With the assignment of former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel into the matter of Russian links to the Trump administration, many would argue that Donald Trump’s days in the Oval Office are numbered—and rapidly shrinking.
Even some Republicans, such as Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan, have openly voiced the “I-word.”
Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), who last week became the first Republican to express support for an independent investigation into the Trump-Russia matter, said Wednesday that if the details reported this week are true, it could be grounds for impeachment.
According to the Hill, Amash added that “everybody gets a fair trial in this country.”
And of course, he is absolutely correct. Everybody in America should get a fair hearing, a fair chance, and if necessary, a fair trial. We shouldn’t consider only the negative inferences against him: we should also give a fair and honest listen to each and every mitigating argument in his favor. Trump deserves this as much as anyone else. But the truth is, that is exactly that kind of fair shake that he hasn’t been willing to give others—particularly not to Hillary Clinton.
And in many ways, that’s exactly what has landed him in his current predicament.
So as shown by these tweets, Donald Trump is really concerned with “leakers” and maintaining “security.”
And then there was the time that Trump himself leaked “code word clearance” classified secrets to the Russian ambassador, and severely damaged our relationship with strategic allies like Israel.
Leaders of Israel’s intelligence gathering community say they’re rethinking their policies on sharing information with the U.S. government after President Donald Trump leaked highly sensitive classified information to Russian officials during an Oval Office visit last week.
The Times of Israel said that two former heads of Mossad — Israel’s top intelligence agency — said this week that Trump is not trustworthy and slammed his decision to reveal classified intelligence with Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and ambassador to the U.S. Sergei Kislyak.
Shabtai Shavit — who was Mossad’s director in the 1990s — told the Times that if he were the current leader of the agency, he would balk at sharing intelligence with the U.S. leadership, who he believes is compromised by Trump’s cozy relations with Moscow as well as the president’s instability and apparent inability to stop his mouth from running.
“If tomorrow I were asked to pass information to the CIA, I would do everything I could to not pass it to them. Or I would first protect myself and only then give it, and what I’d give would be totally neutered,” Shavit said. “If some smart guy decides that he’s allowed to leak information, then your partners in cooperation will be fewer or just won’t be at all.”
Here’s how Stephen Colbert addressed this.
After “firing the man in charge of investigating his Russian ties, [Trump] met with two Russian diplomats, a meeting that was arranged by Vladimir Putin, and which we only saw because Russian photographers were in there to take photos, and at that meeting he admit[ted] he gave Russian diplomats classified information,” rehashed Colbert.
But while others have cautiously broached the horror, one top Republican “did not mince words,” Colbert noted. Ironically, it was Donald Trump himself.
“We can’t have someone in the Oval Office who doesn’t understand the meaning of the word ‘confidential’ or ‘classified,'” said candidate Trump at a campaign rally on September 6, 2016.
“I gotta say — and I don’t care if this is taken out of context,” Colbert quipped after rolling the clip. “I completely agree with Donald Trump.”
Yes, we do know that technically the president has the authority to declassify and divulge classified information, so this isn’t a legal issue: it’s a judgement issue. The point is that whatever favor he may have gained with Russia may not be worth what we’ve consequently lost in future intel opportunities with Israel and other countries. Why exactly should they trust him, and consequently us, if he’s going to just give their most sensitive intel away like it’s just water cooler talk?
Or, y’know, what was that word? Oh yeah, like “candy.”
This was an argument that Trump himself repeatedly used against Hillary Clinton.
In point of fact, the FBI investigation into Clinton’s server never found that it was ever breached, although there were attempts made.
Attempts to breach Clinton Server Unsuccessful
So no, the server wasn’t breached and her IT teamed actually did deploy successful counter strategies.
Pagliano told FBI “there were no security breaches”
The entire premise of Trump’s criticism was based on the fact this was a “private” server, as if that meant that it would be less secure than the State Department’s own internal email system. But that isn’t true, because Russia did breach State’s email system.
Russia's 2014 hack of an unclassified State Department computer system was much more aggressive than previously reported, with one official describing it as "hand-to-hand combat," according to an article published Monday by The Washington Post.
