Leaker caught; U.S. needs consistent policy for classified information
Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee staff!
Thank you for subscribing and I hope you enjoy today’s newsletter.
With gratitude,
Mike
DAILY BIBLE VERSE
3 Let not mercy and truth forsake thee: bind them about thy neck; write them upon the table of thine heart: 4 So shalt thou find favour and good understanding in the sight of God and man.
Proverbs 3:3-4
Spies and Scandals, New and Old
By Colonel Kenneth Allard
So far, the press munchkins are reacting to our latest classified document compromise with wails and the usual platitudes, "How Could This Happen?” As a former investigator in the Army equivalent of the FBI, I have a far more cynical point of view: How Could It Not?
Since the primary objective of any compromise investigation is to determine responsibility, it makes sense to begin at the top, where President Biden's record on national security is so badly flawed that the only good reason for keeping him in office is his hapless Vice President. Apart from Mr. Biden’s personal malfeasance in keeping a tranche of classified docs in his garage, his other debacles have already become legendary. The notorious Chinese spy balloon(s); is merely the most recent, our Beijing adversaries allowed to perform leisurely figure 8’s over our most sensitive nuclear installations. More news keeps leaking out about how badly Mr. Biden performed during the Afghanistan withdrawal, despite a recently released “after-action report” attempting to whitewash the disaster. Most damning of all is Mr.Biden’s ongoing border crisis, the organized surrender of our homeland to the Mexican drug cartels; their most recent “clients” include Chinese nationals of military age who departed on their next missions without any visible impediments.
None of these matters presumably came up Thursday afternoon, when that 20-something Air National Guardsman was arrested by an FBI Swat team and hustled off in an armored vehicle. Neither should you expect government prosecutors to concede that President Biden bears the greatest ongoing responsibility for the country’s declining national security fortunes. Instead, they will present a highly structured case: That the young man held a security clearance based on an extensive background investigation; that he had been trained about the responsibilities of holding a security clearance and may even have signed a non-disclosure agreement about the sensitive materials entrusted to him. Yet none of that, they will argue, deterred him from sharing our most sensitive intelligence in an unguarded chat-room, where almost anyone could have seen it. Many apparently did so, including friends, enemies and in-betweens, all gaining a new appreciation for US intelligence sources and methods: What worked, what did not and with what effects? Any prosecutor worth his or her salt will not fail to point out that some valuable US sources – meaning human beings with families and loved ones – may be killed or compromised, simply because this young man treated intelligence as a fun chatroom exercise for his personal aggrandizement or enjoyment.
The hapless airman thus joins the dubious ranks of such Obama-era personalities as Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. Each for his own reasons, these junior intelligence operatives exploited their highly privileged positions (NSA and Army intelligence in Iraq respectively) to leak treasure troves of intelligence documents of incalculable value to our adversaries. Both were granted wide-ranging access because of their expertise with the electronic systems that provide the infrastructure of modern intelligence. Snowden revealed highly classified NSA programs that he considered unethical, taking refuge in Hong Kong before seeking asylum in Putin’s Russia, where his ethical sensitivities were presumably less troubled. Tried by court-martial, Manning served seven years at Fort Leavenworth before having her sentence commuted by Barack Obama, shortly before the inauguration of Donald Trump.
So what have we learned from these repeated legacies of compromise? Can our vaunted intelligence infrastructure even survive the cumulative effects of so many conspicuous failures? As a young intelligence officer, I learned that the most critical information you possess and hope to protect is best measured by two variables: Placement and access. A generation after 911, our canonical failure of information-sharing and lack of imagination has been overcome by over-reach, sharing too much information with too many people. Seldom do we even wonder if all those people really need to know that information!
