated into the DOJ and to the FBI. This is what we call political prosecution, and when it happens in third world countries we call it out.”

Host Lawrence Jones added that one person of interest to him who is allegedly connected to the Sussmann case is current Biden national security adviser Jake Sullivan. The Vermont native previously served under Clinton when she was secretary of state and further advised her 2016 campaign.

“Sussmann claimed [evidence presented to the FBI] it was a tip from a cybersecurity expert who had nothing to do with Hillary Clinton, even though he worked for her. Total coincidence, sure,” he said.

“I guess it is also a coincidence that Hillary tweeted about it around the same time: Jake Sullivan … signed off on that tweet. Now, that’s significant.”

As the Washington Examiner reported, Clinton tweeted that “computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank,” later adding a statement from Sullivan:

“This could be the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow… This secret hotline may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump’s ties to Russia… This line of communication may help explain Trump’s bizarre adoration of Vladimir Putin,” wrote Sullivan at the time, according to the outlet.

***

Hillary Clinton’s other secret agent man was Marc Elias who headed up the Perkins Coie law firm. He hired Crowdstrike and Fusion GPS. Another fact is he was the campaign lawyer of record for Kamala Harris when she ran for president.

Democrat Lawyer Behind 'Russia Dossier' Pressures Nevada ...

Facebook Internal Documents Show Stasi Operations Including Murder

What about Apple and Tim Cook?

  • Apple threatened to remove Facebook from its App Store after a report about an online slave market.
  • The BBC in 2019 reported that human traffickers were using Facebook’s services to sell domestic workers.

    Apple threatened to kick Facebook off its App Store after a 2019 BBC report detailed how human traffickers were using Facebook to sell victims, according to The Wall Street Journal.

    The paper viewed company documents that show a Facebook investigation team was tracking down a human trafficking market in the Middle East whose organizers were using Facebook’s services. What appeared to be employment agencies were advertising domestic workers that they could supply against their will, per the Journal.

    The BBC published a sweeping undercover investigation of the practice, prompting Apple to threaten to remove Facebook from its store, the paper said.

    An internal memo found that Facebook was aware of the practice even before then: A Facebook researcher wrote in a report dated 2019, “was this issue known to Facebook before BBC inquiry and Apple escalation?,” per the Journal.

    Underneath the question reads, “Yes. Throughout 2018 and H1 2019 we conducted the global Understanding Exercise in order to fully understand how domestic servitude manifests no our platform across its entire life cycle: recruitment, facilitation, and exploitation.”

    Apple and Facebook did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

    The Wall Street Journal on Thursday also reported how Facebook’s AI content moderators cannot detect most languages used on the platform, a needed skill if the company is going to monitor content in foreign markets where it has expanded. source

Source: The dozens of internal Facebook documents obtained by the outlet showed how employees have expressed concerns about how the social media giant is being used in countries across the globe and how Facebook has failed to properly respond to these issues.

Some of the documents reportedly showed that Facebook employees raised concerns about human trafficking organizations in the Middle East that used Facebook to attract women. Other documents showed Facebook employees alerting their higher-ups of groups involved in organ selling and pornography.

The news outlet reported that while some of the groups and pages flagged by employees have been taken down, dozens of others remain active on the social media site.

Mexican cartels that are feeding America's drug habit ... source

Another document detailed a Facebook employee’s investigation into a Mexican drug cartel that was active on the social media site. The employee, who was a former police officer, was able to identify the Jalisco New Generation Cartel’s network of accounts on both Facebook and Instagram, which is owned by Facebook.

The employee wrote in the report that his team had found Facebook messages between cartel recruiters and potential recruits “about being seriously beaten or killed by the cartel if they try to leave the training camp.”

México: Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación lanzó un video ... source

The documents reportedly showed that the cartel was open about its criminal activity, with several pages on the social media site showing “gold-plated guns and bloody crime scenes.”The Wall Street Journal reported that even after the employee recommended Facebook increase its enforcement on the groups, documents showed that Facebook didn’t completely remove the cartel from its site and instead said that it removed content tied to the group. Just nine days after the report from the employee, his team found a new Instagram account tied to the cartel, which included several violent posts.

