Hillary Is a National Security Risk
To assess just how damaging a new State Department Inspector General’s report on Hillary Clinton’s email practices is to her political career, one need only take note of the fact that the former secretary of state has disappeared. When trouble arises, Clinton predictably scurries back into her bunker and allows the news cycle to sort itself out — presuming perhaps that the unfocused political media will tire of the story faster if she does not provide them with any new material to parse. That is not an invalid operating theory for dealing with an ADD-afflicted press. 16 months into this scandal however, Clinton should know by now that this story isn’t going away. Further, the IG’s report is objectively damning beyond its trite political value. The report casts doubt on the notion that Hillary Clinton can serve as an unprejudiced commander-in-chief of the armed forces. In fact, to swear Clinton into the presidency may seriously jeopardize American national security.
The IG’s report indicates clearly that, when it comes to the controversy surrounding her “homebrew” email server, Clinton is compulsively mendacious. The Washington Post’s fact-checker Glenn Kessler took a victory lap after the release of the report, noting that all ten of his department’s checks on Clinton’s claims regarding her server proved true. “[I]t appears Clinton often used highly technical language to obscure the salient fact that her private email setup was highly unusual and flouted existing regulations,” Kessler wrote.
The standard Clintonian methods for defusing a budding scandal – dueling claims that fresh revelations regarding the former first family’s behavior are “old news” and that those who dare make notice of this “old news” are partisan cranks with an ax to grind – were blunted by the IG’s report, as was the political contention from Team Clinton that the conduct of state business on an insecure email server had ample precedent. Although the report acknowledges that records keeping practices have occasionally been substandard under past secretaries of state, Clinton remains the first and only secretary to use a personal email exclusively to conduct both public and private business. Yes, that’s right: there were business-related emails in Clinton’s server, which she did not hand over to the State Department but which investigators obtained through other means.
This flagrant disregard for the law is disturbing, and Clinton’s dissimulations are unconscionable. What may be the most disturbing, though, is the former secretary of state’s utter contempt for practices designed to keep American national security secrets from becoming public. In choosing this course, she has compromised herself and her office. It is no longer certain that she can serve as President of the United States without exposing American national interests to an unacceptable level of risk.
“Notification is required when a user suspects comprise of, among other things, a personally owned device containing personally identifiable information,” the IG’s report revealed. The investigation turned up “no evidence” that either Clinton or her staff ever alerted the State Department to a possible breach. Possible breaches were, however, recorded. The report cites a January 2011 incident in which an aide to Bill Clinton warned a counterpart working for Hillary Clinton that the server had been temporarily shut down due to the fear that “someone was trying to hack us.” There was no reassessment of Clinton’s communication system after this or other similar incidents (including at least one Russian-linked “phishing” expedition), and the server was simply reactivated.
There’s a reason why top American officials are shielded from cyber hackers who may be working for sophisticated information warfare shops operated by foreign intelligence services. As a memo Clinton received in March of 2011 from the Assistant Secretary for Diplomatic Security warned, a “dramatic increase” in attempted hacks targeting personal and private email services used by State Department officials may be designed to enhance the “technical surveillance” capabilities of foreign actors or even to “blackmail” officials.
Hillary Clinton insists that none of her communications were hacked, but she provides no evidence beyond her dubious assertions to back that claim up. Her contention amounts to little more than a test of the faithful. In reality, it’s highly unlikely that her email server was not infiltrated by foreign actors. Even the State Department is unable to corroborate the former secretary’s claim. “We do know that there were hack attempts or that — but none of them were successful,” asserted State Department Spokesman Mark Tonner. When informed by a reporter that the IG’s report cannot confirm that no hacking attempt was successful, Toner paused for an agonizing four seconds before confessing that he “misspoke.”
