Sunday, August 9, 2015

The Server, The Server, The Server: How Hillary Damaged National Security

The Server, The Server, The Server: How Hillary Damaged National Security

by Hugh Hewitt

My column this morning at The Washington Examiner and Noah Rothman’s at Commentary both target the same incredible though so-far-largely-ignored story in the background of the noise around Hillary’s server.
The former Secretary of State almost certainly opened a portal for the nation’s enemies into our highest levels of government with her private server. Noah put it this way:
As for national security, the Secretary of State’s emails were likely the subject of intense interest by foreign actors and her improperly secured email account probably provided anyone with the capabilities a way to penetrate American diplomatic information security. Despite being discouraged from doing so, Clinton used at least one of her personal mobile devices while abroad to access emails on her private server, creating plenty of opportunities for foreign agents to compromise her account.
This is no small matter. On the heels of Edward Snowden’s revelations, American informational security has been harmed like never before. “The experts warned that the entire U.S. national security clearance system could be compromised,” read a chilling Fox News report published on Friday in the wake of the hacking of the Office of Personnel Management, “that future senior government leaders and advisors could be targeted even before taking office, and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of government officials might successfully be blackmailed, bribed or otherwise manipulated in the future into handing over still more sensitive information.” How can someone who, through carelessness or indifference, imperiled American national security serve as the nation’s commander-in-chief?
Michael Morell, the retired Deputy Director of the CIA confirmed as much to me ten weeks ago on air, and every serious intelligence and counter-intelligence expert I have talked with since then confirms the same thing: Of course the Russians, the Chinese and the Iranians and probably a few more governments and perhaps even some private organizations —some of HRC’s emails were published on Gawker by “Guccfer”— have all of Hillary’s emails.  What doesn’t seem to penetrate the thickness of the MSM’s protective reflexes when it comes to the Clintons is that the hostile intelligence services almost certainly had the emails –all of them– in real time, giving them an open window into the Obama Administration’s senior appointee’s inner thinking and communications.  In other word’s, an intelligence service’s dream-come-true.
Why are Hillary’s numbers plummeting?  Some portion of it has to be in the recognition by independent voters and even some national security-minded Democrats that Hillary really cannot be trusted to be the Commander-in-Chief, not after such reckless and destructive behavior, criminal or not.

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