Over a 24-hour period, top US network defenders repeatedly ejected the intruders. Just as quickly, the intruders reentered the breached computer system, the news organization reported, citing both named and unnamed officials. Whenever the defenders severed a link between the malware inside the infected network and a command-and-control server belonging to the hackers, the Russians established a new connection. The new details came amid new warnings by the National Security Agency that Russia is likely visiting the same aggressive tactics on private industry sectors, which have fewer resources and less expertise in repelling such attacks.
If Clinton had actually done as Trump suggested, Russia would have hacked her emails.
Outside of that issue one could certainly argue with Clinton’s decision to replace her previous @att.blackberry.com email address with @clintonemail.com, using a server which had previously been used by her husband’s presidential offices. The server also contained the domains for presidentclinton.com and wjcoffice.com, but it should be noted that the malware attack and breach that occurred at State.gov—and then later at the DNC and with John Podesta’s account—didn’t happen to any of the domains on the Clinton server.
A lot of companies or large organizations use their own private server. IT security and the use of private corporate servers isn’t really such a mystery or oddity. As a matter of fact, former President Bill Clinton’s had several of them located at offices in Virginia, and over the course of several years there were two located in their home in Chappaqua, New York. The first was an Apple server that was maintained by Justin Cooper. That was later replaced by a Microsoft Exchange Server in 2009 and maintained by Brian Pagliano at the request of Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin, because it was antiquated and users were having a hard time accessing it consistently.
For the record, Pagliano installed SSL security encryption for passwords on the server in March 2009.
During that time the previous Apple server was used as a household system until 2014, when its data was migrated to an iPad and an Apple Laptop. In 2013 the exchange server was moved from their home to an outside vendor named PRN, then its functions and data were migrated and replaced by one of PRN’s servers in Secaucus, New Jersey, which was also equipped with SSL and other security features such as an intrusion detection system called CloudJacket.
That’s a situation that frankly isn’t much different from setting up a private email domain on a service like GoDaddy.com, except they still had the support of both Cooper and Pagliano, as well as the vendor’s own staff to keep an eye on things which anyone who has GoDaddy, Yahoo, or Gmail can attest, is a fairly high level of direct support, no matter what Comey may have later claimed to Congress about it. (Such claims about the Clinton server setup being less secure than Yahoo mail aren’t really stated in the FBI report; that was just Comey’s opinion.)
Having a private server or email while working for the State Department in and of itself is certainly not a crime. In fact, it actually wasn’t technically against State Department guidelines, as they did allow use of personal email within certain limits.
Personal Email was Allowed, although there were some forwarding requirements
But it’s interesting to note that if someone used a State.gov email address, they could only do so with State Department-issued phones, and they weren’t allowed to have a personal email attached to the same phone at the same time.
Clinton actually had two phones and two phone numbers during most of this period, including a flip phone for making calls while she used the Blackberry for her emails. She didn’t have a desktop computer at either her home or office (not counting the Apple server, which was used by her household staff). Neither of her phones was issued to her by the State Department.
Why Clinton decided to keep her personal email account and blackberry.
Clinton did go through about 11 phones during this time (but not all at once, only one was active per phone number at a time). This was largely because her staff would dutifully go out and buy the latest Blackberry upgrade for her, which she would use for several days—but then go back to her old phone, which she liked better. Some of them also broke down and had to be replaced. Cooper was the guy with the hammer who tried to make sure no data could be recovered from them once they were discarded—which frankly, isn’t a bad idea for personal data security.
It’s akin to destroying your bank statements instead of leaving them in the trash.
For the record, Colin Powell used AOL for his email account while he was secretary of state (just like Mike Pence did as governor of Indiana) and when he left at end of his term he just deleted his account. His argument was that any emails that were related to government business would also exist on the State.gov servers, so he didn’t have to provide his own copies. This is at least part of the advice he gave Clinton when she was determining whether to keep her existing email accounts or change to a State account, which would have made any personal message on that device subject to the government records act. Clinton was actually much more forthcoming and conscientious than Powell was.
Still, Trump didn’t just attack Hillary’s decision, but also the actions of her staff.
This AP report really shows the Clinton campaign looking optimistically at this “whole thing blowing over quickly.”
Among the emails made public Tuesday by WikiLeaks was one from Clinton campaign spokesman Nick Merrill, who optimistically suggested that the issue might quickly blow over.
