Security briefings and courses for thee but not for me. Hillary completed no security briefings or courses while at State Dept.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton completed no security briefings or courses on the proper handling of classified materials and how to conduct secure communications while at the Department of State, according to new Obama administration legal filings before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

The surprise admission was released late Friday and could reignite the controversy over Clinton’s “careless” handling of classified materials as asserted by FBI Director James Comey, which has already been a central part of the presidential race.

The revelation also could renew calls for the Department of State to strip her of her security clearance. The co-founder of at least one retired military officers organization has called for a suspension of her clearance.

State Department officials previously reported they could not locate records certifying that Clinton or her top aides took the annually required security courses and briefings.

Hillary and her crew probably thought that security courses were for the underlings but not for them. Her blatant arrogance and recklessness with national security should be her downfall.

What hypocrisy coming from Harry Reid when he said:

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said (referring to Trump) that he hopes the candidate is given "fake intelligence briefings … because you can't trust him."

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WindDancer13's picture

If she was trained before the swearing in, then she was still trained. However, there seems to be contradictory information.

2009 State Dept. Document: Hillary Clinton Trained in ‘Safe Handling’ of Classified Information

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was trained in the proper handling of classified information by the Bureau of Diplomatic Security according to the Diplomatic Security 2009 Year in Review booklet the bureau posted online.

...

“DS contributed to the smooth transition of U.S. government officials by providing more than 180 members of the new Obama administration–ranging from Secretary Clinton to various ambassadors and other presidential appointees–with security training, and immediate access to highly classified systems and other information products critical to their new roles."

Is someone trying to white wash her email handling by saying she wasn't trained? Comey said anyone with common sense in her position would have recognized classified materials.

During the rest of her tenure, she may very well have ignored the required training though:

Clinton Ignored Obama's Order To Get Security Training While Sec of State, Filing Shows

But not seriously enough, apparently, to comply with President Obama's executive order, signed Dec. 29, 2009, regarding the handling of classified information.

...

Obama goes on to say that anyone so authorized "must receive training in proper classification ... at least once a calendar year." [Emphasis in original]

What's more, Obama's order says that "original classification authorities who do not receive such mandatory training at least once within a calendar year shall have their classification authority suspended ... until such training has taken place. [Emphasis added]"

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We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.--Aristotle
If there is no struggle there is no progress.--Frederick Douglass

Steven D's picture

No media will cover this on TV.

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"You can't just leave those who created the problem in charge of the solution."---Tyree Scott

WindDancer13's picture

From what I have seen they are the only ones to call out HRC's lies on the Fox interview. There have been a number of other issues to when they have been more open to truth than CNN and MSNBC. It could be CBS is trying to attract that 13-20 million voters or tried to vote for Sanders' people. Won't know without more evidence of them pointing out things the other media are ignoring.

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We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.--Aristotle
If there is no struggle there is no progress.--Frederick Douglass

But I've noticed a few things that are odd BECAUSE they've appeared in mainstream media. There was an ABC Ross video on those voice mails in the Wickleak DNC stuff. And there was a prominent editorial in WSJ that was very negative on the Clinton Foundation, think I posted that link here. It's bad when something covered by these folks sticks out because it's the only true thing in a larger mass of garbage media. Strange.

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WindDancer13's picture

ABC, NBC Mute on the Lies Clinton Told on Fox News Sunday

I do not know anything about the source this article is in, but it is mainly quotes and video, so information is valid. Media is pretty careful not to get themselves in a lawsuit over misquoting stuff. = )

As noted in the article, WaPo gave HRC 4 Pinocchios, and I do know that Politifact gave her a Pants on Fire rating for the lies on Fox.

I have actually found WSJ to be pretty good, or at least a lot better than many of the others.

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We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.--Aristotle
If there is no struggle there is no progress.--Frederick Douglass

Hillary hypocrisy: her campaign chairman John Podesta received $35 million from Russian government
The Duran

Karma hits fast. Just one day after Hilary Clinton upped the ante by officially blaming Russia for the DNC hack, and publicly saying that Donald Trump is in Putin’s pocket, news breaks today that Hillary’s campaign chairman John Podesta sat on the board of a Russian energy company that received $35 million in venture funding from a “Putin-connected” fund.

Best part of it all… John Podesta somehow failed to fully disclose his participation and compensation on his federal financial disclosures, as is required by US law.

Hillary’s latest hypocrisy is one of the many revelations from a 56-page report released late Sunday titled “From Russia with Money: Hillary Clinton, the Russian Reset, and Cronyism” by the non-partisan government watchdog group, the Government Accountability Institute (GAI).

