Here’s why Hillary Clinton losing her security clearance matters for the rest of us

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State Department: Clinton surrenders security clearance

Hillary Clinton no longer has a security clearance. A letter released from the Department of State to Senator Chuck Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, says she lost her clearance on August 30 at her request. The State Department also withdrew security clearances from five people Clinton had previously requested clearances for, as she had designated them “researchers.” One was Cheryl Mills, who was once the deputy White House counsel for President Bill Clinton who defended him during his 1999 impeachment trial. The names of the others were redacted.

The mainstream media is treating the loss of these clearances as a move by Clinton to avoid a political snub by the Trump administration.

Treating this security issue in such a purely political manner misses a growing problem that the media is purposely trying to ignore, as an honest analysis of it doesn’t help their attacks on the current administration.

Hillary Clinton should have lost her clearance back when the government found out she had classified information on her private servers. Actually, they should have done this even before that; she should have lost her security clearance when she left her public position, as secretary of state, for her private quest to get the nation’s top job.

What other employer allows former employees to access their networks? Companies commonly terminate employees email accounts and access before they even tell them they’ve been let go.

But this isn’t some private company. This is our federal government, an unfathomably large bureaucracy that has a lot of our personal information, top-secret data and so much more in its hands.

All of this should focus our attention yet again on how wide-open our government has allowed itself to become. While doing the research for my new book “Spies in Congress—Inside the Democrats’ Covered-Up Cyber Scandal” it became horrifyingly clear how open congressional offices are to insider threats.

For instance, the group of House IT aides who made up what amounted to a spy ring didn’t even have to undergo background checks to get their insider positions—jobs that allowed them to see and copy all of the emails and more from the members of Congress they worked for.

What other employer allows former employees to access their networks? Companies commonly terminate employees email accounts and access before they even tell them they’ve been let go.

Evidence shows that Imran Awan, the head of the group who was an IT aide working for Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Democrat from Florida, was spying on congressmen and even congressional staffers. A current IT aide who wants his name kept out of print told me Awan even used his own email address as the Apple IDs when setting up staffer’s phones.

“The only reason I can think of for why Imran would do that is this would have given him the ability to see everything these staffers were doing,” said the House IT aide, a contracted employee who has more than a decade of experience working for congressmen.

This IT spying scandal, however, was covered up – as it only had to do with Democrats in Congress, the mainstream media apparently had no interest in pursuing the story.

But this lax security is not simply a political story. It puts every one of us in jeopardy. A congressman whose private emails or other data are in the hands of someone who can blackmail or otherwise influence them is a risk. For all of us. And without public pressure, it’s next to impossible to know whether Congress has tightened security to prevent this kind of spying from taking place.

A more recent case offers little to assuage such concerns.

Only weeks ago, a volunteer on the staff of a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Jackson A. Cosko, was arrested after Capitol Police became aware the Wikipedia pages of three U.S. Senators had been edited to include restricted personal information without their knowledge or permission.

“On the night of Oct. 2, 2018, according to the affidavit,” says a Department of Justice press release, “a witness saw Cosko at a computer in the office of a U.S. Senator who had once employed him. The witness confronted Cosko, who left the office. An investigation led to Cosko’s arrest by the U.S. Capitol Police.”

If Cosko hadn’t posted the information, as he is alleged to have done, for political purposes (called “doxxing”) but had instead used it privately or even gave it or sold it to a news agency or a foreign government, he might never have been arrested. Or he might have gotten off just as Imran Awan and his associates did.

By overlooking and explaining away how Hillary Clinton treated government data, including classified information, and then covering up what Imran Awan allegedly did for years in the House, the mainstream media has done a massive disservice to the state of our democracy. Light needs to be shined on Congress and on anyone who abuses the safeguards of our system so that reforms can take place.