Hillary’s Strange Security Adviser How did a big-money Clinton donor get on an expert panel next to nuclear scientists? By Kimberley A. Strassel
http://www.wsj.com/articles/hillarys-strange-security-adviser-1467328345
Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been forced to acknowledge over the past week that the former secretary of state did not, as she had claimed, turn over all her work-related email to the State Department. The new story is that her deletion of these emails was an oversight. Team Clinton is hoping therefore that you won’t hear the story of Rajiv K. Fernando, which would suggest the oversight tale to be yet another untruth.
Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of Mr. Fernando, because you arguably never should have. Mr. Fernando is a one-time Chicago securities trader who in July of 2011 somehow found himself sitting on the International Security Advisory Board, with the ability to access the nation’s most sensitive intelligence.
Mr. Fernando had no background that would have qualified him to sit on the ISAB alongside the likes of former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, former Defense Secretary William Perry, a United Nations chief weapons inspector, members of Congress, and nuclear scientists. That Mr. Fernando didn’t belong was apparent. “We had no idea who he was,” one board member told ABC News. So how exactly did he get there?
We now finally know, thanks to State Department internal emails that the government was forced to turn over to the watchdog group Citizens United. And thanks to ABC News, which began digging into Mr. Fernando’s bizarre appointment when it first happened.
In August 2011, ABC requested a copy of Mr. Fernando’s resume from the State Department. This, the internal emails show, sent a press aide reeling to find answers to how a trader had ended up on the ISAB. Even the aide noted that it was “natural to ask how he got onto the board when compared to the rest of the esteemed list of members.”
The response came only a few hours later in an email from Wade Boese, chief of staff for an undersecretary of state: “The true answer is simply that S staff ( Cheryl Mills) added him,” Mr. Boese wrote. “Raj was not on the list sent to S; he was added at their insistence.”
S, in this situation, stands for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Ms. Mills, a longtime aide, was her chief of staff. Why would Hillary want to entrust the nation’s secrets to a man with no intelligence experience?
Here’s what we do know: Mr. Fernando, before his plum appointment, had given between $100,000 and $250,000 to the William J. Clinton Foundation. He had been a top bundler for Mrs. Clinton in her 2008 presidential run, and later a major Obama fundraiser. He gave tens of thousands more to a political group that helped Hillary pay off her 2008 campaign debt by renting her email list.
The 2011 emails reveal that the State Department knew it had a problem on its hands. “We must protect the Secretary’s and Under Secretary’s name,” the press aide warned. Ms. Mills, the messages say, asked staff to “stall” the news organization. Damage control came in the form of Mr. Fernando’s quick resignation, on grounds of “additional time needed to devote to his business.” Uh huh. CONTINUE AT SITE
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