“Goal would be to cauterize this just enough so it plays out over the weekend and dies in the short term,” Merrill wrote on March 6, 2015.
It did not, and became the leading example of Clinton’s penchant for secrecy, which has persisted as a theme among her campaign critics and rivals throughout her election season. Clinton did not publicly confirm or discuss her use of the email server until March 10 in a speech at the United Nations, nearly one week after AP revealed the server’s existence.
And it’s not like we haven’t repeatedly heard similar assurances from Sean Spicer and Sarah Huckabee Sanders that this entire “Russia” thing will soon blow over. If you think there’s essentially “nothing to the story,” why wouldn’t you believe it’s just going to “blow over?” Why wouldn’t it?
But of course, Trump wasn’t done.
Specifically, the Bloomberg report says this:
Hillary Clinton’s campaign spokesman urged a blanket denial that she ever sent classified information through her private e-mail system because anything less emphatic could open her to charges that she broke the law, according to the latest batch of e-mails purportedly stolen from her campaign and posted by WikiLeaks.
“We should not think it is fine to find something that ‘should have been classified at the time,”’ Brian Fallon, the spokesman, wrote other top campaign officials on Aug. 22, 2015, as they debated a statement Clinton would make on her use of an e-mail server in her home. "Our position is that no such material exists, else it could be said she mishandled classified info,” Fallon wrote.
That doesn’t sound anything like Gen. McMaster claiming Trump didn’t divulge any “sources and methods” when he talked to Lavrov and Kislyak, does it? Hairs. Splitting. And stuff.
No, Hillary did not say that because the “C” marking didn’t mean “Classified.” It actually meant “Confidential”—but in point of fact there were only three of these sets of messages in all of the 55,000 emails she sent and received, and the State Department told the FBI that two of them weren’t classified at all.
Emails marked “C” for Confidential
Oh, and one other thing: as head of the State Department, Hillary Clinton had the ultimate authority within the department for deciding exactly what is or isn’t “classified” from the perspective of the department, and how it should or could, be disseminated—just like a president does for all classified information from all departments. It’s not like somebody would randomly take it upon themselves to do that or anything without following established declassification protocols.
Clinton was “Original Classification Authority” (OCA) at State.
The difference here is that Clinton never attempted to use this authority to change or modify the classification of any document or information on the fly, and instead relied on State Department staff to make these determinations. In fact, none of the emails that the FOIA office and Inspector General argued should have been considered classified (a process called “Up Classification”) were generated by Secretary Clinton herself. Just like with the two mistaken “C” markings, they were generated by others downstream at State and forwarded to her for her information and response.
Authors of the emails “used their best judgement”
So besides the up-classified items after the fact, which most of the State Department staff interviewed by FBI argued were within reasonable bounds in the course of doing their jobs to send on an unclassified system, there was really only one email marked “Confidential” that was received and/or sent by Hillary Clinton during her four years as secretary of state.
But It’s not like she just blurted out any of this stuff to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador on a whim or anything. As a matter of fact, during his congressional testimony former FBI Director James Comey stated that “Everyone involved in these email chains had the appropriate security clearances.”
It’s not a stretch to say it’s doubtful Lavrov or Kislyak have clearance. Which brings us to the bit where Trump said Hillary Clinton shouldn’t get security briefings.
Yeah, it’s not like members of the intelligence community haven’t said the exact same thing about Trump—because Russia.
U.S. intelligence operatives are withholding sensitive information from the White House for the first time in history because they believe that Russia will find out anything they tell Pres. Donald Trump and his aides.
The New York Observer — which is owned by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner — reported Sunday that the intelligence community (IC) is “pushing back” against an administration it believes is incompetent, dishonest, leaky and “penetrated by the Kremlin.”
“Our Intelligence Community is so worried by the unprecedented problems of the Trump administration — not only do senior officials possess troubling ties to the Kremlin, there are nagging questions about basic competence regarding Team Trump — that it is beginning to withhold intelligence from a White House which our spies do not trust,” wrote former analyst for the National Security Agency Jack R. Schindler.
And it seems they were right.
Wow, that’s like knee-slapper material now isn’t it?
