By Darren Smith, Weekend Contributor

An open letter to Vladimir Putin, President of Russia

President Putin,

As you are certainly aware,  a great controversy is roiling here in the United States where a former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, maintained, diverted, and in some cases destroyed official email correspondence associated with her duties. She  hosted these records on a personal home-brew email server maintained under her control. We are encountering difficulty obtaining these records and we ask for your assistance.

As your intelligence services are aware, clintonemail.com, wjcoffice.com, and presidentclinton.com had their registration contact information listed as the home address as that of President Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at Chappaquah, New York. This registration was accessible by any person performing a WHOIS query on those domains. Since Mrs. Clinton did not use an official State Department email address, a private email server maintained at her residence provided these services so that she could control the information, should it become embarrassing, or be used against her to damage her political aspirations or worse.

Mrs. Clinton claims that the server was secure due to the fact that it was located at her residence and the Secret Service certainly protected the server from being physically stolen or accessed while it remained at her home. But your very capable intelligence service certainly was not thwarted by this. In fact, the FSB probably could have through its Romanian contacts visited hacker Marcel Lazăr Lehel (aka Guccifer) who broke into Bill Clinton aide Sydney Blumenthal’s email account and revealed several emails sent to Hillary Clinton; thus revealing at least to the American public the existence of the clintonmail.com server. Of course, your agencies were already aware of this since it was discovered that Guccifer routed his network traffic through an IP address conveniently located in Russia.

When the controversy became significant, Hillary Clinton arranged for a data center to erase the hard drive of sensitive information before it was transferred to Platte River Networks. I imagine this company along with another that provided backup services to the Clintons, has an electronic dossier in Russia indexing of what was contained there. Furthermore, Mrs. Clinton when asked by a reporter if she wiped the hard drive dismissed him and made a gesture showing that she wiped it with a cloth. Since only the dust was apparently removed, data recovery should not be too difficult to extract electronically.

The American public and elected members of our own government have faced a great deal of resistance from Hillary Clinton and our own State Department in obtaining all these email records. In fact, the State Department stated that its retrieval efforts required of them by a federal judge are being undermined by a recent snowfall in Washington. Since Russia has great experience in dealing with snow, I imagine this should not be much of a barrier to your security services in obtaining this information.

President Putin, the American people and Members of Congress need your help. We would like to evaluate the suitability of Hillary Clinton as a trustworthy and capable future president who makes good decisions regarding the security of secret records and puts the interests of the American people before her own. These emails will prove to be an invaluable asset in making this decision.

Moreover, our friends at the FBI count on obtaining as much evidence as possible for their investigation into Hillary Clinton’s alleged improper handling of classified information and corruption. They are also having to budget for the cost of over one hundred special agents and personnel for that case and as you can imagine this is very expensive. It also takes resources away from other duties such as fighting organized crime and disrupting terrorist activity–challenges that we mutually agree is very important.

I do recognize that your agents, citizens of your nation, have concerns about possible criminal action taken against them by the United States Government for hacking into the clintonmail.com server or monitoring internet traffic to and from this device, yet it might be worth noting that the specter of arrest might not be as dire a consequence as could be imagined.

Your loyal agents have been imprisoned for espionage in the United States and for unlawfully obtaining classified information. That is certainly a deterrent but consider this. Hillary Clinton testified that no information marked classified was hosted on her email server. Plus, since the clintonmail.com server was not an official government data storage device, either state or federal, I can’t imagine your agents being charged with anything other than a local misdemeanor computer trespass violation. Extradition is almost an impossibility, even between US states, as it is only misdemeanor in nature.

Our government, Hillary Clinton, her protectors, and others having a big stake in hiding the Clinton emails from public scrutiny and are throwing up a wall to protect their own self interest.

Mr. Putin, tear down this wall !

By Darren Smith

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