May 23, 2016
A group of U.S. intelligence
veterans is calling on President Obama to expedite the FBI review of former
Secretary of State Clinton’s alleged email security violations so the public
can assess this issue in a timely fashion.
MEMORANDUM FOR: The President
FROM: Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity
SUBJECT: Those “Damn Emails” –
“Really a Concern”
Introduction
Last Wednesday Robert Gates,
CIA Director under President Bush-41 and Defense Secretary under President
Bush-43, publicly commented that Secretary Hillary Clinton’s “whole email thing
… is really a concern in terms of her judgment,” adding, “I don’t know what
originally prompted her to think that was a good idea.”
What originally prompted her
does not matter. As your Secretary of State and your subordinate, she willfully
violated laws designed to protect classified information from unauthorized
disclosure. It may be somewhat difficult for those not as immersed in national
security matters as we have been to appreciate the seriousness of the offense,
including the harm done in compromising some of the most sensitive U.S.
programs and activities. This is why we write.
Pundits and others are playing
down the harm. A charitable interpretation is that they have no way to gauge
what it means to expose so much to so many. We do know, and our overriding
concern is to protect the national security of our country from further harm.
It would be a huge help toward this end, if you would order Attorney General
Loretta Lynch to instruct the FBI to stop slow-walking the email investigation
and release its findings promptly.
If you choose, instead, to
give precedence to politics over national security, the
American people will be deprived of timely appreciation of the gravity of
the harm done; national security officials who do follow the rules will be
scandalized; FBI investigators will conclude that that their job is more
political than professional; and the noxious impression will grow that powerful
people cannot be held accountable when they break the law. Worse: if the
results of the FBI investigation remain under lock and key, dangerous pressures
are likely to be exerted on the most senior U.S. officials by those who have
the key – as we explain below.
* * *
We the undersigned Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) have spent 400 years working with
classified information – up to and including TOP SECRET, Codeword, and Special
Access Programs (SAP). Given that experience, we believe that much of the
commentary on the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton email controversy
has been misplaced, focusing on extraneous issues having little or nothing to
do with the overriding imperative to protect classified information.
As intelligence, military, and
foreign service professionals, we are highly aware not only of that compelling
need, but also of the accompanying necessity to hold accountable those whose
actions compromise – whether for reasons of convenience or espionage –
sensitive operations, programs and persons. In addition, we know that
successful mutual cooperation with foreign intelligence services depends
largely on what they see as our ability to keep secrets secret.
Background
Last August, Secretary Clinton
handed over her private email server to the FBI, five months after she
acknowledged she had used it for work-related emails as Secretary of State. She
admitted to having deleted about 31,000 emails she described as personal. Media
reports last fall, however, indicated that the FBI was able to recover the
personal emails, and was reviewing them, as well as the 30,000 others she had
described as work-related.
In January, the Department of
State announced that, of the 30,000 work-related emails, at least 1,340
contained classified material. The Department retroactively classified 22 of
those TOP SECRET and prevented their release. Among the 22 were some that,
according to media reports, included information on highly sensitive Special
Access Programs (SAP).
The White House has said it
will do nothing to impede the FBI investigation and possible filing of charges
against Clinton, if the facts should warrant that kind of action. Inasmuch as
the outcome of the investigation is bound to have major political consequences,
such White House assurances stretch credulity.
By all indications, the FBI is
slow-walking the investigation and mainstream media are soft-pedaling the
issue. As things now stand, most Americans remain unaware of the import of this
industrial-scale compromise of very sensitive national security information in
Secretary Clinton’s emails.
Our concern mounted in January
when the Inspector General of the intelligence community wrote to the chairs of
the congressional intelligence committees that he had received from one of the
intelligence agencies two “sworn declarations” asserting that Secretary
Clinton’s emails contained not only CONFIDENTIAL and SECRET information, but
also information at the TOP SECRET/SAP level.
In 2009, you signed an
Executive Order regarding SAP (Special Access Programs), so we assume you were
briefed on their extremely high sensitivity and the consequent need to sharply
limit the number of people allowed to be “read-in” on them. The mishandling of
SAP information can neutralize intelligence programs costing billions of
dollars, wreck liaison relationships assiduously cultivated for decades, and
get a lot of people killed.
