Russia is a threat or not a threat at all, depending on which side of the aisle you are on and whether your side sits in Oval Office. Russia as a threat was a joke as far as media and democrats were concerned when Romney said it, and Russia as a threat is a joke now, as far as Trumpers are concerned when the FBI and CIA and NSA and congress and the special counsel and foreign intelligence agencies and the U.N. and the Ukraine say it.
But you don’t have to go by who is in office. You could just check out the actual actions of Russia. Like the fact that they had a spy working at the United States Embassy in Moscow for OVER A DECADE.
(For those working out the math, that means they were spying both during AND BEFORE Donald Trump came down the escalator. Sorry, Robert.)
US counter-intelligence investigators discovered a suspected Russian spy had been working undetected in the heart of the American embassy in Moscow for more than a decade, the Guardian has learned.
The Russian national had been hired by the US Secret Service and is understood to have had access to the agency’s intranet and email systems, which gave her a potential window into highly confidential material including the schedules of the president and vice-president.
The woman had been working for the Secret Service for years before she came under suspicion in 2016 during a routine security sweep conducted by two investigators from the US Department of State’s Regional Security Office (RSO).
Hired by the Secret Service. Great work.
She was finally fired last year after the Trump administration’s Russia purge and expulsions.
An intelligence source told the Guardian the woman was dismissed last summer after the state department revoked her security clearance. The dismissal came shortly before a round of demanded by the Kremlin after Washington imposed more sanctions on the country.
The order to remove more than 750 US personnel from its 1,200-strong diplomatic mission is understood to have provided cover for her removal.
“The Secret Service is trying to hide the breach by firing [her],” the source said. “The damage was already done but the senior management of the Secret Service did not conduct any internal investigation to assess the damage and to see if [she] recruited any other employees to provide her with more information.
At Hot Air, Townsend points out that the Secret Service was worried about bad PR.
Why did it take so long for the Secret Service to get rid of her? A fear of embarrassment to the agency, if the reporting is to be believed. I would think that an investigation, at the very least, would be necessary to determine if she recruited others to spy and pass along confidential information.
The Secret Service issued a statement that said “It was specifically the duties of the FSN position in Moscow to assist our attaches and agency by engaging the Russian government, including the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), the Russian Ministry of the Interior (MVD), and the Russian Federal Protective Service (FSO) in furtherance of Secret Service interests.”
“At no time, in any US Secret Service office, have FSNs been provided or placed in a position to obtain national security information.”
Hot Air is not buying it.
This defies logic. The alleged spy had frequent meetings with the FSB and had access to top confidential material, not to mention the ability to put the lives of other Secret Services members in jeopardy. It was the meetings with the FSB that caused her to be caught in the first place.
Did this woman’s computer access allow her to help the Russian government hack American targets? Shouldn’t someone be asking that question?