Looking for Mr. Butterfield

As summer days lengthened in 1973, few Americans grasped the significance of the Watergate scandal. The Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities toiled mostly in obscurity seeking to connect the dots between a third-rate burglary at the Watergate Hotel and the Oval Office. Then on July 16, a bombshell.

Alexander Butterfield, an undistinguished deputy assistant to the president, was sitting in the witness chair, grilled about office procedures by a till then mostly unknown minority counsel, Fred Thompson.

“Mr. Butterfield, are you aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the president?” Thompson asked.

“I was aware of listening devices, yes, sir,” Butterfield replied.

Butterfield went on to describe the taping technology Nixon installed in 1970, which recorded all the president’s conversations leading up to the Watergate break-in. Suddenly an answer to the looming question seemed possible: What did the president know and when did he know it?

How did diplomatic emails addressed to the secretary of state …come to be rerouted through [the Clinton server]?

What followed was a year of courtroom drama to secure the taped evidence. Once in hand it made clear Nixon had obstructed justice and abused power. Congress moved toward impeachment and Nixon resigned on Aug. 9, 1974.

In considering Hillary Clinton’s abuse of email privileges while she was secretary of state, Watergate is a useful precedent—not so much for its historical impact but for the technical details on which it turned. So far, the media and the House Select Committee on Benghazi sleuths are showing neither the savvy nor bulldog tenacity of their Watergate-era predecessors.

Consider what’s come to light so far. Repeated attempts to alert the secretary of state to the deteriorating situation in Benghazi, along with threats to U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, went unheeded by Clinton leading up to the Sept. 11, 2012, attack. In the course of examining related emails, the committee learned that while secretary of state Clinton never had an official government email account.

As The New York Times first reported in March, instead she used a personal email account accessed via a private, unsecured server to conduct official business—likely violating the Federal Records Act and likely compromising national security. The server located in Clinton’s basement had no security protocols, not even a virtual private network that’s a common corporate safeguard. Intelligence officers examining the first 7,000 publicly released emails to her private account quickly cited 150 that should have been classified. The Associated Press reported attempted hacks on her server from China and Russia.

Having looked at thousands of Clinton emails, the select committee needs to focus on the Clinton server. How did diplomatic emails addressed to the secretary of state—including alarms of a pending al-Qaeda ambush in Benghazi—come to be rerouted through it?

Securing the State Department’s diplomatic communication is handled by the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), which answers directly to the secretary of state. Its IT function, I’ve been told, has expanded anywhere from five- to eightfold under the Obama administration. Appointees to State go through extensive security briefings upon their arrival and departure—briefings that cover protocol to send and receive emails, briefings that take place inside a locked, soundproof vault.

The protocol had to be circumvented to reroute Clinton’s email to her private server. That likely required the assistance of someone at INR but also permission above the secretary’s office—likely through the White House’s National Security Council or the Oval Office itself. The only time I’m aware of this issue being raised, when the House select committee tried to subpoena Clinton technology adviser Bryan Pagliano, Pagliano in September pleaded his Fifth Amendment right not to answer the panel’s questions. The select committee should subpoena everyone connected to INR to get to the bottom of what happened in Benghazi on Clinton’s watch when Christopher Stevens became the first American official killed by al-Qaeda.

The compromise of classified information and derelict attitude toward security that led to his and three other deaths ought to rate as worthy of investigation as the Watergate scandal. It turns on an important question about a potential abuse of office past, present—or future: What did Hillary Clinton or someone at the White House know and when did they know it?

Email mbelz@wng.org