It’s hardly any wonder that Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes has a "mind meld" with his boss, the president. According to a David Samuels New York Times Magazine article to be published Sunday and already posted to the website, Rhodes, like Barack Obama, is contemptuous of "the American foreign-policy establishment." What Obama calls the "Washington playbook" dictating the sorts of responses available to American policymakers, Rhodes calls the "Blob."

The Blob includes "editors and reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker," etc. It also encompasses, according to Rhodes, Obama's former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, and the administration's first defense secretary Robert Gates. Presumably Leon Panetta, former Pentagon chief and CIA director, who goes on the record to criticize Rhodes and the president, is also part of the Blob, alongside "other Iraq-war promoters from both parties who now whine incessantly about the collapse of the American security order in Europe and the Middle East." In other words, the emotion driving the administration's foreign policy is contempt—contempt for allies, colleagues, and the generations of American policymakers who built the post-WWII international order, ensuring relative global stability, and peace and prosperity at home.

Samuels's profile is an amazing piece of writing about the Holden Caulfield of American foreign policy. He's a sentimental adolescent with literary talent (Rhodes published one short story before his mother's connections won him a job in the world of foreign policy), and high self regard, who thinks that everyone else is a phony. Those readers who found Jeffrey Goldberg's picture of Obama in his March Atlantic profile refreshing for the president's willingness to insult American allies publicly will be similarly cheered here by Rhodes's boast of deceiving American citizens, lawmakers, and allies over the Iran deal. Conversely, those who believe Obama risked American interests to take a cheap shot at allies from the pedestal of the Oval Office will be appalled to see Rhodes dancing in the end zone to celebrate the well-packaged misdirections and even lies—what Rhodes and others call a "narrative"—that won Obama his signature foreign policy initiative.

"Like Obama," writes Samuels:

Rhodes is a storyteller who uses a writer's tools to advance an agenda that is packaged as politics but is often quite personal. He is adept at constructing overarching plotlines with heroes and villains, their conflicts and motivations supported by flurries of carefully chosen adjectives, quotations and leaks from named and unnamed senior officials. He is the master shaper and retailer of Obama's foreign-policy narratives, at a time when the killer wave of social media has washed away the sand castles of the traditional press.

As Rhodes admits, it's not that hard to shape the narrative. "All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus," Rhodes said. "Now they don't. They call us to explain to them what's happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That's a sea change. They literally know nothing."

In Rhodes's "narrative" about the Iran deal, negotiations started when the ostensibly moderate Hassan Rouhani was elected president, providing an opening for the administration to reach out in friendship. In reality, as Samuels gets administration officials to admit, negotiations began when "hardliner" Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was still president. It was Rhodes who framed the Iran deal as a choice between peace and war, and it was Rhodes who set up a messaging unit to sell the deal that created an "echo chamber" in the press. "[Al Monitor reporter] Laura Rozen was my RSS feed," says Tanya Somanader, the 31-year-old who managed @TheIranDeal twitter feed. "She would just find everything and retweet it."

"In the spring of last year," Samuels writes:

legions of arms-control experts began popping up at think tanks and on social media, and then became key sources for hundreds of often-clueless reporters. "We created an echo chamber," [Rhodes] admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. "They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say."

When I suggested that all this dark metafictional play seemed a bit removed from rational debate over America's future role in the world, Rhodes nodded. "In the absence of rational discourse, we are going to discourse the [expletive] out of this," he said. "We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project and whomever else. So we knew the tactics that worked." He is proud of the way he sold the Iran deal. "We drove them crazy," he said of the deal's opponents.

It's not clear whether or not Panetta supported the deal, but he admits he was wrong about Obama's willingness to take all measures to stop Iran from getting a bomb.

As secretary of defense, he tells me, one of his most important jobs was keeping Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and his defense minister, Ehud Barak, from launching a pre-emptive attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. "They were both interested in the answer to the question, 'Is the president serious?' " Panetta recalls. "And you know my view, talking with the president, was: If brought to the point where we had evidence that they're developing an atomic weapon, I think the president is serious that he is not going to allow that to happen."