‘It Wasn’t That Bad’
All those directly or
peripherally involved in the
investigation of the Clinton email issue know very well that it could have
a direct impact on who is likely to become the next President of the United
States, and they will be making decisions with that reality in mind. They know
that it is with you that “the buck stops,” and they are sensitive to signs of
your preferences. Those were not difficult to discern in your commencement
address at Howard University on May 7, in which you strongly advocated the same
basic policy approaches as those espoused by one Democratic presidential
candidate – Hillary Clinton.
Your White House has also made
excuses for deliberate security violations by Secretary Clinton that would have
gotten senior officials like us fired and probably indicted. We look with
suspicion at what we see as contrasting and totally inappropriate attempts by
the administration and media to play down the importance of Secretary Clinton’s
deliberate disregard of basic security instructions and procedures.
It appears that the option
chosen by the White House is using the declared need for “thoroughness” to
soft-pedal and delay completion of the investigation for several more months,
while the corporate media sleeps on. Four months have already gone by since the
smoking-gun-type revelations in the intelligence community Inspector General’s
letter to Congress, and it has been well over a year since Secretary Clinton
first acknowledged using an insecure email server for official business.
Another claim emanating from
your White House is that Clinton was careless in managing her emails and has
admitted as much, but that she has not damaged American national security. She
has called it a “mistake,” but security officials of the National Security
Agency explicitly forewarned her against violating basic laws and regulations
designed to prevent the compromise of classified information.
NSA, FBI Have Enough Evidence
Surely, enough time has
passed, and enough material has been reviewed, to permit a preliminary damage
assessment. The NSA has the necessary information and should, by now, have
shared that information with the FBI. Secretary Clinton’s server in her house
in Chappaqua, New York, was not a secured device. Her email address
incorporated her initials, “hdr” (apparently for her maiden name, Hillary Diane
Rodham). It also included the “clinton” server identity, so it was easy for a
hacker to spot.
Anyone with the proper
equipment, knowledge and motivation might have been able to obtain access. That
is what hackers are able to do, with considerable success, against government
servers that are far better protected than the private email server located in
her New York State home.
In fact, there have been
reports that Secretary Clinton’s emails were, indeed, hacked successfully by
foreigners. The Romanian hacker who goes by the name Guccifer claimed earlier
this month that he had repeatedly hacked her email server. He described
the server as “like an open orchid on the Internet” and that “it was easy …
easy for me, for everybody.” Guccifer has been extradited from Romania and is
now in jail in Alexandria, Virginia, where the FBI is said to be questioning
him on the emails. There have also been credible claims that Russian
intelligence and other foreign services were able to hack the Secretary’s
server.
Another argument being
surfaced, in a transparent attempt to defend Secretary Clinton, has to do with
intent. It is said that she did not intend to have classified information on
her computer in New York and had no intention of handling secret material in a
way that would be accessible to foreign intelligence or others lacking the
proper security clearances and the need-to-know.
But while intent might be
relevant in terms of punishment, it does not change the fact that as a member
of the Senate Armed Services Committee, then Senator Clinton had clearances for
classified information for years before becoming Secretary of State. She knew
the rules and yet as Secretary she handled classified information carelessly
after a deliberate decision to circumvent normal procedures for its
safeguarding, thus making it vulnerable to foreign intelligence, as well as to
criminal hackers.
Anyone who has ever handled
classified material knows that there are a number of things that you do not do.
You do not take it home with you, you do not copy it and share it with anyone
who does not have a clearance and a need-to-know, you do not strip off the
classification marks and treat it as unclassified, and you do not transfer it to
another email account that is not protected by a government server.
If you have a secured
government computer operating off of a secure server that means that what is on
the computer stays on the computer. This is not a matter of debate or subject
to interpretation. It is how one safeguards classified information, even if one
believes that the material should not be classified, which is another argument
that has been made in Clinton’s defense. Whether or not the classification is
unnecessary is not your decision to make.