“In my opinion, there is a 100 percent chance that all emails sent and received by her, including all the electronic correspondence stored on her server in her Chappaqua residence, were targeted and collected by the Russian equivalent of NSA,” former CIA case officer Jason Matthews, an expert in Russian intelligence, told the AP. Clinton’s personal-issue Blackberry device also provided foreign intelligence services a window into her email account when she used the device in places like Vietnam, Brazil, and South Korea. In Vietnam, in particular, experts believe her use of a device not hardened by State Department security on telecommunications systems owned and operated by Hanoi likely offered Chinese intelligence services an open door to access Clinton’s email account.
Last year, Beijing compromised the personal data and social security numbers of every person in America who ever worked for the government or accessed a federal facility by hacking the Office of Personnel Management. It’s unlikely that the Chinese hackers found the modest safeguards securing Clinton’s server to be anything more than a nuisance.
Clinton’s secretive email practices betray a level of obsessive paranoia that has typified her entire career in politics. As president, Clinton would not be bound by law. She would also perceive her political enemies to be a more potent threat to her presidency than they represent, and the power and authority of the Oval Office would prove a seductive instrument for neutralizing them. Perhaps more chillingly, there is a high likelihood that foreign intelligence services have compromised Hillary Clinton. We do not know what they know, and she may no longer be at liberty to act in America’s best interests. That alone should preclude Clinton from serving as the commander of the most powerful military force on earth, one responsible for maintaining global peace, security, and navigation rights. In 2016, however, all bets are off.
Hillary Is a National Security Risk
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Russia, ‘Collusion,’ and Trump’s Hillary Problem
Can the president ever be objectively exonerated?
When it comes to the accusation that Donald Trump campaign operatives cooperated with Russian officials in the 2016 race, the president’s defenders have recently found themselves in a new position: on offense.
The implosion and retraction of a sloppy CNN story that alleged ties between a Trump campaign operative and a Russian investment firm put a veneer of doubt onto a whole catalog of related insinuations. Democrats and center-left pundits have begun to wonder aloud whether the Russian “collusion” narrative is a distraction from the necessary work of crafting a liberal governing agenda. These days, reporting on the concurrent congressional and Justice Department investigations into the Trump-Russian Nexus focuses more on the prospect that Donald Trump obstructed justice—not that he undermined American sovereignty. The pro-Trump phalanx is strutting in vindication over the crumbling of the “Russian collusion myth,” and who could blame them? Unambiguously good news for Trump on the Russian front has been in short supply.
A dispatch in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday, however, suggests that the president’s supporters celebrated the demise of the collusion narrative prematurely. Investigators probing the claim that Trump operatives worked with Russian officials in any capacity have long sought a link—perhaps a third-party intermediary or the like—who could connect Russian government-backed hackers to the president’s campaign. The Journal’s Shane Harris may have found it.
His report alleges that longtime Republican operative Peter Smith, who passed away this year at the age of 81, assembled a team with the mission of acquiring communications that might have been stolen from Hillary Clinton’s private email server. Smith’s targets were the 33,000 emails Clinton dubbed personal in nature that were summarily deleted from her server before it was handed over to the FBI—the same missing emails Trump himself theatrically asked Russian hackers to dig up and reveal to the public on the campaign trail. “We knew the people who had these were probably around the Russian government,” Smith told the Journal before his death. In this effort, Smith presented himself as a conduit to General Mike Flynn, who was at the time an advisor to Donald Trump’s campaign and would later become his national security advisor.
The story is thoroughly sourced. The Journal directly reviewed the emails described. The report cites investigators directly involved in the probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election and who confirm through Russian sources efforts made to secure emails from Clinton’s private server. It implicates both Flynn and his son, who was also briefly employed by the Trump transition team. These are serious charges. Even if “collusion with a hostile foreign power” is still too great a leap, this report alleges an effort to leverage illicit material purloined from a Cabinet-level official to advance Donald Trump’s political prospects.
