For an army of ethically compromised defenders in politics and the media, Hillary Clinton’s email scandal is being framed as little more than a political attack aimed solely at derailing her presidential candidacy. Yet while each new revelation makes it harder to dismiss Hillary and Bill’s seemingly endless effort to monetize the Clinton Foundation by virtually any means possible, most of it is beside the point. What’s not beside the point is the reality that Hillary Clinton is a walking, talking national security disaster.
The Daily Beast’s John R. Schindler, who wonders if other officials in the Obama administration, including the president, will be burned by this scandal, notes that many counterintelligence officials now assume Clinton’s emails have been read by foreign intelligence officials in Russia and China because her server was “wholly unencrypted for months.” A Department of Defense counterintelligence official was so certain of that reality he insisted that anyone working for the Chinese or Russians would be fired if they couldn’t explain why “they didn’t have all of Hillary’s email.”
As if on cue, RadarOnline.com revealed a person claiming to be a computer specialist allegedly has 32,000 emails from Clinton’s private server, and is putting them up for sale for $500,000. “Promising to give the trove of the former Secretary of State’s emails to the highest bidder, the specialist is showing subject lines as proof of what appear to be legitimate messages,” the website states.
At least four of those emails contain subject lines with the word “Sid,” presumably referring to Clinton hatchet man Sidney Blumenthal, whose own AOL account was breached in 2013 by the Romanian hacker known as Guccifer. That hack also revealed Clinton’s @clintonemail.com email address. The website’s source warns that if the 32,000 emails enter the public domain, “not only is Hillary finished as a potential Presidential nominee, she could put our country’s national security at risk.”
She already has, and the National Review’s Stanley Kurtz reveals the unassailable logic behind that assertion. Even if Clinton was extraordinarily lucky, and the Russians and Chinese haven’t accessed some or all of her emails, it is nonetheless incumbent on the nation’s entire security community to behave as if they did. “Doesn’t that mean that we are now making massive changes to the sources and methods of our intelligence?” Kurtz asks. “Are we now withdrawing valuable agents? Are we trying to replace methods that cannot be easily replicated? Are we now forced to rebuild a good deal of our intelligence capabilities from the ground up? Are we not suffering tremendous intelligence damage right now, regardless of what foreign intelligence services did or did not manage to snatch from Hillary’s server—simply because we are forced to assume that they got it all?”
Considering the stakes—as well as the reality there have been massive hacks at Office of Personnel Management, networks of the Department of Defense (DOD), the IRS, the State Department (called the “worst ever”), and the White House, compromising the personal data of million of Americans—the answer is an unequivocal yes.
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