Panetta stops.

"But would you make that same assessment now?" I ask him.

"Would I make that same assessment now?" he asks. "Probably not."

Rhodes tells Samuels that Don DeLillo is his favorite novelist. "That's the only person I can think of who has confronted these questions of, you know, the individual who finds himself negotiating both vast currents of history and a very specific kind of power dynamics," he tells Samuels. "And that's what it's like to work in the U.S. foreign-policy apparatus in 2016."

So that's it. For the last seven years the American public has been living through a postmodern narrative crafted by an extremely gifted and unspeakably cynical political operative whose job is to wage digital information campaigns designed to dismantle a several-decade old security architecture while lying about the nature of the Iranian regime. No wonder Americans feel less safe—they are.

Romanian Hacker ‘Guccifer’ Just Gave Bernie Sanders the Democratic Nomination

There’s only one Democratic candidate not linked to an ongoing FBI investigation, and his name is Bernie Sanders. Vermont’s Senator will become Democratic nominee for many reasons, but a cyber hacker named “Guccifer” just solidified the fact only one candidate can type an email without scandal. Superdelegates exist so that Republicans like Donald Trump won’t use FBI investigations and foreign hackers against a Democratic nominee.

Forget about foreign hackers for a moment, and listen to the words of Defense Secretary Robert Gates. These words are highlighted in a Hill article titled Ex-Pentagon chief: Iran, China or Russia may have gotten to Clinton server:

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates says he believes foreign countries like Russia, China and Iran may have hacked the private email server Hillary Clinton used while secretary of State.
“...I think the odds are pretty high,” he said
Gates said he agreed with former acting CIA Director Mike Morell’s claim that the server had probably been hacked by either Russia, China or Iran.
He added that the fact that classified intelligence has been found on the server was “a concern for me.”
“I never used email when I was head of CIA or head of the Department of Defense,” Gates said.

Gates believes other nations most likely compromised Clinton’s server. If you don’t trust the recent statements of a Romanian hacker (I believe him), do you trust the views of President Obama’s former Defense Secretary?

Furthermore, imagine if anyone else had endured a year-long FBI criminal investigation. As The Wall Street Journal stated in March, “The criminal investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s email setup is clearly progressing, leaving some officials hopeful the case could wrap up in a matter of months.”

If a foreign hacker claimed to have hacked into Senator Barack Obama’s emails in 2008, Clinton would have won the election that year. Similarly, if Bernie Sanders owned a private server as Vermont’s Senator, there’s no doubt the Clinton campaign would have labeled him a modern-day Aldrich Ames. I addressed this phenomenon, and why Hillary Clinton is able to dodge endless political controversy, during this appearance on CNN New Day.

First, it’s important to note that Hillary Clinton has not been cleared by the FBI. In fact, the FBI hasn’t made any statements, nor has the DOJ issued a verdict on potential indictments. The Daily Banter recently reported that “according to an exclusive CNN report, sources familiar with the FBI probe of Clinton’s private e-mail server are saying that as the investigation nears the end, so far ‘investigators haven’t found evidence to prove that Clinton willfully violated the law.’”

However, “sources familiar with the FBI probe” does not mean the FBI.

It simply means the same anonymous sources Fox News quotes (saying Clinton will end up in jail after this investigating is over) have been asked their opinion. “Sources familiar” with Saddam Hussein helped Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld justify the Iraq War, so we know why this type of journalism leads to chaos. Ultimately, the only recent facts that can’t be disputed involve Huma Abedin and other top Clinton aides being interviewed by the FBI.

Again, if the top aides of Obama in 2008, or Sanders in 2016, were interviewed by the FBI, just imagine the political fallout.

Also, the future Commander in Chief according to the smartest people in the room didn’t “willfully” violate laws, so this means Clinton is qualified to run the country. What they ignore is the reality that owning a server for “convenience” is almost certainly an outright lie. Every defender of Hillary Clinton’s email use, including the unnamed sources “close” to the FBI investigation, assume Clinton’s server was only used for convenience.