For now, though, President Trump’s problem isn’t legal but political. His struggles are not dissimilar from those that once plagued Hillary Clinton. The former secretary of state labored through the 2016 campaign year with a cloud of mistrust hanging over her head. Her paranoid conduct as secretary of state ensured that there was no way to definitively disprove the notion that she imperiled American national security in service to her sense of personal “convenience.” Despite the FBI’s qualified exculpation, Clinton never regained the public trust.
Trump, too, is now struggling to govern with a cloud over his administration. The notion that the Trump campaign benefited incidentally from Russian intervention in the political process is widely accepted, with Trump’s true believers representing the exception to the rule. The claim that the Trump campaign actively colluded with Moscow or its representatives to secure electoral advantage has been harder to prove. The Trump campaign’s links to disreputable individuals, many of whom cultivated conspicuous ties to the Kremlin, also renders that charge unfalsifiable.
Stories like the Journal’s latest bombshell only fuel the public’s suspicions. Even if the special counsel investigation eventually exonerates Trump, the notion that the president worked with Russia to undermine the American political process will remain an article of faith for many—if the counsel’s office makes such a determination. While Robert Mueller’s probe is underway, prudent Americans are well-advised to reserve judgment.
Those who are confident that either Trump colluded with Moscow or is entirely innocent of that charge have let their wish be father to the thought. For now, there are only questions, but those questions sap the Trump administration of authority and legitimacy. More disturbingly for the administration, those questions may never be answered definitively enough to make the “collusion” narrative disappear. As such, the president may never be able to climb out from under the veil of suspicion engulfing his administration.
Repealing and Replacing…the Media?
Podcast: Media, health care, and the art of misdirection.
On the second of this week’s podcasts, the COMMENTARY crew is scattered far afield—I’m in Vegas, baby; Noah Rothman is at home in Jersey; and Abe Greenwald is in our offices in New York. Perhaps our distance accounts for a greater degree of disagreement and even disgruntlement as we consider the meaning of the Trump war on the media and its convenient crescendo during a moment in which it looks like the GOP hopes of scoring a health-care reform are in the process of crashing and burning. Give a listen.
Don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes.
The War on CNN: We’ve Seen This Movie Before
When the Trump era is over, media will still be here.
The White House is preparing for war. Despite a decisive electoral victory and with majorities in both chambers of Congress, the president is encountering unforeseen obstacles in the effort to enact his agenda. The president’s critics in the press are growing more brazen and, thus, irritating. Media is a soft target—far softer than Congress—so that’s where Donald Trump’s energy has to go if only to keep the faith of the true believers. We’ve seen this movie before. We know how it ends.
Trump and his White House are devoting an inordinate amount of attention to CNN. The network gave the president an opportunity to make a valuable political point this week when it published an erroneous story alleging that a Trump campaign official had ties to a Russian state-run investment firm. The story was retracted entirely, and the editors and reporters responsible for it resigned. Any savvy political operation would not pass up the chance to use the affair not only to discredit an institution they regard as hostile but to cast doubt the other allegations involving the Trump campaign team and Russia.
The zeal with which the White House’s political allies threw themselves into this effort on the president’s behalf was, however, remarkable. The White House communications shop advised the public to seek out a James O’Keefe sting video featuring a CNN producer and a contributor appearing to question the network’s integrity. The president personally disseminated that video on his social-media accounts while hammering away at the network’s credibility.
Trump’s allies in media have followed his lead. Some have asked earnest questions about the ethics of CNN’s editorial decisions. Others have questioned the network’s viability in the current political environment. Still others simply reveled in the adversity with which this institution is contending.
“Could Donald Trump be the end of CNN?” asked radio host Rush Limbaugh. “CNN being treated this way is exactly what Trump voters supported and are applauding.” According to a source who attended a closed-door fundraiser on Wednesday night, the president allegedly basked in the beating this cable news network was taking—and all to the “wild” celebrations of the Republican donors in attendance.