The New York Post and the Wall Street Journal ran stories on the released report late Sunday evening.

Under normal circumstances one would not care if Hillary’s campaign chairman did business in Russia, he is free to do so.

Why this matters is because for Hillary progressive liberals, when Trump even mentions the word “Russia”, he is a Putin patsy. When Hillary, and high ranking members of her team, are doing business in Russia, sitting on the board of Russian companies, which are tied to government investments…well that’s perfectly acceptable.

More at the link.

Someone over at K4S has said that The Duran seems to be a pro Trump/Putin right wing news outlet, so I wanted to make that disclaimer.

However, the story was first reported by the Wall Street Journal late on Sunday evening - the one that you referred to birdiemom87. The title the WSJ used for the story was:

The Clinton Foundation, State and Kremlin Connections Why did Hillary’s State Department urge U.S. investors to fund Russian research for military uses?

The WSJ article is behind a paywall, but you can get around that by going to google and doing a search for the title of the article and clicking on the link from the google search results page.

Google search results page for this story

Interestingly enough, there was no mention of John Podesta in the WSJ version. It looks like the person who did the article at The Duran did some further digging and made the Podesta connection.

Also, the title for The Duran story is misleading because – as the article in The Duran notes:

The GAI investigative report says it’s unclear how much, if any, money Podesta made. The reason: Podesta was on the board of three Joule entities, but only listed two on his disclosure; the most important entity, Joule Stichting, he did not list. “Podesta’s compensation by Joule cannot be fully determined,” reads the report. “In his 2014 federal government disclosure filing, Podesta lists that he divested stock options from Joule. However, the disclosure does not cover the years 2011-2012.”

Why Podesta failed to reveal, as required by law on his federal financial disclosures, his membership on the board of this offshore company is presently unknown.

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and they didn't just summarize what comey said that contradicted her. They played the tape.

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Censorship lives, but here's another story that dares to be critical of the queen.

Hillary, Russia and the consequences of recklessness: Column

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/08/02/hillary-russia-putin-tr...

"Clinton's weak leadership would give Putin another four years of nearly unrestrained aggression".

"Because of the DNC’s irresponsibility and overt bias towards Clinton during the primary season, the Democrats’ convention was damaged and their general election efforts have been jeopardized. They have tried to spin their ineptitude of potentially jeopardizing U.S. national security by portraying Clinton as a victim. If she is a victim, she’s a victim of her own recklessness".

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WindDancer13's picture

of HRC's hypocrisy, but the vast majority are in print/online media. Most of the population still gets the majority of its news from TV which is why the CBS report was surprising.

The link is to an opinion piece so many will shrug it off for not being a news article or investigative piece by the publication itself. Although of late, it is getting harder to tell opinion from news as news reporting has generally contained fewer facts than the opinion articles.

For this article, I would question the reference to Putin getting "another four years of nearly unrestrained aggression." The USA has been far more aggressive than Russia in the last four years. The author spends a lot of time and effort villainizing Putin rather than setting the record straight about HRC.

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We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.--Aristotle
If there is no struggle there is no progress.--Frederick Douglass

OLinda's picture

Is someone trying to white wash her email handling by saying she wasn't trained?

That was my thought, WD. Trying to shore up Comey's remarks to say Clinton may have been ignorant and incompetent, but not devious.

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qualified for the Sec of State job would understand the necessity of utmost care in the handling of secure information on a Web-based platform. No one would expect Clinton to be a tech expert herself, but everyone should expect her to understand the importance of hiring qualified people to check, double-check, and triple-check through layers of protection all official business she and her staff conducted--at home or anywhere else. She did not. In fact, she did the reverse.

This issue is distinct from the dodging of FOIA and federal documents requirements represented by her home server.

Here's one of my fave excerpts from Hillary's self-promoting memoir, Hard Choices--which, it turns out, she did not actually write (ditto her first book, It Takes a Village, much like Trump and his bestseller).*This excerpt gives the lie to anything she might say now about not knowing about security protocols or trusting to subordinates or the State Department screwed up:

She Believes Technology is a Double-Edged Sword:
Although Clinton admits she is “not the most tech-savvy person,” she also describes “falling in love with my iPad,” even as she acknowledges that new technologies, including more widespread use of cell phones and ever expanding social media channels, are tools that are “in and of themselves value-neutral. They could be forces for bad as easily as for good, just as steel can be used to build hospitals or tanks, and nuclear power can either energize a city or destroy it.” She adds that we must “act responsibly to maximize technology’s benefits—while minimizing the risks.” [bold added] Ways she and her staff were advised to minimize those risks included leaving “BlackBerrys, laptops—anything that communicated with the outside world—on the plane, with their batteries removed to prevent foreign intelligence services from compromising them” when they visited places like Russia. She was also advised to keep sensitive material confidential by reading it “inside an opaque tent in a hotel room. In less well-equipped settings we were told to improvise by reading sensitive material with a blanket over our head. I felt like I was ten years old again, reading covertly by flashlight under the covers after bedtime.”

