First, a preemptive note. In his March 16 diary, Kos wrote:
You can still criticize Clinton if you are trying to push her to the left or trying to make her a better candidate (and yes, that even includes sober discussions of news events that might negatively impact her candidacy).
I am not in fact criticizing Clinton in this diary, but I am discussing a news event which might impact her candidacy. Therefore I believe this diary is allowed under the site rules.
Second, a caveat regarding the source of this allegation. The author of this article is John Schindler. He is a former NSA analyst who has, to put it mildly, been a long-time critic of Secretary Clinton.
With that out of the way, Schindler's latest article makes a specific and startling allegation regarding an email sent by Sid Blumenthal (PDF) to Sec. Clinton on June 8, 2011:
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 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.
I see three possibilities here.
1) Schindler is lying. This is of course possible, he does have a history of hostility towards Clinton. But it seems pretty high-risk and therefore unlikely to me.
2) People inside NSA are lying to Schindler. This would be a somewhat scary scenario, because it would mean an anti-Clinton agenda inside the intelligence community strong enough to lead to an active disinformation campaign.
3) The story is more or less true. This would raise a whole slew of questions. How the heck would Blumenthal have that kind of access to virtually real-time NSA reports? Who were his sources and how wide does this spread? Why was he forwarding this kind of stuff to Clinton at all (presumable she would have access to the original reports within the classified systems) and by this insecure channel? Who faces any legal risk?
But the big inconsistency which makes me question possibility (3) is the fact that the State Department released this email in full with no redactions. That makes no sense if this story about verbatim copying from TS/SI reports is true. They redacted material about news reports on the CIA drone program (which everybody knows about.) Why not redact this?
Which sends me back to possibilities (1) and (2). If it’s (1) then no big deal I suppose. But if it’s (2) then this is a serious problem which I think the president personally needs to deal with by seeing to it that the IC publicly sets the record straight.