In addition, not “willfully” breaking laws doesn’t mean no laws were broken. It’s a sad day for American democracy when supporters of a presidential candidate are proud that no laws were “willfully” broken. Nonetheless, even if Clinton seriously believed a private server was convenient, and there was no political motive, “gross negligence” is enough to prosecute under the Espionage Act.

Hillary Clinton deleted 31,830 emails, and most likely, not all of them were about yoga. Any government records deleted, and that’s a crime.

Then there’s the recent claims of a Romanian hacker named Marcel Lehel Lazar, also known as Guccifer. His statements are addressed in an NBC News article titled Hacker Guccifer Claims He Got Into Hillary Clinton’s Server:

The Romanian hacker who first exposed Hillary Clinton’s private email address is making a bombshell new claim — that he also gained access to the former Secretary of State’s “completely unsecured” server.
“It was like an open orchid on the Internet,” Marcel Lehel Lazar, who uses the devilish handle Guccifer, told NBC News in an exclusive interview from a prison in Bucharest.
“There were hundreds of folders.”
...As political opponents charged that national security was compromised and the FBI launched an investigation, Clinton maintained that the server was safe and there were no security breaks.
“It was a lie, clearly,” Lazar said.
NBC News asked Chris Tarbell, who broke open the Silk Road case, to review Lazar’s explanation of how he got into the server.
“It’s plausible,” Chris Tarbell said, adding that Lazar’s conviction for hacking in Romania showed he had the know-how to carry it out.
Tarbell added that he could not imagine why Lazar would make up a claim that could get him in very hot water.
“To go on television and admit to a felony you didn’t commit seems a little silly,” he said.

Guccifer is likely telling the truth, and former FBI agent Chris Tarbell states “To go on television and admit to a felony you didn’t commit seems a little silly.”

Most importantly, didn’t Clinton ever expect to send or receive Top Secret intelligence as Secretary of State? I explain here why America’s national security was likely compromised by Clinton’s server and why Guccifer just handed the nomination to Bernie Sanders.

But this is H. A. Goodman, it’s hyperbole!

When you evaluate Guccifer’s claim, alongside the viewpoint of Secretary Gates, a former FBI agent, and the head of Obama’s Defense Intelligence Agency (who believes Clinton should “drop out”), then also remember the 22 Top Secret emails. These emails are highlighted in a CNN piece from January titled State Department will not release 22 ‘top secret’ Clinton emails:

The State Department announced Friday that it will not release 22 emails from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton because they contain “top secret” information, the highest level of government classification...

If another Guccifer somewhere in the world accessed these emails, would he or she have publicized their findings?

Guccifer’s relevance in 2016 is enormous. Touching upon this impact, The Daily Beast has a brilliant article by Shane Harris titled Hillary’s Secret Email Was a Cyberspy’s Dream Weapon:

The private email address for Hillary Clinton, which became the talk of Washington this week and created her first major speed bump on her road to the White House, has actually been freely available on the Internet for a year, thanks to a colorful Romanian hacker known as Guccifer.
On March 14, 2013, Guccifer—his real name is Marcel-Lehel Lazar—broke into the AOL account of Sidney Blumenthal, a journalist, former White House aide to Bill Clinton, and personal confidante of Hillary Clinton. Lazar crowed about his exploits to journalists, disclosing a set of memos Blumenthal had written to Clinton in 2012, as well as the personal email address and domain she’s now known to have used exclusively for her personal and official correspondence...
Her email account was the ultimate hacker’s lure. It’s a common technique to impersonate a trusted source via email, in order to persuade a recipient to download spyware hidden inside seemingly innocuous attachments.

Since hackers often “impersonate a trusted source via email,” there are so many ways Clinton’s private server could have been compromised.

While Hillary supporters are dancing in the streets after hearing anonymous sources stating she didn’t “willfully” break laws, the FBI hasn’t formally concluded anything. I explain how the Clinton campaign, and its supporters, view the FBI in the following YouTube segment. Ultimately, this viewpoint, combined with the likelihood that Guccifer did indeed compromise Clinton’s server, will give Bernie Sanders the Democratic nomination.