The enthusiasm with which the Trump fan base has taken to the smoking out of wreckers and saboteurs at a cable news network seems directly proportional to the trouble in which Donald Trump’s legislative agenda finds itself. The effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act is stalled. The legislative product that has emerged in the Senate is deeply unpopular, as is Trump’s plan for a “wall” along the border with Mexico. Meanwhile, support for free trade is on the rise. That which the president can do with a pen stroke (and over the objections of the courts) has been done. Save for appointment power to the judiciary, those accomplishments are ephemeral. His successor can undo them. Trump needs an uncooperative Congress to secure lasting achievements.
So what is a political operation to do? To allow the troops to dwell on these unmet promises would be dispiriting. The president certainly can’t allow his allies to go too hard after the GOP in Congress. That’s counterproductive. The Democrats are a spent force unworthy of the energies Trump supporters would expend in attacking their credibility. Who else is left but “media” and, specifically, one particularly vexing network?
This is precisely the trajectory the early Obama administration followed when facing similar circumstances. At the beginning of 2009, Barack Obama was struggling with the unanticipated negative consequences of large congressional majorities: ideological heterogeneity. Emergency measures to stanch the bleeding resulting from the financial crisis were easily passed, but sweeping financial regulatory reform was stalled. By June of Obama’s first year in office, Democrats in the Senate were missing their own deadlines on health-care reform. The House wouldn’t produce its first draft bill for another month. When they did, it would be to the consternation of fiscally and socially conservative Democrats who would ensure it was broadly amended. For Democrats who anticipated a glorious new progressive age, the early months of the Obama administration were an ice water bath.
It’s not coincidental that during this period the Obama White House also went to war with a media outlet: the Fox News Channel. By the autumn of 2009, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel was attacking Fox as “not a news organization.” Anita Dunn, then White House communications director, defended the attacks on the network by claiming it was functionally an “arm of the Republican Party.” In early 2010, even the president himself joined the chorus. He told Rolling Stone that Fox represented a return to the era of yellow journalism and represented a “destructive” point of view. This discrediting effort crossed a line when the White House tried to withhold access to a White House advisor from Fox and only Fox. The news-media industry rallied to the network’s defense. The administration backed down. Eventually, the warring parties declared a truce.
Does the White House retreat to attacks on media in the face of political diversity as a conscious distraction? That’s surely part of the calculation. For average voters—both progressive Democrats in 2009 and populist Republicans in 2017—that strategy is unrealistically Machiavellian. More likely, they believed that their political opposition would accept electoral defeat as they had accepted victory. The fact that their adversaries didn’t dry up and blow away with the winds of change is aggravating. That condition is made more bothersome by the fact that, for politically oriented radio and television networks, catering to a sitting president’s opposition is a far more rewarding business model.
Far from celebrating the Trump administration’s war on CNN, the president’s sincerest supporters should consider it a warning sign. When the Trump administration is gone, media will still be here. If the Trump era is remembered for anything, it won’t be how many of the president’s fans yelled at the television.
A Failed State on Our Doorstep
The Syria next door.
The Western Hemisphere reached a milestone this week. According to United Nations observers, Colombia’s leftist rebel militia FARC has entirely disarmed. When it comes to monitoring rogue actors, the UN’s representatives have a spotty track record, but even FARC’s leaders are endorsing the group’s transition away from violence. After a half-century of war, Latin America’s longest-running insurgency is over. Unfortunately, celebrations must be tempered by the sobering developments on the other side of the Colombian border. There the violence surging, the military is teetering, and the political class is nearing the point of irreversible illegitimacy. The prospect of Venezuela collapsing in on itself looms dreadfully large.
The crisis in Venezuela again made its way into international headlines following a daring attack on the country’s Supreme Court. On Tuesday, an elite police officer-turned-actor allegedly commandeered a helicopter and flew it over the nation’s high court, dropping live grenades on the building from overhead. No one was injured in the attack, but the rogue cop posted a confession on social media expressing the hope that his actions would stir the country to overthrow President Nicolas Maduro’s government.
