By CHRISTOPHER MANION
Given the current unpleasantness surrounding the impeachment proceedings on the floor of the Senate, many wonder just what constitutes a “high crime” or “misdemeanor.” In reflecting on past occasions that might have been considered worthy under the Constitution’s definition, this writer’s eye drifted to a letter that arrived some five years ago. It’s still sitting on my desk. The author was one Beth Cobert, “Acting Director of the White House Office of Personnel Management,” commonly known as OPM.
Cobert’s letter explains that since June 2015, OPM “has offered credit and identity theft protection services at no charge to individuals impacted by the cyber incident involving personnel records. Because your data — which may have included your personal information — was included in the personnel records incident, OPM offers these services to you at no charge.”
The “personnel records incident”? What was this all about?
Well, in July 2015, OPM announced that it had been the victim of hackers. The Obama administration revealed that the massive security breach included the personal records of more than 22 million (not a misprint) people, including government employees as well as a wide array of others.
Obama officials offered one excuse after another. They stridently resisted admitting that the attack had been conducted by Chinese Communist intelligence agencies. Even Sen. John McCain criticized the Obama administration’s stonewalling when OPM Director Katherine Archuleta testified at a Senate hearing. (Archuleta, who was celebrated by the White House as “the first Latina director of OPM,” was forced to resign several days later.)
Well, thanks to the breach, what does the Chinese Communist intelligence community now know about us? One report addressed the details: “U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials are particularly concerned over the theft of forms known as SF-86s that current and prospective federal workers, including certain military personnel and even contractors, submit for security clearances. The forms require applicants to provide personal information not only about themselves but also relatives, friends, ‘associates,’ and foreign contacts spanning several years. The forms also ask applicants about past drug use, financial history, mental health history, and personal relationships.”
Today, thousands of those affected are still in government, many of them undoubtedly in senior decision-making positions that require top-secret clearances. Well, Communist China now knows everything about us.
Everything.
Obama’s OPM waited another month before finally admitting that the Chinese also possessed 5.6 million sets of our fingerprints alongside those other records.
As Wired Magazine observed at the time, “when hackers steal your password, you change it. When hackers steal your fingerprints, they’ve got an unchangeable credential that lets them spoof your identity for life. When they steal 5.6 million of those irrevocable biometric identifiers from U.S. federal employees — many with secret clearances — well, that’s very bad.”
Consider: If you, like me, are among those 5.6 million people, and, like me, your phone or pad opens at the touch of your finger, then a Chinese Communist agent — or any criminal gang who pays China’s corrupt government’s going price — can easily open your device and download all of the information contained there or in in the “cloud” where you save all your data.
Crime And (No) Punishment
Why did this happen, and why hadn’t it happened before? To find out, The Wanderer spoke with Joseph Morris, a prominent Chicago attorney who served as OPM’s General Counsel during the Reagan administration.
The database stolen by the Chinese, Morris told me, “included not only my records and all those of everyone who might in layman’s terms qualify as a federal civil servant. But that’s not all: It contained the records of all members of Congress, all members of the federal judiciary, all employees of the legislative and judicial branches.”
Morris also revealed a shocking detail that the Obama administration failed to publicize. The stolen trove “included records of those clandestine employees of the United States who live and work in other countries as foreign nationals but who, for one reason or another, have retirement, health insurance, and life insurance accounts with OPM.
“For example,” he continued, “consider the foreign official who everyone, including the Chinese Communists, thought was the finance minister of Ruritania. The Chinese might have bribed this official to act as a criminal conduit for billions of dollars in laundered money. Now the Chinese Communists discover that the official was all the while on the payroll of a major U.S. intelligence agency! And now they know where he lives.
“Thousands of such secret American intelligence contacts were now potential assassination targets,” Morris continued, “not only for the Chinese, but for other Communist regimes whom China might inform — always for a price.”
Former FBI agent Robert Hanssen, a convicted spy for the Soviet Union, was sent to prison for life because his treachery led to the assassination by the KGB of a handful of Russian officials who were secretly cooperating with the United States. The Obama administration’s incompetence and indolence was of a far greater magnitude. It revealed untold hundreds, even thousands, of such friends of the United States. And yet, not one Obama official was ever punished for allowing one of the worst intelligence disasters in U.S. history.
“The Russians and the North Koreans stole additional U.S. Government files” under Obama, Morris said, “just as the Russians were stealing files from the Democratic National Committee as late as 2016. The administration of Barack Obama knew all about all of this, but neither prevented it, nor seasonably warned the victims (including, famously, Donna Brazile) about it, nor prosecuted it after the fact, nor willingly admitted it.”
We asked Morris why such a shocking penetration of America’s national security hadn’t happened before.
“Well,” he said, “when I was the General Counsel of OPM, I was also the Security Officer of the agency. I was responsible for all personnel, physical, and information security of the agency. That included assessing all related suitability, clearance, and access adjudications. We had a small staff of security professionals who assisted me in this work. Their office was an adjunct to, and physically co-located with, the General Counsel’s office at OPM Headquarters.
“Let the record show that, on our watch, neither the Communist Chinese, Russians, nor Koreans got their fingers on a single OPM retirement record. Our secret of success? We kept them all under lock and key in a former coal mine under a small town in western Pennsylvania, which was staffed by patriotic Americans who carefully observed everyone who came in and out of town, let alone in and out of the mine. Most importantly, we didn’t digitize any of the records or put the database online. We couldn’t be ‘hacked,’ period. And despite the fact that Al Gore had not yet invented the Internet, my colleagues at OPM managed to pay all the retirement benefits and insurance claims of millions of people on time every month.”
Is Manifest Incompetence
Impeachable?
According to China scholar Steven Mosher of the Population Research Institute, when Obama met with Chinese Premier Xi in September of 2015, Xi pledged that China would stop its cybercrime. A year later, Obama had a private dinner with Xi. Even though China’s massive thievery had continued unabated, Global Warming was on the agenda.
Obama’s insouciant and blatant disregard for national security caused the most massive breach of U.S. intelligence in recent history. Why wasn’t he impeached? And would he be impeached today?
Democrat impeachment leaders have applied a new standard for the Senate trial of Donald Trump: rather than being innocent until proven guilty, Speaker Pelosi and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Nadler insist that the president must prove his innocence,
The smug, arrogant Barack Obama was a party to this heinous crime. By the Democrats’ standard, he should be impeached and convicted retroactively for his administration’s gross negligence in the Chinese Communist Cybertheft Affair. As Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker used to say, “That door swings both ways.”
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