Apart from the guidelines for
proper handling of classified information, outlined in Executive Order
13526 and 18 U.S.C Sec. 793(f) of the federal code, there is
some evidence of a cover-up regarding what was compromised. This itself would
be a violation of the 2009 Federal Records Act and the Freedom of Information
Act.
Numerous messages both in New
York and in Washington have reportedly been erased or simply cannot be found.
In addition, the law cited above explicitly makes it a felony to cut and paste
classified information removing its classification designation. Retaining such
information on a private email system is also a felony. In one of Secretary
Clinton’s emails, she instructed her staff simply to remove a classification
and send the information to her on her server.
So the question is not whether
Secretary Clinton broke the law. She did. If the laws are to be equally
applied, she should face the same kind of consequences as others who have been
found, often on the basis of much less convincing evidence, guilty of similar
behavior.
Some More Equal Than Others
Secretary Clinton’ case
invites comparison with what happened to former CIA case officer Jeffrey
Sterling, now serving a three-and-a-half-year prison term for allegedly leaking
information to New York Times journalist James Risen. Sterling first
came to the media’s attention when in 2003 he blew the whistle on a botched CIA
operation called Operation Merlin, telling the Senate Intelligence Committee
staff that the operation had ended up revealing nuclear secrets to Iran. When
in 2006 James Risen published a book that discussed, inter alia, this
amateurish cowboy operation, the Department of Justice focused on Sterling as
the suspected source.
In court, the federal
prosecutors relied almost entirely on Risen’s phone and email logs,
which reportedly demonstrated that the two men had been in contact up until
2005. But the prosecutors did not provide the content of those communications
even though the FBI was listening in on some of them. Risen has claimed that he
had multiple sources on Operation Merlin, and Sterling has
always denied being involved.
Jeffrey Sterling was not
permitted to testify in the trial on his own behalf because he would have had
to discuss Operation Merlin, which was and is still classified. He could not
mention any details about it even if they were already publicly known through
the Risen book. No evidence was ever produced in court demonstrating that any
classified information ever passed between the two men, but Sterling, an
African American, was nevertheless convicted by an all-white jury in Virginia
based on “suspicion” and the presumption that “it had to be him.”
The contrast between the
copious evidence – some of it self-admitted – of Secretary Clinton’s
demonstrable infractions, on the one hand, and the very sketchy, circumstantial
evidence used to convict and imprison Jeffrey Sterling, on the other, lend
weight to the suspicion that there is one law for the rich and powerful in the
United States and another for the rest of us.
Failing to take steps against
a politically powerful presidential candidate and letting her off unscathed for
crimes of her own making, while an institutionally unprotected Jeffrey Sterling
sits in prison would be a travesty of justice not dissimilar to the gentle
wrist-slap given Gen. David Petraeus for giving his mistress extremely
sensitive information and then lying to the FBI about it.
Your order to then-Attorney
General Eric Holder to let Gen. David Petraeus off easy created a noxious – and
demoralizing – precedent in the national security community indicating that,
whatever the pains taken at lower levels to prevent compromise of duly
classified information, top officials are almost never held accountable for
disregarding well-established rules. These are some of the reasons we are so
concerned that this is precisely the direction in which you seem to be leaning
on the Clinton email issue.
In our view, the sole
legitimate reason for disclosing classified information springs from the only
“oath” we all took – “to support and defend the Constitution of the United
States against all enemies foreign and domestic.” When, for example, Edward
Snowden saw the U.S. government grossly violating our Fourth Amendment right to
be “secure” against warrantless “searches and seizures,” he gave more weight to
that oath (ethicists call it a supervening value) than to the promise he had
made not to disclose information that could harm U.S. national security.
Possibly Still Worse Ahead
You might give some thought,
Mr. President, to a potentially messy side of this. What is already known about
NSA’s collect-it-all electronic practices over the past several years strongly
suggests that NSA, and perhaps the FBI, already know chapter and verse. It is
virtually certain they know what was in Secretary Clinton’s emails – including
the ones she thought she had deleted. It is likely that they have also been
able to determine which foreign intelligence agencies and other hackers were
able to access the emails.
One ignores this at one’s
peril. Secretary Clinton’s security violations can have impact not only on
whether she becomes your successor, but also on whether she would, in that
case, be beholden to those who know what lies hidden from the rest of us –
perhaps even from you.