It worked, in a way. Maduro took the daring and potentially galvanizing raid quite seriously. He immediately appeared on state television to denounce the assault, mobilized the military, and implied that Washington D.C. was behind the incursion. Accordingly, the world has temporarily forgotten to forget about the crisis in Venezuela. That condition seems unlikely to last.
This current bloody chapter in Venezuelan history began on March 29, the country’s Supreme Court (an institution packed with Maduro loyalists) stripped the country’s legislature (an institution dominated by the opposition) of its authority. The veritable coup attempt was short-lived; the Latin American world all but broke off relations with Caracas until the high court reversed itself. But the fuse had been lit. The assault on Venezuelan sovereignty set off a display of violent and ongoing demonstrations against Maduro, his predecessor Hugo Chavez, and the Bolivarian Revolution.
The current spasm of violence against the Venezuelan regime by its oppressed peoples long ago became bloodier than earlier outbursts of anti-government unrest. The death toll resulting from organized violence in Venezuela surged to more than 62 dead at the beginning of June—among them a 37-year-old judge who was involved in the unorthodox conviction and sentencing of one of Venezuela’s most well-known political prisoners, Leopoldo Lopez.
The Maduro government’s efforts to undermine the elected opposition in the National Assembly have also failed to subside. Despite this unrest, the Maduro government has forged ahead with a plan to create an alternative Congress that would render the National Assembly obsolete. The Venezuelan president plans to put a new constitution to the public in a July plebiscite, and he has shaken up his cabinet and military to ensure the new government is filled with as many key loyalists as possible.
The forthcoming referendum is a mere formality. The opposition is boycotting the upcoming election. Even former Maduro loyalist and Venezuela’s chief prosecutor under Chavez, Luisa Ortega, denounced the vote as an attack on the fundamental pillars of Venezuelan democracy. The new government will be illegitimate, ensuring that the opposition and the violence continue.
As Maduro continues to shed the confidence of Venezuelan power brokers, the talk of a military coup has grown louder and louder. The head of a group of exiled Venezuelan officers, former National Guard Lieutenant Jose Colina, told The Telegraph that the regime’s support rests on the shoulders of a handful of politically loyal army officers. The unreliable ones are being sent to the provinces or are being disposed of in other, grislier ways. “The government is purging the armed forces as it anticipates having to use the army to repress growing street protests,” said retired Admiral Ivan Carruto.
While there are no outward signs of dissent against the government, Reuters revealed that recruiting for the military and police is becoming more difficult. The Telegraph reported that, according to exiled sources, some 5,000 officers have left the Venezuelan army and could make up the backbone of paramilitary forces in the event of a putsch. The stability of government is, however, due entirely to the fact that most of the army remains loyal to it. A coup attempt with sufficient support could fail. If it did, it would likely result in a civil war.
The prospect of a protracted Syrian-style conflict in the Americas seems an event for which policymakers in the United States are ill-prepared. Such a scenario would mean the implosion of a country rich with oil resources, a state flush with government-backed narcotics traffickers, money, and weapons. It could spark a refugee crisis similar to that which has cast the Middle East and North Africa into disorder and strengthened the rise of reactionary elements inside Europe. It would be a conflict that would threaten American national security and may necessitate and armed American response.
The trajectory Venezuela is following in 2017 is eerily similar to the path Syria took in 2011. It would behoove the United Nations, the Organization of American States, and the United States, in particular, to begin preparing the public for the prospect of necessary contingency operations. The worst case scenario is now pretty easy to envision.
Everyone for Themselves!
A party in a Cold War with itself.
