Memo to Wisniewski: Is There a Phil Murphy Angle in the Latest Wikileaks Row?

Murphy, as ambassador, with Chancellor Merkel

Presumptive Democrat gubernatorial nominee Phil Murphy (D-Goldman Sachs) is no stranger to Wikileaks, Save Jerseyans. In fact, he was prominently featured in the Podesta Email dump.

Now we’ve got another huge dump from the controversial hacking organization and, given that we’ve already lived up to our promise to be the Internet’s top Phil Murphy watchdog, I’d be remiss if I ignored this angle.

I’m also not typically in the business of giving advice to Democrats (!) but if John Wisniewski, Ray Lesniak or one of these other long-shot 2017 Democrat primary candidates is serious about making a dent? They’d print out this post and do something with it. Stat. This is red meat for their foaming-at-the-mouth Bernie Sanders backers.

A little quick background might be necessary.

After 23-years raking in the big bucks at Goldman Sachs and a brief stint as DNC Finance Chairman under Howard Dean (yeaaah!), Murphy served as Barack Obama’s United States Ambassador to Germany between 2009 to 2013. His was a rocky tenure, folks. For starters? Everyone hated him. Murphy famously declared that “the buck stops with me” in the wake of the diplomatic cables leak scandal, and the stuff he said about leading German politicians in those controversial cables neutered his effectiveness for the rest of his tenure.

Phil Murphy: International Man of Mystery

Flash forward to the present day. Phil Murphy is back in the public eye, running for governor over here on this side of the pond.

In Germany? Prosecutors are chomping at the bit after the latest aforementioned Wikileaks dump revealed new details about how the U.S. government’s intelligence agencies collect overseas data:

The WikiLeaks files also revealed that the U.S. Consulate in Frankfurt is a major hacker outpost for the most important and sensitive operations, and a former official confirmed that it is the major nerve center for covert joint CIA and National Security Agency voice collection around the globe. The official said it was the likely origin of the hacking of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s personal phone — which was revealed in a leak by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013.”

The Merkel part is a little murkier than ABC suggests, by the way, but suffice it to say that we now have evidence of more diplomatically sensitive espionage going down likely during Phil Murphy’s much-maligned tenure as our country’s ambassador to Germany.

Presumably, someone would let the ambassador know if there’s a major, ongoing intelligence operation happening at one of his installations?

Did the “buck stop” with Phil regarding whatever was going on at his Frankfurt Consulate, too? (His words, not ours!)

It’s political malpractice if his opponents don’t at least ask. Don’t think this kind of stuff is exactly popular with the “citizen of the world” ACLU granola-eating social justice warrior crowd….

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Matt Rooney
About Matt Rooney 8437 Articles
MATT ROONEY is SaveJersey.com's founder and editor-in-chief, a practicing New Jersey attorney, and the host of 'The Matt Rooney Show' on 1210 WPHT every Sunday evening from 7-10PM EST.