Sidney Blumenthal (l) and Hillary Clinton
How ironic that the person responsible for the world knowing that Hillary Clinton maintained a private email server while secretary of state has a name that rhymes with Lucifer. Marcel Lehel Lazar, an unemployed taxi driver from Romania, is the hacker who uses Guccifer as his nom de Internet, writes Kimberley Strassel in the WSJ.
Mr. Guccifer was arrested in 2014 and extradited to the U.S. earlier this year. He claims to have easily and repeatedly hacked Mrs. Clinton’s server. “It was like an open orchid on the Internet. There were hundreds of folders,” he told NBC News.
Recently, Bill Clinton has been on the road arguing that his wife’s emails “were retroactively classified as confidential, secret or top-secret after she received or sent them and, therefore, she had no notice of their sensitivity.”
Andrew F. Napolitano writes at Fox News that there are two reasons Mr. Clinton’s arguments don’t hold up:
Emails are confidential, secret or top-secret at the time they are created, whether marked or not.” Furthermore, Mrs. Clinton “signed an oath on her first full day as secretary of state — after she received a two-hour tutorial from two FBI agents on the proper care and lawful handling of state secrets. In that oath, she acknowledged that she had an obligation to recognize and protect state secrets on the basis of the sensitive nature of the information contained in them — whether they bore classified warnings or markings or not.
What Guccifer did with his material or why is anyone’s guess, but as Ms. Strassel points out:
The bigger point is that an unemployed taxi driver in Romania, using nothing more than a desktop computer, was able to infiltrate Mr. Blumenthal’s account and discover that a woman privy to America’s closest-held secrets was using a home-brew server.
The Chinese are bright—even brighter than Romanian taxi drivers. They employ hackers whose only job is to infiltrate the U.S. government. Those hackers have supercomputers at their service. They have lists upon lists of relatives and friends and aides of powerful people. When they break into accounts, they don’t publicize it.
Here was a server that lacked a host of cybersecurity experts to guard it, even as it held potential treasure. It was the equivalent of finding Fort Knox with nothing but a bicycle lock on it. Pay no mind to reports that the “server logs” show no evidence of a hack. Logs aren’t definitive.
There’s a reason why the government demands its employees use protected servers, a reason why Mrs. Clinton’s team had to force an exception. Because it isn’t safe. Because there are many, many Guccifers.
Debbie Young
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