OpenCdA wonders …

Will President Barack Obama pull a Gerald Ford and pardon Hillary Clinton for all violations of specific federal criminal laws involving the almost-certain compromise of classified information in connection with her establishing and using her private email server while she was Secretary of State?

If he does, will her quid pro quo be little more than to quietly accept disqualification from seeking or holding any office under the United States regardless of whether that office is elected or appointed?  Will she also agree to have her security clearance revoked with prejudice and agree to never seek its reinstatement, reissuance, or renewal? (more…)

As exemplified by the lede from this Wall Street Journal article on August 19, much of the national skews media have focused their questions on how much damage disclosures about the presumed compromise of Hillary Clinton’s private email server will do to her campaign for President in November 2016.

It’s a reasonable question that goes directly to the question of Clinton’s suitability to have access to national security information, a requirement to be President of the United States, but even that is one which should be further down on the list of more important questions.

In our opinion, the question that should be number one is, “Presuming that all of the emails processed through Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server are now in the hands of technically competent foreign intelligence services, how much damage has been done to the national security of the United States?”

Determinations of any criminal, professional, or political liability assignable to Clinton and others entrusted to properly protect national security and other sensitive information all hinge on a full and complete answer to that question. (more…)

Cozy associations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) are nothing new for either former President Bill Clinton or his wannabe President wife Hillary.  It is only a matter of time until a few people with long memories recall the foreign financial revelations of the 1996 Clinton presidential campaign. The China connections then had little to do with dinner plates.

It was in those revelations the public first learned of the Clinton’s connections with big campaign donors like the Lippo Group’s Mochtar and James Riady who had long-time connections to a Chinese intelligence agency.

The public learned about Yah Lin “Charlie” Trie, a major fundraiser and long-time close friend of the President, who accepted a plea agreement in return for telling how he had routed illegal donations from the PRC to the Clinton Presidential Campaign.

It was in those revelations that the public learned that Los Angeles immigration consultant Maria Hsia and former Democratic National Committee official John Huang had arranged:

“At a fundraising lunch held on April 29, 1996 at the Hsi Lai Temple in Hacienda Heights, California, and attended by Vice President Gore, Buddhist monastics illegally funneled $65,000 to the DNC through ‘straw donors’ at the instigation of Hsia, a longtime fundraiser for the Vice President. When press accounts of this donation-laundering appeared, Temple officials altered and destroyed evidence to protect the Temple, Hsia, and the Vice President from embarrassment.”

Parenthetically, for those who think that America’s Indian tribes are morally above donating money to politicians to encourage the pols to stifle competition with tribal casinos, read the major heading The Indian Casino Decision.

The Clinton’s have a long history of questionable ties to the People’s Republic of China.  The PRC and its intelligence agency, the Guoanbu, have long memories and very likely meticulous records, maybe now including some emails from Hillary Clinton’s private email server, of who received how much money from whom.

It has been almost 20 years since the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign finance scandal.  For most of us, that’s a long time.  For the ChiComs in the PRC, it’s the wink of an eye.

Assuming the McClatchy reporting is accurate, former Secretary of State and current presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had two documents classified TOP SECRET on her private email server in the basement of her Chappaqua, New York home.

The TOP SECRET classification means the original classifying authority certified that unauthorized disclosure of the information could reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security that the original classification authority is able to identify or describe.  TOP SECRET is the highest national security classification.

When she served as Secretary of State from 2009 until 2013, Hillary Clinton would have had original classification authority.  With that authority comes some expectations and obligations concerning the safeguarding of national security information. (more…)

Are citizens of Idaho being targeted for potential recruitment as spies by a foreign intelligence service?

Possibly.

Our OpenCdA post on July 11 titled OPM Hack – The Real Damage briefly explained the underlying significance of the information gleaned from hacked personnel records entrusted to the US Office of Personnel Management.  The hack has been attributed to the People’s Republic of China’s intelligence service, the Guoanbu.  The information obtained in the hack would have helped the Guoanbu assess US citizens’ vulnerability to be induced to commit espionage.

Now we learn from a July 30, 2015, NBC news story headlined Exclusive:  Secret NSA Map Shows China Cyber Attacks on U.S. Targets that Idaho was one of the 48 contiguous states confirmed to have been targeted over a five year period.  Although the July 30 article uses the term “cyber attacks”, a subsequent NBC news article on August 10, 2015, entitled China Reads Emails of Top U.S. Officials uses the same map.  Since the snitched emails came from the officials’ private and not government email accounts, we can conclude the emails contained personal, very private communications about individuals’ personal behaviors and transactions.   That very private information is useful in identifying factors which could be used by an intelligence service case officer to control his agent of espionage or influence.  As Theodore Roosevelt astutely observed, “If you’ve got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.”  So will sensitive information they may have.

For a reasonably informative, Hollywood-ized video portraying the ChiCom’s economic espionage efforts in the US, take a look at the FBI’s 36-minute YouTube production The Company Man – Protecting America’s Secrets.  It’s dramatized to make it entertaining, but it is still not a bad tutorial in how foreign intelligence services spot, assess, and attempt to recruit US citizens to provide economic intelligence.

It’s also worth reading the FBI’s July 23 web page entitled Economic Espionage – FBI Launches Nationwide Awareness Campaign.