I also learned to appreciate Ben Franklin’s wisdom when he wrote in Poor Richard’s Almanac that, “Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead.” https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7286 Modern intelligence depends upon a well-ordered system of personnel security, i.e., extensive background investigations to determine one’s suitability, ideally backed up by periodic re-investigations and the aggressive use of the polygraph. But personnel security systems fail when they are overwhelmed by bureaucratic inertia or hidebound by political correctness. How else can you explain why a junior airman was granted such extraordinary access yet lacked the character to police himself?
After a lifetime in that field, I find it difficult to believe that this was his first big mistake!
NOTE: Colonel Allard is the author of Command, Control and the Common Defense, winner of the 1991 National Security Book Award. After leaving active duty, he became an on-air military analyst for the networks of NBC News.
Leaker caught; U.S. needs consistent policy for classified information
This piece from Matt Vespa at TOWNHALL appeared on Tuesday, before the arrest of the latest leaker of classified information from the U.S. government. Vespa didn’t know then that the leaker, a member of the intelligence ‘wing’ of the Air National Guard from Massachusetts, had THE highest level of security clearance at the tender age of 21. At least that’s what we’re being told about him.
THE GUARDIAN had speculated that the leak was “probably not some dastardly hacking or disinformation plot by Russia or the US, but rather another example of how carelessly Washington handles its secrets.” They apparently were right. And that truth, they said, “may be more worrying for the U.S. and its allies than a Russian hack.”
The leaked documents, they said, appeared to have been put together for Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other top military leaders but were available to other personnel --- and contractors --- with “the right” security clearances.
The point here is not so much to examine the content or potential fallout from these particular leaks --- that’s elsewhere in the newsletter --- but rather to address the carelessness and inconsistency with which we deal with our secrets. Do you know how many people have a top-level security clearance? In 2019, the latest year for which we have the figure, it’s 1.5 million. With that many people having access, it’s almost a statistical certainty that restricted-access material will find its way online.
And with the stunning policy currently in place, those who leave or retire from the FBI and other intel agencies retain those clearances right along with their pensions. John Brennan, former head of the CIA and major proponent of the Russia Hoax, still has his security clearance while working as an analyst for MSNBC. When the intel agencies finally get their badly-needed overhaul, this policy needs one, too.
When Trump was accused of keeping classified documents at Mar-A-Lago --- never mind that as President he could declassify whatever he wanted to --- all we heard was how dangerous to national security it was to have those materials in that storage room. Why, the nuclear codes might have been just sitting there in Trump’s closet, maybe laid right out on the floor in full view, like in the picture! Never mind that the FBI agents had placed those papers on the floor themselves to take the photo, or that even if Trump had some nuclear codes, they would’ve been long-outdated, as they’re changed regularly, certainly with an incoming administration. But partisan hysteria transcended rational thought, as is typical these days.
Later, when the story broke about Biden having classified documents scattered all over the northeastern United States, the narrative changed. It suddenly wasn’t that big a deal. The FBI wasn’t about to send armed agents to storm Biden’s library in Delaware…or his garage, next to his Corvette...or a storage warehouse in Chinatown...or his office at the Washington DC Penn Biden Center...or the University of Pennsylvania...or his lawyer’s office in Boston...or any other place where he might have deposited some classified documents. They left Biden’s attorneys in charge of the retrieval, even though these documents seem to have been much more vulnerable in those locations than the ones at Mar-A-Lago, which were behind a secure door in a building with armed security.
As Vespa said, this “highlights once again how anything Trump-related is treated as an unprecedented event when it’s not...The allegations of Trump’s mishandling classified documents were treated as an unprecedented event until Biden’s state secret snafu, which suddenly led to multiple stories about how everyone in DC [had] leaked these documents since the Kennedy presidency.”
“The Left’s myopia for most of their attacks on the former President has been nothing short of stunning,” he said, “almost comical.” Now that we see the extent to which Biden has made off with classified documents from his entire time in politics and squirreled them away, they’ve had to cut ol’ Joe some slack by switching to an attitude of “everybody does it.” (Hillary did it with thousands and thousands of easily hackable electronic State Department records.) And it seems everyone gets away with it whose last name isn’t Trump.
