A retired senior State Department military advisor claims that Hillary Clinton’s “sloppy communications with her senior staff” when she was secretary of state may have compromised at least two counterterror operations.
Bill Johnson, who was the State Department’s political adviser to the special operations section of the U.S. Pacific Command, or PACOM, in 2010 and 2011, says secret plans to eliminate the leader of a Filipino Islamist separatist group as well as intercept Chinese-made weapons components being smuggled into Iraq, were repeatedly foiled.
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Johnson, who voted for Barack Obama in 2008, and now supports Bernie Sanders, says he had previously witnessed the lax communications habits of Clinton and her aides. In January 2010, Clinton was in Honolulu to give a speech on the administration’s “pivot” to Asia when news of the Haiti earthquake broke. She retreated to the secure communications facility in the basement of Pacific Command headquarters to make calls to various military officials and humanitarian groups to help organize a response to the catastrophe. But she also “needed to talk to her senior staff on Mahogany Row,” her seventh floor executive suite back in Washington, Johnson recalls.
The only problem: she did not readily have any secure telephone numbers or email addresses for her staff members because they were all using personal servers and phones. Security had prevented her travelling aides from bringing their personal cell phones into PACOM headquarters. They appealed to Johnson for an exception, but he refused, citing alarms and lockdowns that would be automatically triggered by any attempt to bring unauthorized signal-emitting units into the building.
Clinton came up with a work-around, Johnson says. “She had her aides go out, retrieve their phones and call the seventh floor from outside”—on open, unsecure lines, he says.
“My relationship with that group started downhill when I refused to let them bring phones and computers into my office [at the Special Operations Command],” Johnson recalls.
“It was really an eye opener to watch them stand outside using non-secure comms [communications] and then bring messages to the secretary so she could then conduct a secure [call] with the military” and the State Department.
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“For the most part, my work with Secretary Clinton was spent working on common goals,” he says. “She once told me that when she spoke of ‘smart power’ it was me she had in mind.”
Today, he says, “I wouldn't be so hard on her if she had simply admitted that what she did was wrong."
“But to insist she's done nothing wrong,” he adds, “is beyond the pale.”