State Dept. intensifies email probe of Hillary Clinton’s former aides

The Trump administration is investigating the email records of dozens of current and former senior State Department officials who sent messages to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email, reviving a politically toxic matter that overshadowed the 2016 election, current and former officials said. As many as 130 officials have been contacted in recent weeks by State Department investigators — a list that includes senior officials who reported directly to Clinton as well as others in lower-level jobs whose emails were at some point relayed to her inbox, said current and former State Department officials. Those targeted were notified that emails they sent years ago have been retroactively classified and now constitute potential security violations, according to letters reviewed by The Washington Post.

They will be, if they haven’t already been , investigated.

Government employees often have personal emails that are sometimes used to email to staff in the government office. It’s a practice that is frowned down on but exists with the understanding that it should be minimal.

Some govt employees who telework will log on to their office govt computers from a home computer, and then send-receive government emails while connected to their govt computers from home. If they are using Skype and have a secure portal, they might also participate in video meetings from home or on the road.

Ms. Clinton should very well have used a telework arrangement to interact her govt email with all that State Dept staff. Why she didn’t do this is a disturbing question and was never raised up in committee.

I get disgusted at the utter incompetence of govt staff and officials when it comes to computers or when investigating computer related malfeasance and abuse. Even govt IT support people can be short in grey matter when it comes to sophisticated hacks and security breaches. There seems to be a bit of laissez-faire that has entered govt culture when it comes to computers.

The central idea is that all govt emails are govt property and are to be contained within the govt network. This is true whether classified or unclassified.

Personal emails sometimes are used but it seems disturbing that so many would be used by a Secretary of State. There is no reason why a working telelink to an office computer wasn’t established. The security of such a link is no less than a personal computer sending-receiving emails and documents to govt email addresses. Classified electronic correspondence should never be conducted over such links. Special secure links exist for this category.

Classified emails would need to be handled offsite by a secure VPN and then only under very special circumstances. Highly classified comms can go through military satellites that frequency hop to break up hacker-intruders.

So if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and sounds like a duck, it’s pretty sure to be a darn duck. Ms. Clinton’s email arrangement looks nefarious with high probability. It’s pretty darn sure that it was used for illegal activity but Ms. Clinton understands plausible deniability better than most so even if investigators are looking at ALL her emails, they need to crack the codes she would be using to hide her corruption.

As far as her claims that 33,000 deleted emails were simply birthday and wedding greetings, and messages, or baby pictures etc. No, that’s BS. And she looks at it like it’s all a game as if taunting the committee (Gowdy) “Ha Ha! Catch me if you can!”

An honest govt official would have taken personal emails and segregated them ‘under camera’ to put them on a sealed disk and ask to protect the privacy of the private emails and the private individuals in them. The Gowdy committee I am sure would have granted that and respected the request. Or the sealed disk could have been made viewable in a SCIF. Once a forensic review was complete, the sealed disk could be released back to the official.

The Gowdy committee to my knowledge never even asked about any of the above. And when you look at all the committee members and the staff assistants sitting behind them, we see a lot of newbie layers or interns but a void of computer savvy persons. Where were they?

Back in the 1980s I worked alongside some very high level persons, some at flag rank in the military. For them to sit down and use a computer such as a data general work terminal was a big no-no because it was beneath them. It was for secretaries running word perfect at these work terminals. The high level officials would insist on having secretaries do all that sort of thing. The image of a Director or Colonel typing away at a keyboard, nope!

Today it’s different but they are still dumb as rocks when it comes to computer hacks. They rely on IT guys who often work from home and are gifted with the art of bullsh__ when it comes to making crap up in response to a high ranking govt official inquiry who understands practically nothing.

Back in the day, such computer guys had it easy, when the network went down and phone calls flooded in, their response was easy “20 minutes!” and three hours later “20 minutes!” again and so on. Today a network monkey can BS their way to make it look like they know what’s up such as for example “the system update performed by Microsoft last night threw out current drivers and replaced then with old drivers and we are having to go back and put in the newer drivers. We’ve told the Microsoft contractor to not do this but this contractor is new” yada yada yada. Government culture is all about blaming someone else. Never fall under a ring of accountability lest you have a lot of puritanical lifers come out of the woodwork and point fingers at you as if you should be taken to the gallows that very minute.

The whole government could use a major reform in the usage of computers with strict controls on all of its interfaces. There are now offices of cyber security and I believe Rudy is heading up the national office of that. But my sense is they still have a long ways to go but I could be wrong. But I’m not wrong. My recent observations are less than a year old. The government has trouble getting real computer talent. They up the salary levels which only attracts the existing lifers to fill the created higher paying slots. So they stay dumb because of layers of sludge impeding new talent from getting in.

In general, when in government culture, you do not want to be a star among the sludge of governmental dumb-dom. If you are slotted to be a star, you need to be brought in from the outside and attached as a quasi political appointee.

The solution that is defaulted to is to hire an outside contractor that can pay for the talent and not rub lifers the wrong way. But what happens is lifers retire and are hired by companies getting the IT contracts.

If it was up to me, I would have launched a blitzkrieg on Ms. Clinton, so fast her lawyers wouldn’t have time to stop this bull in her china shop until I had the material. Then I would have played her game with the “oh, so sorry, we just didn’t know. We returned the material and reprimanded our staff to follow protocols in the future” blah blah. Then I would have a crack team who had been gathered ahead of the attack to pour over all the material 24/7 with no breaks except for potty, eat your sandwich while at the screen and get a tier one report in 48 hours. Simultaneously I would have called Supermonkey about some chess moves I was thinking of that Ms. Clinton, oh heh heh did I say that? And Supermonkey would come back to me and tell of a move made to block the current gambit, and then I would hear scuttlebutt that Ms. Clinton’s server dude was having problems etc. What a coincidence. Yeah, two can play that game.

There’s a danger to the soul when combating internal government malfeasance and crime. The danger is in becoming like them. You just have to pray and rely on a higher power to guide your battles.

If it was up to me half the federal bureaucracy would be gone, out pounding the pavement with updated resumes looking for real work. This might be viewed a mean but it’s not. It’s actually doing them a favor. Getting our govt culture into a real job setting can save their souls.

The reason I belabor all the above is to give a sense of why it’’s not so easy to prosecute the corruption in government. When one puts the pedal to the metal, often the government engine just stalls or at worst blows up at you.

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