Intelligence professionals (in
contrast to the occasional political functionary) take the compromise of
classified information with utmost seriousness. More important: this is for us
a quintessentially nonpartisan issue. It has to do, first and foremost, with
the national security of the United States.
We are all too familiar with
what harm can come from blithe disregard of basic procedures designed to protect
sensitive intelligence and other national security information. Yes, the
lamentable unevenness in how such infractions are handled is also an important
issue – but that is not our main focus in the present context.
The Truth Will Out
Not all workers at the NSA or
the FBI are likely to keep their heads in the sand, as they watch very senior
officials and politicians with their own agendas disregard laws to safeguard
the nation’s security. We know what it is like to do the difficult, disciplined
work of protecting information from being compromised by strictly abiding by
what often seem to be cumbersome rules and regulations. We’ve been there; done
that.
If you encourage the
Department of Justice and the FBI to continue slow-walking the investigation, there
is a good chance the truth will come out anyway. As you are aware, the Justice
Department, the FBI, and NSA have all yielded recent patriots who, in such
circumstances, decided that whistleblowing – rather than silence – was the only
way to honor the oath we all swore – to support and defend the Constitution.
To sum up our concern
regarding how all this plays out, if you order the Justice Department and FBI
to pursue the investigation with “all deliberate speed,” so to speak, and
Secretary Clinton becomes president, the juicy email secrets in the hidden
hands of the NSA and FBI are likely to give those already powerful institutions
a capacity for blackmail that would make J. Edgar Hoover’s mouth water. In
addition, information hacked by foreign intelligence services or Guccifer-like
hackers can also provide useful grist for leverage or blackmail.
Taking Care the Laws Are
Faithfully Executed
We strongly urge you to order
Attorney General Loretta Lynch to instruct FBI Director James Comey to wind up
a preliminary investigation and tell the country now what they have learned. By
now they – and U.S. intelligence agencies – have had enough time to do an early
assessment of what classified data, programs and people have been compromised.
Realistically speaking, a lengthier, comprehensive post-mortem-type evaluation
– however interesting it might be, might never see the light of day under a new
president.
We believe the American people
are entitled to prompt and full disclosure, and respectfully suggest that you
ensure that enforcement of laws protecting our national security does not play
stepchild to political considerations on this key issue.
On April 10, you assured Chris
Wallace, “I guarantee that there is no political influence in any investigation
conducted by the Justice Department, or the FBI – not just in this [Clinton
email] case, but in any case. Full stop. Period.”
We urge you to abide by that
promise, and let the chips fall where they may. Full stop. Period.
For the Steering Group,
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
William Binney, Technical
Director, NSA; co-founder, SIGINT Automation Research Center (ret.)
Thomas Drake, Senior
Executive, NSA (former)
Philip Giraldi, CIA,
Operations Officer (ret.)
Sen. Mike Gravel, D, Alaska;
earlier, Army Intelligence
Matthew Hoh, former Capt.,
USMC, Iraq & Foreign Service Officer, Afghanistan (associate VIPS)
Larry C. Johnson, CIA &
State Department (ret.)
Michael S. Kearns, Captain,
USAF Intelligence Agency (ret.), ex-Master SERE Instructor
John Kiriakou, Former CIA
Counterterrorism Officer
Ray McGovern, former US Army
infantry/intelligence officer & CIA analyst (ret.)
Elizabeth Murray, Deputy
National Intelligence Officer for Middle East, CIA (ret.)
Todd Pierce, MAJ, US Army
Judge Advocate (ret.)
Scott Ritter, former MAJ,
USMC, former UN Weapon Inspector, Iraq
Diane Roark, DOE, DOD, NSC,
& professional staff, House Intelligence Committee (ret.)
Robert David Steele, former
CIA Operations Officer
Peter Van Buren, U.S.
Department of State, Foreign Service Officer (ret.) (associate VIPS)
Kirk Wiebe, former Senior
Analyst, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA, (ret.)
Ann Wright, U.S. Army Reserve
Colonel (ret) and former U.S. Diplomat
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