Many of the documents apparently showed employees raising concerns about how the social media giant was being used in developing countries, such as militant groups in Ethiopia using Facebook to promote violence against minority groups.

Brian Boland, a former Facebook vice president, told the Wall Street Journal that the social media site sees these issues in developing countries as “simply the cost of doing business.”

“There is very rarely a significant, concerted effort to invest in fixing those areas,” Boland said.

In a statement sent to Newsweek, a Facebook spokesperson said: “In countries at risk for conflict and violence, we have a comprehensive strategy, including relying on global teams with native speakers covering over 50 languages, educational resources, and partnerships with local experts and third-party fact-checkers to keep people safe.”

In a series of tweets on Thursday, Facebook spokesman Andy Stone wrote, “As the Wall Street Journal itself makes clear, we have a team of experts who help us uncover patterns of harmful behavior so we can disrupt it. We’ve got arguably more experts and resources dedicated to this work than any other consumer technology company in the world.”

The First Possible Prosecution from the Durham Investigation

Durham “has told the Justice Department that he will ask a grand jury to indict a prominent cybersecurity lawyer on a charge of making a false statement to the FBI,” the New York Times reported on Wednesday, citing “people familiar with the matter.”

Sussmann’s lawyers, Sean M. Berkowitz and Michael S. Bosworth, acknowledged Wednesday that they expected him to be indicted, but denied wrongdoing.

“Mr. Sussmann has committed no crime,” they told the Times. “Any prosecution here would be baseless, unprecedented and an unwarranted deviation from the apolitical and principled way in which the Department of Justice is supposed to do its work. We are confident that if Mr. Sussmann is charged, he will prevail at trial and vindicate his good name.

Durham has until the weekend to charge Sussmann because of a five-year statute of limitations, the newspaper said. source

Michael Sussmann (@michaelsuss) | Twitter

Breaking report from the New York Times (Savage and Goldman, et al.): Special Counsel John Durham “will ask a grand jury to indict” former DNC/Clinton campaign lawyer (and Perkins Coie partner) Michael Sussman for giving false statements. The false statement charges would relate to a September 19, 2016 meeting FBI lawyer James Baker had with Sussman, where Sussman relayed to the FBI the discredited theory that the Trump Organization was communicating with Alfa Bank.

The New York Times states:

Mr. Baker, the former F.B.I. lawyer, is said to have told investigators that he recalled Mr. Sussmann saying that he was not meeting him on behalf of any client.

This was contradicted by (1) Sussman’s testimony to Congress; and (2) Sussman’s own billing records. Sussman’s lawyers acknowledged “they expected him to be indicted.”

As to Sussman’s testimony, here is a portion where he discusses the Alfa Bank information was given to him by a client.

As we have discussed, the New Yorker first reported back in 2020 that Durham had impaneled a grand jury relating to the false Alfa Bank/Trump Organization story. There is the potential that former Feinstein staffer Daniel Jones – as well as the researches behind the Alfa Bank matter – will also face charges of giving false information to federal officials.

More recently, we noted that Fusion GPS has been fighting to keep secret its communications about Trump/Alfa Bank secret in a civil suit. Court records we reviewed appear to show the degree with which Fusion GPS, Glenn Simpson, and their associates went in drafting and promoting the false Alfa Bank/Trump Organization story.

One court document of interest is this August 26, 2016 e-mail from Fusion GPS to Michael Sussman.

That Fusion GPS-Sussman correspondence occurred not long before Sussman met with FBI General Counsel James Baker weeks later.

The e-mails correspond to the dates the Alfa Bank/Trump Organization was getting media exposure. One has to wonder what other correspondence Sussman had with Fusion GPS.

Questions have long been asked about Sussman’s involvement in the potential cover-up of the DNC hack in 2016. It was Sussman who brought in CrowdStrike (given his close relationship with founder Shawn Henry) to look into the DNC hack. According to Politico:

In late April [2016], the DNC’s IT department noticed some suspicious behavior and contacted DNC chief executive officer Amy Dacey, according to a DNC official. Dacey reached out to DNC lawyer Michael Sussmann, a partner at the Perkins Coie law firm and a former federal prosecutor specializing in cybercrimes. Sussmann called Shawn Henry, the president of cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, to get his company’s help.

