It is/was not just the incompetent New York Times going for 33,000 virtual shiny objects, it was the Democratic Party which as well, which before the 2016 election had been educated by Silicon Valley Cyber Security experts that the attacks on Clinton for irresponsible cyber practices were lies. It was all disregarded. Clinton’s email were the shining objects which mad the NYT a 3rd ratenewspaper, competing for bad with the worst of Fleet Street. “Wen Ho Lee: my Country vs. Me” , all over again. Shameful! . Here is one of my letters afterwards, this one to the Local Representative Anna Eshoo (D-Palo Alto), from April of 1917. I also wrote letters before the election.
Hi Anna Eshoo: What have you been doing for the Democratic Party lately? The continuing war against the reputation of Hillary Clinton, and with it for the future the Democratic Party will never end. If she is continued to be tainted as unreliable, all Democrats are tainted. You’ll see: What about ….? Still we hear: What about Carter, hollowing out the military?
He did not! Carter, a career Naval Officer and Nuclear Engineer, picked by Admiral Hyman Rickover as CO for the crew which was getting the second nuclear submarine, the Seawolf, ready, when he resigned because his father had died and he felt that his brother Billy would not be capable of running their peanut farm. Just Google “military budgets since 1970” and you see who hollowed out the military: Nixon and Ford. During most of Carter’s presidency I was (first as a NATO Fellow, then as an NSF Fellow) on the Faculty of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and got a first class political military affairs education from my (mostly conservative, except for the more liberal Marine Corp Colonels) colleagues.
To jog your memory: Sam Tanenhaus, in Bloomberg News Time Machine, [http://bloom.bg/1Q6SMFZ ] describes very soberly that from 1974 on, when the Republican Hillary Rodham wrote the first draft of the Articles of Impeachment of Richard Nixon, working for the Republican Impeachment Inquiry Special Counsel John Doar, Republicans have relentlessly waged war on her. This is 39 years ago! Having been a Republican Goldwater Babe in her youth, she was now an apostate. More recent crusades are described by John Dean, Nixon’s Whitehouse Lawyer, in “The Outrageously False Charges of Perjury Against Hillary Clinton”, in VERDICT, [ http://bit.ly/2b9WdMl ].
FBI Director, and former Republican, James Comey on July 5, 2016 followed this unsubstantiated line of attack by calling the email arrangement of Democratic Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton, when she was Secretary of State 2009 to 2013, “extremely careless”. The substance of the claim was, (1) violations of cybersecurity, (2) violations of Department of State rules and (3) violations of the Classification Manual of the State Department.
The 250-page report published by the FBI in September of 2016 [I recommend Garrett Graff’s review of it in [http://politi.co/2dcsmro ] does not deal with the cybersecurity (topic (1)) on a technical level, except for throwing wild accusation around. In contrast, on topic (2) and (3) above the report shows convincingly there was and is no basis for the Director’s accusation. None.
So let’s deal with topic (1), Cyber Security. Has nobody noticed that the Clinton server was the only “Government-work-related” server with regular Internet access, which has never successfully been hacked? The Department of State, the NSA itself (Snowden), the FBI, you name it, they all have been breached.
There are simple reasons for it.
1. An internet connection becomes “secure” through the use of appropriate encryption, like Stanford’s Martin Hellman public key cryptography, the bane of the of the Intelligence services. There are no special secure “tubes” (ex-Senator Ted Stevens, I mean you!) you could guard. As “The Atlantic” surmised early on: Hillary Clinton (and her only two dedicated Cyber Advisors of many years with a top secret[ security clearance) "may have wanted to be in control of the encryption of their correspondence, ensuring that no third parties — whether commercial, hacker, or government — were able to snoop on them." Very safe, Mr. Comey! And ahead of your understanding. And it was all secret until the Republicans published the emails.
2. 97% of all hacking is estimated to proceed through human engineering. The more users and maintenance personal gets their hands on a server, the higher the probability for hacking. As Secretary Powell would say: that is a fact, and for AOL, where he stupidly had his private account, it is probably dozens or hundreds of vendors, contractors and sub-contractors, as it is for the Department of State itself, and even NSA. The Clinton State-of the-Art set-up, in contrast to Powell AOL account, was as save as it gets. It was never successfully hacked, while Powell’s account was.
3. As so often in life, it is difficult to decide if Comey’s grandstanding was outrageous lies, or deplorable incompetence. By August 2016 the FBI had 95% of all Clinton emails; and the 33,000 deleted (not missing) emails were Clinton’s to delete, says the National Archives. In fact, they remarked that 1250 of the emails submitted clearly concerned private matters.
Whatever it was, in his eagerness to implicate Clinton, Director Comey allowed Congressional Republicans to goad him into a violation of Title 18 of the U.S. Code, Section 1001, “False statements to Congress”, a felony [John Dean in http://bit.ly/2b9WdMl ]. You really should study this, and then like me you will eagerly wait for honest people again running the DoJ to persecute the 3 Republican Congressional Chairman crooks who have perjured them selves, as John Dean shows.
This has to be seen in context with Comey’s further reckless announcement of possibly 600,000 “new” emails found on an aide’s computer, on October 23, 2016, 11 days before the election, which threw the election to Trump. Even so, Hillary Clinton got 3Million more votes, and in total the popular difference between votes for Trump and votes not for Trump 9.5Million..