NEW YORK POST:
DICKILEAKS-FBI REOPENS E-MAIL CASE
STROKING GUN- WEINER SEXT PROBE FOUND HILL EVIDENCE
There are four cyber-security stories that have cropped up recently to which everyone should be paying close attention:
This past week, DMV offices all over California had their computer systems shut down by what was apparently a hardware failure. There’s evidently no reason to suspect the DMV’s systems were attacked, but the incident shows off the frailty of government computer systems, the ease with which the whole edifice can collapse when a single brick is smashed (accidentally or intentionally).
The week before, websites all over the country were shut down when a major American Domain Name System host was attacked. DNS hosts handle the conversion of web addresses that make sense to men — say, NationalReview.com — into the universal system of numerical addresses that make sense to computers. Without the conversion of one to the other, the name you type into your browser’s address bar won’t connect you to that website’s servers; your internet provider won’t understand what you’re looking for. Unless you know your destination website’s IP address (National Review’s is, for instance, 104.16.126.47) and unless it allows direct IP access (National Review does not) the website becomes inaccessible.
That is exactly what happened to large swaths of the Internet two weeks ago, when Dyn, one of the U.S.’s major DNS hosts, was flooded by a tidal wave of artificial internet traffic. It tried to convert addresses for so many fake browsing requests that it was unable to respond to the real ones, like a bartender getting 10,000 orders for Banana Daiquiris just before you try to order a beer. With their DNS host overwhelmed, sites such as Twitter, CNN, Paypal, Reddit, Spotify, and Netflix stopped working.
One week before that, WikiLeaks began publishing John Podesta’s e-mails, and the Clinton campaign decided that it would try to redirect the story toward Russia, which they say is responsible for stealing Podesta’s email. That might not be true; it’s certainly possible that it is — various intelligence agencies seem to think so. There is no doubt that Russia would like to tamper with our elections, or, short of that, to appear to be tampering with them. Because the Obama administration has a more or less established policy of non-response to cyber-attacks — from Russia, from China, from North Korea, from Iran — the Kremlin no doubt felt comfortable giving it a try.
Felony mishandling of classified information, including our nation’s most closely guarded intelligence secrets; the misappropriation and destruction of tens of thousands of government records — these are serious criminal offenses. To this point, the Justice Department and FBI have found creative ways not to charge Hillary Clinton for them. Whether this will remain the case has yet to be seen. As we go to press, the stunning news has broken that the FBI’s investigation is being reopened. It appears, based on early reports, that in the course of examining communications devices in a separate “sexting” investigation of disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner, the bureau stumbled on relevant e-mails — no doubt connected to Huma Abedin, Mr. Weiner’s wife and, more significantly, Mrs. Clinton’s closest confidant. According to the New York Times, the FBI has seized at least one electronic device belonging to Ms. Abedin as well. New e-mails, never before reviewed by the FBI, have been recovered.
The news is still emerging, and there will be many questions — particularly if it turns out that the bureau failed to obtain Ms. Abedin’s communications devices earlier in the investigation, a seemingly obvious step. As we await answers, we can only observe that, whatever the FBI has found, it was significant enough for director James Comey to sense the need to notify Congress, despite knowing what a bombshell this would be just days before the presidential election.
One thing, however, is already clear. Whatever the relevance of the new e-mails to the probe of Clinton’s classified-information transgressions and attempt to destroy thousands of emails, these offenses may pale in comparison with Hillary Clinton’s most audacious violations of law: Crimes that should still be under investigation; crimes that will, in fitting Watergate parlance, be a cancer on the presidency if she manages to win on November 8.
Mrs. Clinton appears to have converted the office of secretary of state into a racketeering enterprise. This would be a violation of the RICO law — the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1971 (codified in the U.S. penal code at sections 1961 et seq.).
UNESCO has joined forces with Islamic State. The fundamentalists now have a new weapon: resolutions passed by servile international bodies.
An earlier delay and the opposition of UNESCO’s chief, Irina Bokova, had raised hopes that this act of jihadist, barbaric, unjust, and, frankly, arrogant supremacism might be voted down. It was not. Now a new lie was given the sanction of the world’s largest and most unaccountable body whose reason for being is to preserve significant sites, not to bowdlerize them.
Lies by UNESCO to rewrite history, erasing all traces of Judaism and Christianity to favour a jihadist Islamic fancy, were already under way in 2015. UNESCO fraudulently renamed two ancient Biblical Jewish sites, Rachel’s Tomb and the Cave of the Patriarchs, as Islamic sites. Historically, Islam did not even exist until the seventh century.
This is the history of Islam, how it takes over — with both hard jihad (violence) and soft jihad (usurping history, migration [hijrah], political and cultural infiltration), and intimidation (soft jihad with the threat of hard jihad underneath it). What is even more saddening is that often, as with this vote, it is done with the West’s cooperation and voluntary submission.
