The second installment of What In The Unholy Fck Is Going On And What In The Unholy Fck Is Wrong With These People? comes to us from The New York Times. It seems that...somebody...is playing fast and loose with a candidate's classified federal security clearance application for the purposes of ratfcking the midterms.

Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic candidate challenging Representative Dave Brat of Virginia, sent a cease-and-desist letter to Corry Bliss, the executive director of the Congressional Leadership Fund, which has raised more than $100 million to help Republicans in the midterm elections. She demanded that the super PAC destroy all copies of the form and agree to not use the information in any fashion.“I write as a former civil servant and as an American, in shock and anger, that you have tried to exploit my service to our country by exposing my most personal information in the name of politics,” she wrote. The super PAC released a statement on Tuesday strongly denying Ms. Spanberger’s charge, saying that the document was obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request filed with the United States Postal Service by America Rising, a separate Republican-aligned research firm.

There is no reason to believe these clowns.

Ms. Spanberger, 39, said in the letter that she had “clear evidence” that the Congressional Leadership Fund had provided a copy of her security clearance application to “at least one news outlet,” adding, “I am not aware of any legal way that C.L.F. could have this document.” In an interview, she said that she suspected that the group was trying to exploit a brief time when she taught at a private Islamic school funded by Saudi Arabia. The super PAC validated that suspicion in its response, going on at some length to try to link the school — called “Terror High” in an earlier news article — to terrorist activity.

The Democrats are running a lot of military veterans and former spooks around the country this time around, and we can argue about whether or not that's a good idea or not at a later time. (I'm a little wary of the situation, to be honest, but the national emergency that is this administration* makes that a somewhat secondary concern.) Over at The Daily Beast, the ever-essential Spencer Ackerman shows us that the alleged doxxing of Abigail Spanberger is having what has to be its desired effect.

Slotkin is a former CIA analyst and senior Pentagon official running for Congress in Michigan as a Democrat. To hold her positions, she needed to obtain a security clearance—and to obtain a security clearance, she had to fill out a highly sensitive form listing her most sensitive personal history. And now, she fears, it may be only a matter of time before that form is revealed.

“Obviously I was very disappointed and surprised they had obtained and then leaked a copy of someone’s SF-86, so you have to assume they’re willing to do the same thing with any other candidate that has a security clearance,” Slotkin said. “These are the kinds of techniques we have to assume our foreign adversaries use, and have used, like with the Chinese breach in the [2015] OPM hack, and it’s just deeply concerning that an American political organization would absorb and adopt those techniques in our own American democracy,” she added.

As Ackerman writes, at least part of the purpose of these documents is to pinpoint elements of an applicant's biography that might make the applicant vulnerable to blackmail. Also, the forms are used to red-flag any applicant who may be applying for untoward purposes.

Information contained in an SF-86 is highly personal and revealing—by design. The point of the application is to stop people who might be blackmail targets or malefactors from obtaining access to classified material. It includes an applicant’s Social Security number; lists of friends, family, and associates; dealings with foreign nationals; and can include legal, criminal,or financial troubles, history with alcohol or drugs, and other potentially embarrassing information.

In other words, for a sophisticated political ratfcking operation, these files would be the Comstock Lode. In June of 2015, hackers, allegedly working for China, broke into the executive Office of Personnel Management and made off with the personal information of at least four million federal employees. So far, there's no connection between that hack and these latest allegations, but the explanations provided so far are laughingly inadequate.

According to BuzzFeed, internal documents validate the claim of a GOP-tied research firm, America Rising, that they received Spanberger’s unredacted clearance application through a Freedom of Information Act request—an extraordinary development, as SF-86s are statutorily exempt from disclosure. Frequent FOIA filers are intimately familiar with what’s known as the B(6) exemption to FOIA, which prevents “personnel and medical and similar files” from public release.

The U.S. Postal Service provided Spanberger’s information to America Rising, according to BuzzFeed. In response to extensive questions from The Daily Beast, David A. Partenheimer, a spokesperson for the Postal Service, said, “We’re looking into the matter.”The GOP-aligned super PAC, the Congressional Leadership Fund, still has on its website a picture purporting to be from a Postal Service FOIA employee, Pamela Gabriel, that appears to contain the critical final four digits of Spanberger’s Social Security number.

That SuperPAC, by the way, is the one affiliated with Speaker Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin, so whatever is going on is a Republican Party operation. This is going to be one seriously ugly election.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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