In a few days a “proud and privileged” candidate for President of the United States will try to work her way through the landmines of the Benghazi Committee. The Democrats, thanks to Republican McCarthy, have been hammering away at the political aspect of the Benghazi Commission to try and convince the American public there is nothing there.
The culture at the State Department under Hillary shows that those in the upper echelons of the State Department ignored the regulations and saw no reason to attend the departments mandatory “cyber security awareness training”.
They were not concerned with properly handling national security issues, perhaps because they knew the personal server that the head of the State Department, namely Hillary Clinton was not following the regulations, and that culture of ignoring the regulation spread throughout the State Department. Ignoring the security protocols in the State Department was intentional. The regulations promulgated in NIST Publication 800,used for all government agencies, including the military was ignored.
The Progressives will continue to say there is nothing there, and gloss over any law breaking and the Department of Justice will absolve Hillary of any wrongdoing after the FBI finishes the investigation. It will not matter what they FBI finds, it will be swept under the rug, and the American citizen will lose interest. Progressives will continue to say that this is a political attack and not an effort to send money to the Clinton Foundation.
There are questions that must be answered. Why was Bryan Pagliano hired from within the State Department to perform maintenance and repairs on a “rogue” server that the State Department did not know about? There is no explanation for hiring a State Department IT adviser who had no security clearance. He had worked on the Clinton campaign, but did not have the degree of expertise needed to ensure the server was secure. And why have State Department officials not explained what they knew about the Clinton server or showed any concern about its use.
In the words of Mark Toner, a State Department spokesman “ That’s not our role in this process to really answer that question publicly” This is the same State Department that withheld records for communications from Mills and Abedin because they were not included in the original FOIA, and would be submitted to the commission in the future.
The FBI has found thousands of e-mails supposedly deleted and considered personal. The DOJ, which is overseeing the investigation refuses to even admit there is an investigation. The position of Inspector General of the State Department, who may have caught these crimes, was not filled by Obama until after Hillary’s term as Secretary of State in September 2013 by Steven Linick. Howard W. Geisel, the “acting” IG issued audits showing the challenges and weaknesses within the Information Resource Management Bureau.
But there was some much to be done, so many problems, Hillary said she really didn’t think about what e-mail to use. The head of the State Department didn’t take the time to think about national security? The State Department IT department did not even know of the server, so how could they have approved it before then?
The criminal investigation by the FBI of Hillary Clinton and what she knew about Benghazi is ongoing. The questions that are being asked are important to understand the outcome of the Benghazi debacle.
Some of these questions are:
Why were numerous requests for extra security in Benghazi ignored and denied?
Why were answers to the reason for the attack at the Benghazi compound tied to a video no one saw?
How does a Secretary of State not recognize what a Top Secret or classified e-mail looks like? Whether marked or not, or even if classification markings are removed, I would think a Secretary of State would have the experience to know what a classified message would be.
Spy satellite e-mails, discussions with foreign officials, troop movements and allocations are all “born” top secret with or without markings. With all her time spent in government, they want us to believe Hillary is ignorant of what is classified and what is not? The e-mails evidently contained classified information, because when they were turned over to the Benghazi commission they were heavily redacted and the State Department cited national security as the reason for the redactions.
Why did Hillary’s State Department staff initially refuse to turn over any documents and when finally confronted about the documents, turned over documents with large gaps in time?
The Nixon tapes were missing 18 minutes, Hillary has destroyed and lost who knows how many e-mails, and the progressives want to give her pass.
It is telling the Intelligence agencies are now operating under the premise that China and Russia have the e-mails because her server was unencrypted for months. This makes Hillary and the others involved in the mismanagement of security protocols a national security disaster that may take decades to recover. She has effectively put human assets at risk, causing massive changes to the intelligence community in methods to collect intelligence.
At a press conference in March, Hillary insisted she was well aware of classification requirements, and now claims what she sent and received was not marked classified, or even top secret. It has already been proven that Hillary wrote and sent at least six e-mails containing classified information from her personal server.
In 2009 the update of the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations required records be kept of all messages sent and received on a personal computer. Clinton sent a memo with her signature warning department employees to avoid conducting official business from personal e-mails. It is evident that Hillary did not follow her own advice.
No one has asked why Hillary thought she needed a “private” server. Perhaps a better description would be a “secret” server. The point may have been to keep it hidden from the officials whose oversight includes classification of material. Foreign information is routinely classified because of the damage that it can cause to national security if leaked. It is known that Hillary personally gave her personal e-mail to George Mitchell, the Middle East envoy at the time.
A former Defense Intelligence Agency Director, Gen, Michael T, Flynn feels that Hillary’s security clearance should be Immediately suspended. He called the use of a private server for national security business was “unprecedented” and caused untold damage to national security.
by John Velisek USN (Ret.)
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