Before the United Nations, with its authoritarian, anti-democratic voting blocs, finishes eradicating Western, Judeo-Christian civilization, as it is clearly trying to do, it is high time for Western democracies to run, not walk, away, before further harm comes to them too, as it surely promises to do.
UNESCO last August planned to vote on the historical status of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount and its associated Western Wall. Back then, this author stated that UNESCO’s plan was to deny any Jewish link to this most central of all Jewish holy sites, to trash a history going back thousands of years, and to claim the Mount and the Wall as Islamic sites.
Islam believes that it is eternal and had therefore preceded the other two great monotheisms, Judaism and Christianity, even though it was only to become visible to the world through Mohammad in the seventh century AD, but entitled to elbow out the two older religions.
WASHINGTON—A Russian jet fighter flew within a half-mile of an American military aircraft over Syria earlier this month, prompting U.S. officials to register pointed concerns to Moscow, U.S. military officials said.
The encounter was sufficiently close that the “jet wash,” or turbulence from the passing Russian fighter, was felt by the crew of the American aircraft, according to Col. John Dorrian, the spokesman for the American-led coalition against Islamic State in Baghdad.
“That’s closer than we’d like,” he said of the Oct. 17 incident.
Col. Dorrian said U.S. officials have determined thus far that the Russian jet fighter’s near miss to the U.S. aircraft wasn’t done for any “nefarious” purpose, but was an accident. The jet fighter apparently was escorting a Russian spy plane. U.S. officials declined to identify the American plane involved, citing the sensitivity of its mission.
U.S. military personnel aboard the American craft immediately contacted the Russian aircraft crew. The following day, U.S. officials followed up on the incident more formally through an official channel with the Russian military, first established in October 2015.
The memorandum of understanding establishing the channel provides for routine military-to-military exchanges in an effort to “de-conflict” the airspace over Syria. The more formal and higher-level exchange between senior level military and civilian officials on both sides may also take place as needed.
LOS ANGELES—Federal prosecutors charged two California men with conspiring to smuggle fighter-jet parts to Iran in a scheme that allegedly dates to 2009.
The pair worked with two Iranian nationals to break laws that restrict exports to the longtime U.S. adversary, the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles said in a statement Friday.
A nine-count federal indictment unsealed Wednesday alleged that Zavik Zargarian of Glendale tried to help one of the Iranians purchase more than $3 million worth of parts for fighter jets, including F-15s and F-18s. Their would-be supplier was an undercover federal agent.
Prosecutors also said Vache Nayirian of Los Angeles exported more than 7,000 fluorocarbon rubber O-rings, which could have military uses, including for aircraft landing gear.
To evade detection, the shipments went to other destinations in the Persian Gulf before being routed to Iran, where the national air force received them, prosecutors said.
Both defendants have been assigned court-appointed attorneys and pleaded not guilty Wednesday. The attorney representing Mr. Nayirian questioned the strength of the government’s case, given that it began seven years ago and a grand jury produced the indictment in 2014.
Attorney General Loretta Lynch is declining to comply with an investigation by leading members of Congress about the Obama administration’s secret efforts to send Iran $1.7 billion in cash earlier this year, prompting accusations that Lynch has “pleaded the Fifth” Amendment to avoid incriminating herself over these payments, according to lawmakers and communications exclusively obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) and Rep. Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.) initially presented Lynch in October with a series of questions about how the cash payment to Iran was approved and delivered.
In an Oct. 24 response, Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik responded on Lynch’s behalf, refusing to answer the questions and informing the lawmakers that they are barred from publicly disclosing any details about the cash payment, which was bound up in a ransom deal aimed at freeing several American hostages from Iran.
The response from the attorney general’s office is “unacceptable” and provides evidence that Lynch has chosen to “essentially plead the fifth and refuse to respond to inquiries regarding [her] role in providing cash to the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism,” Rubio and Pompeo wrote on Friday in a follow-up letter to Lynch, according to a copy obtained by the Free Beacon.
The inquiry launched by the lawmakers is just one of several concurrent ongoing congressional probes aimed at unearthing a full accounting of the administration’s secret negotiations with Iran.
“It is frankly unacceptable that your department refuses to answer straightforward questions from the people’s elected representatives in Congress about an important national security issue,” the lawmakers wrote. “Your staff failed to address any of our questions, and instead provided a copy of public testimony and a lecture about the sensitivity of information associated with this issue.”
Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey revealed Friday that the FBI has reopened its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server and her handling of classified material, merely 11 days before Election Day. Mr. Comey cited new evidence, but the disclosure raises troubling new questions about the Democratic candidate and FBI.
In a letter to Congress, Mr. Comey wrote that in connection “with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation.” The FBI “cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant,” but presumably the new emails are significant enough for Mr. Comey to conclude he had no choice but to take the extraordinary step of returning to the Clinton file so close to Nov. 8.