Notice the anecdote about her as a little girl, a painful attempt to humanize a widely disliked public figure.

*But what credit will Widmer get on “Hard Choices”? Clinton caused an uproar with her bestseller, “It Takes a Village,” when she denied the ghost writer any identification at all. That book was written by Barbara Feinman, a Georgetown University professor. Feinman was paid $120,000 for seven months’ work. She eventually went public and complained about lack of credit. Source: http://www.showbiz411.com/2014/05/30/hillary-clintons-hardest-choice-to-....

See also: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/who-wrote-that-political-...

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WindDancer13's picture

the batteries out of their phones and left them on he plane when Comey flat out stated that those phones and other tech devices were used in places they should not have been.

You know, eventually, I will have read that whole book through excerpts here. = )

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We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.--Aristotle
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terriertribe's picture

But, saying you were advised to do it isn't the same as saying you did it. She doesn't work very hard to make that clear, though.

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sojourns's picture

"Is someone trying to white wash her email handling by saying she wasn't trained?" is how the Clinton camp will spin it.

You nailed that, methinks.

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WaterLily's picture

And he still endorses her.

Go figure.

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WindDancer13's picture

to catch the rot. There are at least four major things that Obama told her to do or not to do, that she didn't do or did anyway. His "enthusiasm" seems out of kilter.

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We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.--Aristotle
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MsGrin's picture

...we're aware of her hubris.

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'What we are left with is an agency mandated to ensure transparency and disclosure that is actually working to keep the public in the dark' - Ann M. Ravel, former FEC member

the woman did take the courses prior to her appointment as SOS.
Doesn't that make her even more reckless? (stupider? asshole-isher? )

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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

Slightkc's picture

You don't just get "trained" on security procedures prior to taking a new position in the gov't. You get RE-trained on security in SEVERAL different online AND face-to-face classes throughout the year; every year; year after year after year. And it's suppose to make no difference who you are, how high up the pecking order you sit, nor how often... or even IF... you handle classified material. And the latter is just ONE aspect of ONE online course on Security. There are at least three separate Security ADL's that deal with technology and digital security. You've also got facilities security, as well as physical security.

ONE of these eLessons takes around 2 hours to finish (if you're knowledgeable and skilled in popping back and forth among pages), and then there's a 50 question test afterwards, which you must achieve 90% or higher to pass.

And, even though they've locked down the Niprnet with group policies on our computers so tight you can't even replace the wallpaper, we're still suppose to access these lessons that are hosted in a non-local (centralized Enterprise) location. Last week they went totally crazy and their little update program managed to wipe every copy of Adobe Pro of our systems. And it's not like we square pegs fit neatly in their round holes, anyway! We're responsible for education... classroom, facilitated, and online. We do EVERYTHING in Adobe!

So... for Clinton to just "blow off" her DoD yearly Security courses like that really irks a lot of us. We each know, or have heard of, people who were written up or fired for failing to maintain their yearly training.

But Clinton just blithely blows it off as not important? And when she screws things up big by letting herself get phished, or sends and receives classified into, or any number of things that are no-no's, OUR computers are remediated with more group policy lock downs. Yep... that whole affair has ticked off quite a few of us...

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http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/08/02/nsa-has-clintons-deleted-emai...

I was reading a Fox News article which said that an NSA whistle blower, William Binney, says that her emails are most likely in a searchable database that would be accessible by the NSA and "a number of agencies in the US government".

In this article there was a link to Breitbart, with a more in depth article with Binney.

http://www.breitbart.com/jerusalem/2016/07/31/exclusive-nsa-architect-ag...

There I found something I have never seen in any articles about her emails:

And the other point is that Hillary, according to an article published by the Observer in March of this year, has a problem with NSA because she compromised Gamma material. Now that is the most sensitive material at NSA. And so there were a number of NSA officials complaining to the press or to the people who wrote the article that she did that. She lifted the material that was in her emails directly out of Gamma reporting. That is a direct compromise of the most sensitive material at the NSA. So she’s got a real problem there. So there are many people who have problems with what she has done in the past. So I don’t necessarily look at the Russians as the only one(s) who got into those emails.

The Observer defined the GAMMA classification:

GAMMA compartment, which is an NSA handling caveat that is applied to extraordinarily sensitive information (for instance, decrypted conversations between top foreign leadership, as this was).

