For a bit of comic relief on the Fourth of July weekend, it was hard to beat the amazing spectacle of “McLaughlin Group” host John McLaughlin – with an assist from robotic Clinton shill Eleanor Clift – floating the idea that Hillary Clinton was wise to break the law and set up her own secret email server, because the State Department system she was supposed to be using got hacked.
There’s so much wrong with this holiday serving of stupid that it’s difficult to know where to begin, but let’s go with the fact that Hillary’s private email server probably has been compromised. We know hackers were aware of its existence because her henchman Sid Blumenthal was hacked long ago.
We’ve also learned over the past few weeks that the White House lied extravagantly when it claimed to be unaware of Clinton’s server shenanigans – they had the special off-the-books email addresses for Clinton and her top aides. The White House was attacked by the same Russian hacking team that hit the State Department. The odds that those hackers were unaware of Clinton Mail’s existence are very long indeed. Hillary was interested in hiding her correspondence from Congress, not foreign espionage agents or hacker gangs.
Clinton has, characteristically, been evasive and duplicitous about the security of her black-box mail server, so cyber-security experts have been left to guess at how well-defended it was. You will not find a single security expert anywhere who thinks Hillary’s server was remotely as well-protected as the State Department system she was supposed to be using. In fact, in the early days of the Clinton email scandal, white-hat hackers needed only a matter of hours to find Clinton’s server – it was still turned on and responding to requests – and cudgel a great deal of information from it, using simple intrusion techniques.
Also, the State Department hack was massive, but it affected the unclassified mail system, and it most likely began after Clinton left the State Department. Is it too much to ask the commentators on a big-time talk show to learn a few basic facts before they spout off?
So no, Clinton wasn’t smart to avoid using the State Department system, and she hasn’t tried claiming that she did so because she thought the official system was insecure. This may have escaped the memories of McLaughlin and Clift, because it was a ridiculous lie that nobody believed for a minute, but Clinton’s official reason for setting up a private mail server is that she thought carrying a second smartphone to access the heavily-encrypted State system was too much of a hassle. In other words, she thought State’s security procedures were too stringent. The burden of carrying an additional five-ounce device was too much for a woman who travels first-class with a gigantic retinue to shoulder, in the interest of complying with security regulations Clinton thought were excessive.
We don’t know nearly enough about the mysterious Clinton server to know if her correspondence was raided by foreign operatives, because the whole point of what Clinton did was to put her system outside the protective and investigative reach of the government. She was happy to sacrifice security – including national security – for the sake of opacity. She’ll do it again in a hot minute, if the American people are foolish enough to trust her with any official responsibility ever again. If you thought the Obama Administration was furtive, wait until you see what the Clinton Mafia can do with 2017 communications technology.
But just for a moment, let us indulge McLaughlin and Clift and suppose Hillary Clinton, contrary to all available evidence and testimony, really did set up a private server because she thought the State Department system she was required to use was dangerously vulnerable. What does that tell us about Big Government and its high priestess? The Democrats who saddled us with a gigantic burden of taxes, deficit spending, and regulations don’t trust the multi-trillion-dollar government they’ve built. Clinton wants every American citizen wrapped in the tentacles of a sleepless Leviathan State, our every movement monitored and micro-regulated, but she has no intention of joining us in that crappy system. The laws and regulations she favors don’t apply to her, and she won’t stoop to using the hideously expensive government systems Democrats force the rest of us to pay for.
To give Clinton the slightest credit for evading hackers by secretly setting up her own mail server is to deliver a crushing blow to everything she claims to believe in. It’s also a damning indictment of her character, because if she thought the State Department system was vulnerable, she should have raised all sorts of alarms and demanded changes. Instead, she quietly slipped off into the night with her top aides and built an email server in her basement. The freaking Secretary of State saw a gigantic problem in her lavishly-funded agency, but instead of addressing it, she quietly made preparations to protect herself alone, while throwing the rest of her department to the wolves? How can anyone possibly think that says anything good about her?
Unfortunately, that would be an indication Clinton is as careless and irresponsible as the rest of the centralized government she worships, because as the OPM catastrophe reveals, top people in a variety of agencies have long known the federal government’s cyber-security was riddled with holes, but they didn’t get terribly exercised about fixing the problem.
To this day, OPM Director Katherine Archuleta thinks the biggest data breach in the history of the world was nobody’s fault – it was just a sort of natural disaster, a sharknado of hackers randomly blew into town and compromised millions of federal employees, and it was just dumb luck that this bloated, overfunded, badly-managed super-government was caught with its digital pants down. Archuleta’s Fourth of July blog post expressed hopes that “our hardworking Federal workforce” would enjoy “a much-deserved holiday weekend” before expressing her impotent rage about the attack – “I share your anger that adversaries targeted OPM data” – and congratulating herself on doing such a great job of managing data security and developing “a comprehensive IT strategic plan.”
Anyway, back here in the real world, no one with the slightest knowledge of the email scandal, or the ability to think coherently, believes Hillary Clinton set up a secret private server because she had some sort of premonition that the State Department would be hacked.
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