This CrowdStrike/Perkins Coie links put into perspective this information in the the New York Times article, where Durham

has been pursuing a theory that the Clinton campaign used Perkins Coie to submit dubious information to the F.B.I. about Russia and Mr. Trump in an effort to gin up investigative activity to hurt his 2016 campaign.

If that is the case, then we doubt it would be limited to the Alfa Bank allegations.

Future Developments

We’ll be following the Sussman story closely and will post the charging documents and criminal information once – or if – Durham gets the indictment. (hat-tip)

***

When Fox News anchor Bret Baier asked about the origin of the infamous Trump dossier, James Comey brushed off most of the questions. The former Federal Bureau of Investigations director said someone on his “senior staff”—he couldn’t remember who—had “briefed” him on the dossier “sometime in the fall” of 2016. Mr. Comey had been told it came “from a reliable source.” He insisted he “never knew exactly which Democrats had funded” it. He then continued on about his book, which meditated on the importance of “truth.”

Testifying before a joint session of the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees, Mr. Baker said Mr. Sussmann approached him. The contact was initiated before the FBI and Justice Department applied for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant for key Trump campaign figure Carter Page, according to the Daily Caller’s report.

Mr. Baker was instrumental in obtaining the warrants for Mr. Page. source

General Milley Says China is not an Enemy

It was 2017 when General Milley said China is not an enemy.

Well let’s go back to some facts shall we?

Has General Milley even met FBI Director Chris Wray?

The counterintelligence and economic espionage efforts emanating from the government of China and the Chinese Communist Party are a grave threat to the economic well-being and democratic values of the United States.

The Chinese government is employing tactics that seek to influence lawmakers and public opinion to achieve policies that are more favorable to China.

At the same time, the Chinese government is seeking to become the world’s greatest superpower through predatory lending and business practices, systematic theft of intellectual property, and brazen cyber intrusions.

China’s efforts target businesses, academic institutions, researchers, lawmakers, and the general public and will require a whole-of-society response. The government and the private sector must commit to working together to better understand and counter the threat.

Then, the New York Times publishes an article on April 13, 2021 titled: ‘China Poses Biggest threat to U.S., Intelligence Report Says’

Sure, it is several years later but and after Milley says he has known his CCP counterpart for 5 years…there is this –>May be an image of text that says 'Milley reportedly made the calls before the 2020 presidential election on Oct. 30, 2020, and two days after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, on Jan. 8, 2021, and assured Zuocheng of the stability of the American government. He also allegedly assured the Chinese general that he would contact him regarding any imminent attack from the U.S. in the waning days of Trump's presidency.'

and this –>

May be an image of text that says 'Four #ChineseWarships, including a Chinese destroyer, have sailed into the United States' exclusive economic zone. Chinese state-run media says this is a warning to the United State about China's naval capabilities.'

The Annual Threat Assessment of the Intelligence Community published on April 9, 2021 is here in full. 

The 112th Congress held a hearing (House Foreign Affairs Committee) on May 28, 2012 titled: Investigating the Chinese Threat, Part I: Military and Economic Aggression. 

How about APT 40 (Advanced Persistent Threat) published by CISA? Can we really safeguard our trade secrets, intellectual property and infrastructure from the Chinese cyber war? Did General Milley discuss any of this in any other phone calls with his Chinese Communist Party counterpart?

China hacked Microsoft. Chinese hacking goes back several years. How about NASA, the World Bank, the State Department (East Asia Division), the Commerce Department, the Naval War College or the Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter program?

Remember when President Obama removed all CIA operatives from China? That was because the Chinese military was killing our operatives in country. How did they know?

CHINA USED STOLEN DATA TO EXPOSE CIA OPERATIVES IN AFRICA AND EUROPE
The discovery of U.S. spy networks in China fueled a decadelong global war over data between Beijing and Washington. 