Here is the link from this story:

http://observer.com/2016/03/hillary-has-an-nsa-problem/

I see that it's from March 18, 2016, but I had not seen it previously.

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WindDancer13's picture

Blumenthal? I know there was a big to-do for a short bit about him having given her some documents that he should not have had access to.

I am guessing those are the ones that even Congress are not being allowed to see.

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We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.--Aristotle
If there is no struggle there is no progress.--Frederick Douglass

The Observer article makes the connection. How can these people NOT be in prison?

3/18/16

"Now, over two months later, I can confirm that the contents of Sid Blumenthal’s June 8, 2011, email to Hillary Clinton, sent to her personal, unclassified account, were indeed based on highly sensitive NSA information. The agency investigated this compromise and determined that Mr. Blumenthal’s highly detailed account of Sudanese goings-on, including the retelling of high-level conversations in that country, was indeed derived from NSA intelligence.

Specifically, this information was illegally lifted from four different NSA reports, all of them classified “Top Secret / Special Intelligence.” Worse, at least one of those reports was issued under the GAMMA compartment, which is an NSA handling caveat that is applied to extraordinarily sensitive information (for instance, decrypted conversations between top foreign leadership, as this was). GAMMA is properly viewed as a SIGINT Special Access Program, or SAP, several of which from the CIA Ms. Clinton compromised in another series of her “unclassified” emails.

Currently serving NSA officials have told me they have no doubt that Mr. Blumenthal’s information came from their reports. “It’s word-for-word, verbatim copying,” one of them explained. “In one case, an entire paragraph was lifted from an NSA report” that was classified Top Secret / Special Intelligence.

How Mr. Blumenthal got his hands on this information is the key question, and there’s no firm answer yet. The fact that he was able to take four separate highly classified NSA reports—none of which he was supposed to have any access to—and pass the details of them to Hillary Clinton via email only hours after NSA released them in Top Secret / Special Intelligence channels indicates something highly unusual, as well as illegal, was going on.

Suspicion naturally falls on Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA senior official who was Mr. Blumenthal’s intelligence fixer, his supplier of juicy spy gossip, who conveniently died last August before email-gate became front-page news. However, he, too, had left federal service years before and should not have had any access to current NSA reports."

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WindDancer13's picture

How can these people NOT be in prison?

[video:https://youtu.be/I8P80A8vy9I]

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We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.--Aristotle
If there is no struggle there is no progress.--Frederick Douglass

kharma's picture

Hubris Hillary. She is too good for the little people rules.

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There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties.. This...is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.--John Adams

The revelation also could renew calls for the Department of State to strip her of her security clearance. The co-founder of at least one retired military officers organization has called for a suspension of her clearance.

Don't tell me she still has a security clearance after she became a private citizen.

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Alphalop's picture

prevent the individual from obtaining such clearances in the future.

Kind of hard to run the country when you can't access classified info, which I think would make the candidate automatically disqualified from holding office.

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"I used to vote Republican & Democrat, I also used to shit my pants. Eventually I got smart enough to stop doing both things." -Me

but the way this reads she still has a security clearance. Does that mean bush, cheney, b clinton, Jimmy Carter all still have security clearances?

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Alphalop's picture

In accordance with a practice established by President Harry S. Truman, presidential nominees of both major political parties receive intelligence briefings at some point between the summer political conventions and the presidential elections every four years. Assuming a candidate is an incumbent president or vice president, he is already accustomed to receiving such briefings, but for a contender who has not served in the inner circles of a previous administration, the briefing is an entirely new experience. The pace of briefings intensifies once a candidate is chosen in the November elections, and continues in the period leading up to inauguration day. Thereafter, the new chief executive will receive intelligence briefings on a regular basis in the form of the presidential daily briefing (PDB).

Read more: http://www.faqs.org/espionage/Pa-Po/Politics-the-Briefings-of-United-Sta...

If a candidate was stripped of clearance they would no longer be able to get these briefs, which both will be receiving otherwise.

It would also undermine their campaign completely, after all, if you cannot be trusted with security briefs you obviously can't be trusted with nuke codes...

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"I used to vote Republican & Democrat, I also used to shit my pants. Eventually I got smart enough to stop doing both things." -Me

didn't know this but it makes sense. I reckon they won't revoke the queen's security clearance - obama wouldn't allow that. Maybe someone should appoint her a babysitter/emailsitter.

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that might be another thing Bill can do, since he is such an upstanding servant of the people. Or maybe no clearance is needed; none was required for all of those people, her attorney, Blumenthal etc. with access to her server. Once again, rules are for little guys.

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