It just keeps getting better and better. Besides the fact that there were no breaches, SSL security was in place, and everyone emailed had clearance, there also wasn’t any real attempt by Clinton to “hide” information from the public by deleting her emails. As it turns out, there was a fairly careful process followed by employees to identify her work-related emails in order to satisfy FOIA requests that were issued in 2015.
Samuelson’s Keyword Search for work related emails.
Clinton never ordered or requested that the remaining emails be deleted from the PRN server. She simply said she didn’t need them anymore, and the request came from her attorneys without her direct input. And it clearly wasn’t done to defy the subpoena for those emails issued by Congress, because the deletion was already done at that point by December 2014 or January 2015.
Emails were not deleted to avoid FOIA
The only thing that happened after the subpoena was issued on March 4, 2015, two days after the New York Times story about her server broke, was that a member of PRN’s staff changed the retention date for Clinton email because he’d had forgotten to do it previously when it was originally requested. Nobody on Clinton’s team directed him to do this in reaction to the subpoena.
PRN Staffer has an “Oh Shit” Moment.
We do know that Hillary server was never breached. Only one email actually contained confidential material (which was marked), all persons in those email chains were cleared, and her non-work emails weren’t deliberately deleted to hide anything from Congress. None of Trump accusations against Clinton had any factual validity and all of this is why charges weren’t filed. There was no basis for them when you look at all the mitigating facts.
And remember when I mentioned that many companies have their own private servers and networks that have to be maintained and secured? Well, it just so happens that there are several current major network security holes among Trump’s own businesses and properties, including his “Southern White House” Mar-a-Lago, as documented by Pro Publica.
We parked a 17-foot motor boat in a lagoon about 800 feet from the back lawn of The Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach and pointed a 2-foot wireless antenna that resembled a potato gun toward the club. Within a minute, we spotted three weakly encrypted Wi-Fi networks. We could have hacked them in less than five minutes, but we refrained.
...
We have also visited two of President Donald Trump’s other family-run retreats, the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., and a golf club in Sterling, Virginia. Our inspections found weak and open Wi-Fi networks, wireless printers without passwords, servers with outdated and vulnerable software, and unencrypted login pages to back-end databases containing sensitive information.
The risks posed by the lax security, experts say, go well beyond simple digital snooping. Sophisticated attackers could take advantage of vulnerabilities in the Wi-Fi networks to take over devices like computers or smart phones and use them to record conversations involving anyone on the premises.
“Those networks all have to be crawling with foreign intruders, not just ProPublica,” said Dave Aitel, chief executive officer of Immunity, Inc., a digital security company, when we told him what we found.
Security lapses are not uncommon in the hospitality industry, which 2014 like most industries and government agencies 2014 is under increasing attack from hackers. But they are more worrisome in places where the president of the United States, heads of state and public officials regularly visit.
Wouldn’t it be nice if any of these Trump networks and servers had SSL security or CloudJacket in place like Hillary Clinton’s server did? Oh well, as long as Trump doesn’t try to plan, like, a massive military strike against a foreign nation while he’s in the Mar-a-Lago dining room or anything, we should be fine.
What? Seriously!?
And then there was the time during the transition when Trump staff decided to start moving classified documents from building to building without permission.
President Donald Trump's disclosure of classified information to Russian officials isn't the first time his team's handling of secrets has raised alarms bells.
In the weeks before Trump took office, Obama administration officials were so concerned by the Trump transition team's handling of classified documents that they moved swiftly to exert more control over the sensitive materials, according to two former U.S. officials.
The officials said transition officials removed classified materials from secure rooms and carried them between buildings in Washington without permission. Worried about keeping tabs on the highly sensitive material, the Obama administration officials set new limits on some classified information and explicitly barred Trump aides from viewing that material in their transition offices.
On top of all of that you have the fact that Kellyanne Conway ,Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon both had their email accounts on an RNC Private server when they arrived in the White House.
Senior Trump administration staffers, including Kellyanne Conway, Jared Kushner, Sean Spicer and Steve Bannon, had until Wednesday active accounts on a Republican National Committee (RNC) email system, Newsweek has learned.
The system (rnchq.org) is the same one the George W. Bush administration was accused of using to evade transparency rules after claiming to have “lost” 22 million emails.