Liberals decided in real time Friday that Mr. Comey is now a partisan attempting to influence the election, but the same liberals had a ball after his July media appearance when he created a new legal standard of “extremely careless” instead of “grossly negligent” to exonerate Mrs. Clinton. Then the FBI chief was the reincarnation of Eliot Ness. At the third debate, Mrs. Clinton cited Mr. Comey’s probity: “The FBI conducted a yearlong investigation into my emails. They concluded there was no case.” Liberals can’t have it both ways.
The reality is that Mr. Comey’s Clinton probe has been a kid-glove exercise all along. Only days before he prematurely ended the investigation and proclaimed that “no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case”—a decision for the Justice Department, not the FBI— Bill Clinton met with Attorney General Loretta Lynch on an Phoenix airport tarmac.
When the FBI later released its investigation summary and interview notes on the Friday before Labor Day weekend, they showed Mrs. Clinton telling agents that she “could not recall” or “did not remember specifically” key details and events 27 times. The interview wasn’t taped, and Mrs. Clinton wasn’t put under oath, though it is a crime to lie to the FBI.
Recent revelations include the immunity deals extended to Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson to get them to surrender their laptops. The FBI could have sought a subpoena or search warrant to do as much, but Justice didn’t empanel a grand jury. Ms. Mills and Ms. Samuelson were allowed to serve as lawyers for Mrs. Clinton at her FBI interview, despite being material witnesses. Their deals specified that the laptops would be destroyed, meaning they can’t now be re-searched and cross-checked against Mr. Comey’s new information.
This week we learned that Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe steered more than $675,000 to the political campaign of the wife of FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, who oversaw the Clinton investigation in the FBI’s Washington D.C. field office. Mr. McAuliffe is a longtime Clinton friend who is under FBI investigation himself over campaign finances. CONTINUE AT SITE
The FBI bombshell is not necessarily a gamechanging event. The Clinton campaign, and its mainstream media extension, have weathered with surprising ease the fainting episode on September 11.
In the next two days they will focus on:
the possibility (they will claim likelihood) that Anthony Weiner’s/Huma Abedin’s server does not contain any emails not known to the FBI already, let alone those designated confidential, classified, secret or top secret – that was Hillary Clinton’s predictable immediate reaction;
that the FBI will not be able to sift through thousands of emails quickly enough to provide a clear answer to (1) before the election, which is the coded message behind the Clinton camp’s demand for a “detailed and thorough” investigation – demands for “immediate” disclosure notwithstanding – and an unnamed official has already indicated that it was not likely that the FBI’s review of the additional emails could be completed by Election Day; and
that the FBI was acting under political pressure from Clinton’s foes: Sen. Dianne Feinstein has already declared that “the FBI has a history of extreme caution near Election Day so as not to influence the results. Today’s break from that tradition is appalling.”
The one truly appalling event in this saga was James Comey’s decision last spring not to ask for a grand jury, without which the entire investigation into Clinton’s emails was predictably sidetracked. On that inglorious form, his surprise Friday announcement may indicate that the potential for scandal is so great that his options for further damage limitation in Clinton’s interest were extremely limited.
However . . . In 1982 I interviewed for the BBC World Service one of Ireland’s best respected diplomats and political commentators, Connor Cruise O’Brien, at his home by the cliffs above the Irish Sea. In passing he mentioned Ireland’s scandal-ridden prime minister of the day, Charles Haughey, who had managed repeatedly to survive numerous disclosures of corruption and wrongdoing. O’Brian said that if he saw Charlie Haughey “buried at midnight at a crossroads with a stake driven through his heart, I should continue to wear a clove of garlic around my neck, just in case.”
WASHINGTON — A new trove of emails that appear pertinent to the now-closed investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server was discovered after the F.B.I. seized at least one electronic device shared by Anthony D. Weiner and his estranged wife, Huma Abedin, a top aide to Mrs. Clinton, federal law enforcement officials said Friday.
The F.B.I. is investigating illicit text messages that Mr. Weiner, a former Democratic congressman from New York, sent to a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina. The bureau told Congress on Friday that it had uncovered new emails related to the Clinton case — one federal official said they numbered in the tens of thousands — potentially reigniting an issue that has weighed on the presidential campaign and offering a lifeline to Donald J. Trump less than two weeks before the election.
In a letter to Congress, the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, said that emails had surfaced in an unrelated case, and that they “appear to be pertinent to the investigation.”
Mr. Comey said the F.B.I. was taking steps to “determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.” He said he did not know how long it would take to review the emails, or whether the new information was significant.
Mr. Trump has fallen behind Mrs. Clinton in most national polls and in many key states. Polls have been tightening in recent days, however, amid the daily release of hacked Clinton campaign emails published by WikiLeaks.
Mr. Trump seized on the F.B.I. action on Friday at a rally in New Hampshire. To cheers of “lock her up” from his supporters, Mr. Trump said: “Hillary Clinton’s corruption is on a scale we have never seen before. We must not let her take her criminal scheme into the Oval Office.”
After deriding the F.B.I. for weeks as inept and corrupt, Mr. Trump went on to praise the law enforcement agency.