Around 2013, U.S. intelligence began noticing an alarming pattern: Undercover CIA personnel, flying into countries in Africa and Europe for sensitive work, were being rapidly and successfully identified by Chinese intelligence, according to three former U.S. officials. The surveillance by Chinese operatives began in some cases as soon as the CIA officers had cleared passport control. Sometimes, the surveillance was so overt that U.S. intelligence officials speculated that the Chinese wanted the U.S. side to know they had identified the CIA operatives, disrupting their missions; other times, however, it was much more subtle and only detected through U.S. spy agencies’ own sophisticated technical countersurveillance capabilities.

In part:

More than a thousand visiting researchers from China working at US universities have left the country since the summer, according to John Demers, chief of the Department of Justice’s national security division. This exodus comes as the Department of Justice has intensified its investigations of espionage by scientists at US institutions who are secretly affiliated with the Chinese government or military.

This summer, the Department of Justice has had at least five researchers from China arrested. They all had US visas but hadn’t disclosed their affiliations with the Chinese Communist party or military in their visa applications, Demers explained at a 2 December virtual summit of the Aspen Institute, a global non-profit think tank based in Washington DC. Those handful of arrests were ‘just the tip of the iceberg’, Demers stated.

‘Between those five or six arrests, and the dozens of interviews that the [FBI]  did with individuals who were here under similar circumstances … more than 1000 [People’s Liberation Army]-affiliated Chinese researchers left the country,’ he claimed.

It appears that those departures were in addition to about a thousand Chinese graduate and postgraduate students whose visas were revoked by the State Department back in September under a ‘proclamation’ announced by outgoing President Trump. That directive prohibited individuals from studying or conducting research in the US if they were found to have links with the Chinese government or its military.

Bill Evanina, the US government’s top counterintelligence official, said at the summit that of the 1000-plus Chinese researchers who left the US he is ‘most concerned about the graduate-level students’. These researchers all came to the US ‘at the behest of the Chinese government and intelligence services’, and are going to particular universities to study specific fields that are expected to benefit China, he claimed.

***

CHICAGO (WLS) — The spy case against a former U.S. Army reservist and student at Illinois Institute of Technology wasn’t a one-man espionage show, according to federal investigators.

Ji Chaoqun’s federal court appearance in Chicago on Thursday is routine, in an anything-but-normal case. Chaoqun is charged against the backdrop of a possibly wider Chinese scheme to siphon intelligence information overseas.

Chaoqun and a similarly-accused spyman in Cincinnati, Ohio, shared the same foreign connection according to authorities, what’s known in intelligence circles as a “handler.” That link is pointed out in federal court records examined by the I-Team.

Chinese national Chaoqun, 30, is charged with providing intelligence officials in China with background check information on eight American citizens including defense contractors, federal investigators say. He had arrived in Chicago in 2013 with a student visa to study electrical engineering at IIT on the South Side but since being arrested has been locked up at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in the Loop for allegedly violating America’s Foreign Agents Registration Act.

In the Cincinnati case, Yanjun Xu is being held on charges he tried to steal trade secrets from GE Aviation, the giant military contractor and manufacturer. Xu, 40, is accused of downloading GE Aviation records onto his personal laptop and then smuggling them on a flight to China. As part of the charged scheme, federal authorities said Xu had posed as a technology association official and invited a GE Aviation employee to travel to China for a presentation. Xu became the first suspected Chinese intelligence official ever extradited to the U.S. He was arrested in Belgium and is now being detained at the federal penitentiary in Milan, Michigan.

So, what’s the connection between Cincinnati’s Xu and Chicago’s Chaoqun? While there is no indication the men were actual associates, commiserated in crime, or even ever met, the alleged link is buried in a Chicago court file.

Chaoqun’s criminal complaint cites a “clandestine and overt human source collection” used by Chinese officials to recruit spies and gather stolen intelligence.

“Chinese intelligence services conduct extensive overt, covert, and clandestine intelligence collection operations against U.S. national security entities, including private U.S. defense companies, through a network of agents within and outside of China,” states FBI Special Agent Andrew K. McKay.