Making use of separate political email accounts at the White House is not illegal. In fact, they serve a purpose by allowing staff to divide political conversations (say, arranging for the president to support a congressional re-election campaign) from actual White House work. Commingling politics and state business violates the Hatch Act, which restricts many executive branch employees from engaging in political activity on government time.
The RNC later stated that those emails were setup for distribution lists and have been since deleted, but still — I mean really — all these people had private emails on the same server that disappeared Karl Rove’s emails after Congress issued a subpoena for them whlie they we’re going around saying “Lock Her Up” for essentially the same thing.
The irony of all these disappearing emails is brought into even more relief by the fact that Trump and his companies repeatedly destroyed documents and deleted emails that were under court order.
Over the course of decades, Donald Trump’s companies have systematically destroyed or hidden thousands of emails, digital records and paper documents demanded in official proceedings, often in defiance of court orders. These tactics—exposed by a Newsweek review of thousands of pages of court filings, judicial orders and affidavits from an array of court cases—have enraged judges, prosecutors, opposing lawyers and the many ordinary citizens entangled in litigation with Trump. In each instance, Trump and entities he controlled also erected numerous hurdles that made lawsuits drag on for years, forcing courtroom opponents to spend huge sums of money in legal fees as they struggled—sometimes in vain—to obtain records.
This behavior is of particular import given Trump’s frequent condemnations of Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent, for having deleted more than 30,000 emails from a server she used during her time as secretary of state. While Clinton and her lawyers have said all of those emails were personal, Trump has suggested repeatedly on the campaign trail that they were government documents Clinton was trying to hide and that destroying them constituted a crime. The allegation—which the FBI concluded was not supported by any evidence—is a crowd-pleaser at Trump rallies, often greeted by supporters chanting, “Lock her up!”
Last point: Trump is still using an unsecured Android Galaxy S3 cellphone to tweet with.
Soon after Trump's inauguration, an enterprising hacker found that Trump's @realDonaldTrump account was still tied to the Gmail account of a staffer, a move seen as insecure. (The account now seems to be connected to more official and secure White House email accounts.) And a January article in The New York Times reported that Trump continues to tweet from an "old, unsecured Android phone."
Several cybersecurity experts told NPR, if that's the case, it's not good.
"Donald Trump for the longest time has been using a insecure Android phone that by all reports is so easy to compromise, it would not meet the security requirements of a teenager," says Nicholas Weaver, a computer scientist at the University of California at Berkeley.
By all apparent accounts Trump is still tweeting using his outdated Android, which is so old there are no longer any security updates for it.
All of which goes to show: Trump and his people know nothing about nothing when it comes to security.
Yes, Russia is laughing at us—or rather, at you, Donald.
And for the grand finale, we have these last two precious gems.
Guess whose Justice Department investigation just got a special counsel this week?
Go on—guess.
Hopefully former FBI Director Robert Mueller will do a thorough and fair a job investigating why Michael Flynn was still hired as national security advisor in the first place, even after Obama specifically warned Trump not to do it. The hiring also came in the wake of Flynn admitting to them that he had been receiving money from Turkey during the entire campaign (which was actually coming from Russia). Mueller should also find out exactly why it was that Russia paid him $575,000 in the first place.
One possible reason for the payment: Flynn agreeing to set up a back channel to Russia for Trump so they could get around the government with all it “rules” and “security” and stuff. That is probably why he didn’t fire Flynn for lying to the FBI and vice president on the spot when Sally Yates told them about his illegally discussing sanctions with Kislyak in violation of the Logan Act, and why he apparently tried to bully and coerce FBI Director Comey into “letting Flynn go” the very next day, then fired him when Comey’s testimony showed he clearly wasn’t going to do that. But based on readily available evidence, verifying this kind of thing is what investigations are for.
It’s possible there are some mitigating circumstances to all of that. Somewhere. Maybe just a smidge. But as has been said many times, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.” And Trump has a whole lot of ‘splaining to do.
(This is technically the second article in a series I’m doing comparing and contrasting the Trump and Clinton “scandals.” The first, addressed their relative efforts in “Obstruction and Influence” over investigations targeting them. The next will address and contrast each of their charity foundations.)