It was in that context that we all learned of these new leaks. Vespa theorizes that “the endless cycle about classified materials, leaks, and their related dangers, all hyperbole, saturated the media to the point where we might have one that could impact national security, and no one cares.”
It doesn’t inspire much confidence in federal investigators that NEW YORK TIMES reporters actually beat them to the house where the suspect, Jack Douglas Teixeira, lives and knocked on the door first. I suppose the feds just didn’t have enough agents because most of them are busy investigating Trump supporters and traditional Catholics.
The WASHINGTON POST had already identified the leaker. More details...
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/04/about-that-leaker.php
These leaks do show the government has been lying to us about the fight in Ukraine and our role in it. Yet the reporters at the NYT and WAPO helped the feds catch the leaker and, ironically, maintain secrecy. Their job seems to be to help the government lie. Here’s part of independent journalist Glenn Greenwald’s take, which also pretty well summarizes what we’ve learned through these leaks:
“If you’re a real journalist, somebody who’s devoted to transparency...shining a light on the most powerful government actors in the lives of the American people, and informing the public, you would be celebrating this person [as with Ed Snowden and Julian Assange], who stepped forward and risked his security to show his fellow citizens that the government was lying about this incredibly important war with a nuclear-armed power --- that we have actual troops deployed on the ground in Ukraine, there’s going to be no diplomatic resolution through at least 2023, that Zelenskyy is planning to use our weapons to strike deep into Russia, which we were told would never happen, risking escalation. He [the leaker] did the job of what journalists came to do, which is show the public the truth.”
Certainly, it was in Ukraine’s interest to keep all this secret. And, of course, the intel community hates the leaker because he’s shown that they’ve been lying.
As for the so-called ‘journalists,’ Greenwald nails them to the wall: “They love leaks when the CIA and Homeland Security tell them to leak. That’s when they disseminate propaganda to the American public, like they did during the Trump years, when they leaked the transcript between Michael Flynn and Ambassador Kislyak...The WASHINGTON POST did that; nobody looked for that leaker, nobody cared, everybody cheered, because it served the interest of the security state.”
But when a leaker undermines these agencies and tells the truth, he said, the “journalists” take the government’s side and are out for blood. They don’t think like journalists anymore; they’re working for the administration.
We would add that when a Republican comes in, they’ll be working against the administration.
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6324998676112
RELATED: Matt Taibbi has similar thoughts to those of Greenwald, plus he believes the media are already starting the spin that this leak shows how dangerous it is to allow rightwing “incels” and “gun enthusiasts” to speak privately on the Internet, sharing “dark humor” and “innocuous memes” that might be taken the wrong way by some people. So obviously, we need to pass the horrifying RESTRICT Act to allow the government to keep lying with impunity while spying on and silencing anyone who might complain about it under the guise of “national security.”
ALSO RELATED: China sends not-so-subtle message to President Biden
Speaking of foreign powers benefiting from secrets, the WASHINGTON TIMES reports that by giving Senate Republicans the financial records showing millions of Chinese dollars flowing to the Biden family, a Chinese-American bank has in effect “fired a warning shot” at the President.
These are the records requested of Cathay Bank by Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson and Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, and no subpoena was required. They handed them right over, no questions asked, and “will continue to cooperate with the committee,” they said in a statement. “In my mind,” said Sen. Johnson to the TIMES, “it’s the Chinese government telling Joe Biden, ‘We got the goods on you, buddy, and we’re willing to dish it up.’”
The TIMES has details of those financial transactions. I hate to keep using the word “shocking,” but this really is. And knowing the Chi-Comms, they’re probably holding something back, perhaps the worst of it, just to maintain leverage over our Commander-in-Chief. That would certainly explain a lot.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/apr/12/china-sent-not-so-subtle-threat-joe-biden-revealin/