According to the FBI, Chaoqun and Xu shared the very same covert, Chinese handler. U.S. authorities say the Chinese man assigned to secretly oversee both assignments, met with each alleged operative separately. They would get together in secret locations, frequently hotel rooms, but for the same alleged purpose: provide “information as a benefit to the Chinese government.”

Did General Milley discuss of of this with Li Zuocheng? Remember it is said that China was a little rattled at the potential instability of the United States and needed hand holding before and after the election of 2020 and the January 6 chaos in Washington DC. Seems, we Americans need hand holding from the woke Joint Chiefs of Staff and Pelosi.

Calls are routine? But the subject matter is hardly routine much less loyal to the homeland and the Constitution. Joint Chiefs spokesperson confirms Milley calls with China, defends them as routine Greg Nash

Joint Chiefs of Staff spokesperson Col. Dave Butler on Wednesday confirmed that Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley called his Chinese counterparts after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol but said those calls were routine.

Butler said in a statement that Milley “regular communicates with Chiefs of Defense around the world, including China and Russia. These conversations remain vital to improving mutual understanding of U.S. national security interests, reducing tensions, providing clarity and avoiding unintended consequences or conflict.”

The statement comes in response to reports that a forthcoming book says Milley once told his Chinese counterpart that he would give a heads up before any attack on China by the U.S.

“You and I have known each other for now five years. If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise,” Milley said, according to an excerpt from a new book by veteran journalist Bob Woodward and The Washington Post’s Robert Costa.

“All calls from the Chairman to his counterparts, including those reported, are staffed, coordinated and communicated with the Department of Defense and the interagency,” Butler said in Wednesday’s statement.

 

 

$64 Million to Afghanistan Per Biden Admin but Add in $1.2 Billion

The Taliban is swimming in significant assets, with more to come. and China is delighted.he ultimate winner of two decades of war in Afghanistan is likely China. Secretary of State Antony Blinkin confirmed that if the Taliban behaves, the $64 million will be authorized. Further, there is the matter of nations around the world and the pledges they have made in ’emergency funds’ for Afghanistan.

At the first high-level conference on Afghanistan since the Taliban took power a month ago, Western governments, big traditional donors and others announced pledges that went beyond the $606 million that the United Nations was seeking to cover costs through the end of the year for protecting Afghans from looming humanitarian disaster.

U.N. humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths announced at the close of the ministerial meeting that more than $1.2 billion in humanitarian and development aid had been pledged. He said this included the $606 million sought in a “flash appeal” but also a regional response to the Afghan crisis that U.N. refugee chief Filippo Grandi spoke about after arriving in Kabul on a previously unannounced visit.

He wrote on Twitter that he would assess humanitarian needs and the situation of 3.5 million displaced Afghans, including over 500,000 displaced this year alone.

Officials at the U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR, have expressed concerns that more Afghans could take refuge into neighboring Pakistan and Iran, which both already have large numbers of Afghans who fled their country during the past decades of war. sourceTaliban seen with SCAR rifle commonly carried by American ...

GovExe: The aircraft and armored vehicles left behind when U.S. forces withdrew will give China—through their eager partners, the Taliban—a broad window into how the U.S. military builds and uses some of its most important tools of war. Expect the Chinese military to use this windfall to create—and export to client states—a new generation of weapons and tactics tailored to U.S. vulnerabilities, said several experts who spent years building, acquiring, and testing some of the equipment that the Taliban now controls.

To understand how big a potential loss this is for the United States, look beyond the headlines foretelling a Taliban air force. Look instead to the bespoke and relatively primitive pieces of command, control, and communication equipment sitting around in vehicles the United States left on tarmacs and on airfields. These purpose-built items aren’t nearly as invincible to penetration as even your own phone.

“The only reason we aren’t seeing more attacks is because of a veil of secrecy around these systems,” said Josh Lospinoso, CEO of cybersecurity company Shift5. “Once you pierce that veil of secrecy…it massively accelerates the timeline for being able to build cyber weapons” to attack them.

Lospinoso spent ten years in the Army conducting penetration tests against radios, small computers, and other IT gear commonly deployed in Afghanistan.