As congressional Republicans struggle to cobble together a bill to replace ObamaCare, their party’s leader has been less than helpful. More often than not, in fact, the president’s comments seem calibrated to provide him with the maximum political benefit even if they undermine the Republican effort to repeal and replace Barack Obama’s health-care reform law. Well, turnabout is fair play. If Republicans were once reluctant to undermine the president by name and on the record, they are shedding their inhibitions.
As if the process of reshaping the nation’s sprawling health-care sector wasn’t hard enough, Donald Trump has spent his presidency making himself an obstacle to conservative reform. He undercut the House GOP’s efforts by calling the draft they produced at the cost of much political capital and factional comity “mean.” He insisted that the bill needed “more heart,” by which he said he meant “more money.”
The president may be a political novice, but he’s a savvy operator. Trump seems to have determined that it was in his best interests to let congressional Republicans pilot the ship while criticizing their driving from the backseat.
Trump’s latest display of apparent disinterest in the GOP’s central governing plank occurred yesterday, ironically, in a setting designed to communicate to Republicans just how plugged into the process he was. “We’re getting very close, but for the country, we have to have health care, and it can’t be ObamaCare, which is melting down,” Trump told the Senate Republican conference at a White House summit on the reform process. “This will be great if we get it done. And, if we don’t get it done, it’s just going to be something that we’re not going to like. And that’s okay, and I understand that.”
There’s a lot to unpack in that contradictory cascade of raw inner monologue. Even if the president thought he was giving the troops a rousing pep talk, observers came to the precise opposite interpretation. It’s hard to avoid concluding from this word cloud that the president is entertaining the prospect of not just the Senate bill failing but the entire repeal-and-replace effort.
For Republicans, that’s an unacceptable outcome. Not only does the party have to make good on eight years of previous promises to their voters, but the party’s entire legislative agenda hinges on freeing up billions of dollars currently dedicated to ObamaCare provisions.
At some point, someone had to have informed the president that his agenda and, thus, his presidency rested on this fulcrum. It’s hard to explain his actions other than to attribute them to a self-preservation instinct. Well, two can play at that game.
In a recent Washington Post dispatch, Senator Susan Collins offered a subtle but scathing attack on the president’s competence. “This president is the first president in our history who has neither political nor military experience, and thus it has been a challenge to him to learn how to interact with Congress and learn how to push his agenda better,” she said. When asked, Republicans ranging from Lindsey Graham to Darrell Issa to Carlos Curbelo all dismissed the idea that the president could exact retribution against lawmakers who crossed him.
“In private conversations on Capitol Hill, Trump is often not taken seriously,” the Post revealed. “They are quick to point out how little command he demonstrates of policy. And they have come to regard some of his threats as empty, concluding that crossing the president poses little danger.”
“It is frustrating to deal with a WH that is not 100 percent accurate,” Senator Dean Heller told a caller into his Tuesday night tele-town hall. An early opponent of the Senate GOP’s draft health care bill, Heller drew friendly fire from a pro-Trump outside group that began targeting his home-state support in negative ads. Those ads were mysteriously pulled on Tuesday following the revelation that the Nevada senator was ready to go back to the negotiating table on health care, but Heller’s declarations of no-confidence in the president have not abated.
According to two Republicans who spoke to the New York Times, those attacks on Heller were dubbed “beyond stupid” and unhelpful by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in a phone call to White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus. The Majority Leader is similarly disinclined to prop up the president. “When asked by reporters clustered on the blacktop outside the West Wing if Mr. Trump had command of the details of the negotiations, Mr. McConnell ignored the question and smiled blandly,” the Times reported.
This is what a party operating without conventional leadership looks like. It is the responsibility of any president to manage competing interests within and outside his governing coalition. Donald Trump appears to have prioritized his own interests and his own position over even those of his allies. Trump is not owed the loyalty of his fellow Republicans in Congress. To the extent Trump enjoyed a honeymoon, it’s over. The grace period has expired. If the GOP doesn’t start rowing in the same direction and soon, the New Republican Era will be remembered only for its dysfunction and transience.