Take the radios and communications equipment aboard the Afghan Air Force C-130 transport plane captured by the Taliban. The Pentagon has assured that the equipment was disabled. But if any of it remains on the plane an adversary with time and will could pick those apart one by one.

“You now have some or all of the electronic components on that system and it’s a representative laboratory; it’s a playground for building, testing, and iterating on cyber-attacks where maybe the adversary had a really hard time” until he obtained actual copies of the gear, Lospinoso said. “It is the playground for them to develop attacks against similar items.”

Georgianna Shea, who spent five years at MITRE helping the Pentagon research and test new technologies,  said the loss of key equipment to the Taliban “exposes everything we do in the U.S., DOD: our plans of action, how we configure things, how we protect things. It allows them unlimited time and access to go through and find vulnerabilities that we may not be aware of.”

“It’s not just a Humvee. It’s not just a vehicle that gets you from point A to point B. It’s a Humvee that’s full of radios, technologies, crypto systems, things we don’t want our adversaries getting a hold of,” said Shea, now chief technologist at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’s Transformative Innovation Lab.

Of particular concern are the electronic countermeasures gear, or ECMs, used to detect improvised explosive devices.

“Imagine the research and development effort that went into develop those ECM devices that were designed to counter IEDs,” said Peter Christensen, a former director of the U.S. Army’s National Cyber Range. “Now, our adversaries have them. They’re going to have the software and the hardware that goes with that system. But also develop capabilities to defeat or mitigate the effectiveness of those ECM devices.”

Gear that has been “demilitarized” or “rendered inoperable,” as U.S. officials described the planes and vehicles left behind, can still reveal secrets, Shea said.

“In some cases, this equipment was fielded with the assumption we would have gates and guards to protect it. When it was developed, no one thought the Chinese would have it in their cyber lab, dissecting it, pulling it apart.”

Once an attacker has physical control of a device, little can stop her from discovering its vulnerabilities—and there are always vulnerabilities, Shea said.

Under current acquisition practices, most new defense gear is not tested for vulnerabilities until late in the design process. Testers often receive far too little time to test comprehensively. Sometimes they get just two weeks, she said, and yet “they always find something. Always.”

“Regardless of the previous testing that’s been done on compliance, they always find something: always… “They’re very backlogged and don’t have an unending amount of resources,” she said. So you have to schedule development with these testers. There’s not enough resources to test it to the depth and breadth that it should be to understand all of the vulnerabilities.”

Plans to fix newly discovered vulnerabilities “were often inconsistent or inadequate,” Christensen said.

Lospinoso, who spent years conducting such tests for the Army, still performs penetration testing for the U.S. military as a contractor. He says a smart hacker can usually find useful vulnerabilities  in hardware “within hours.”

When such a network attack disables a radio or a truck, troops are generally not trained to do anything about it. They may not even realize that they have been attacked, and may chalk up problems to age or maintenance problems.

“Every time we run an attack against a system, knocked out a subcomponent or have some really devastating effect that could cause loss of an asset—every time, the operator in the cockpit says, ‘We do not have operating procedures for what you just did,’” Lospinoso said.

Little of this is new. In 2017, the Government Accountability Office highlighted many of these concerns in a blistering report.

More than just insight into network vulnerabilities, the abandoned vehicles and gear will help China understand how U.S. forces work with partner militaries, said N. MacDonnell Ulsch, the CEO and chief analyst of Phylax Analytics.

“If you were to take all of the technology that was currently deployed in Afghanistan by the [United States] and you made an assessment of that, you have a point in time and a point in place reference of what the status quo is; what technology is being used, how much it costs, what’s it capable of doing and you realize it’s going to a developing nation,” Ulsch said.

China can use the knowledge to develop their weapons and tactics, but also to give their arms-export sales team an edge, he said. The Taliban have highlighted their nascent partnership with China as perhaps their most important foreign diplomatic effort. China, meanwhile, has already begun giving millions in aid to the new regime.

Whatever vulnerabilities China does discover will likely imperil U.S. troops for years to come, Lospinoso said.

“There is a zero percent chance we will go back and re-engineer” all of the various systems with serious cyber vulnerabilities, he said. “We are stuck with billions and billions in weapon systems that have fundamental flaws.”