The Washington Times, a conservative newspaper, is running a story based on anonymous sources that one of the emails being screened by the State Department involves the North Korean nuclear program as divulged by spy satellites.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/sep/1/hillary-clinton-emails-contained-spy-satellite-dat/
That email, if accurate, has to be highly classified.
The Clinton campaign is now falling back on the claim that these emails being released were not classified at the time she received and/or sent them (which is irrelevant. It is the material that counts.) Who could seriously argue that such information would be handled by anyone as unclassified? Who can justify such information being transmitted to or from a private server located in Mrs Clinton's home? As the Times article points out, that type of information by rule is classified in a special manner. As one who has dealt with intelligence agencies while overseas with DEA, I can tell you that these folks classify their toilet paper! (OK, that's an exaggeration, but you get the point.)
What is so sad is that the average Joe has no concept of just how serious this is. This woman removed her official and classified communications from the State Department communication system, which is designed to be secure and put them in her own home brew private server based in her home in Chappaqua, New York. Not only does that cast doubt on her judgment, to put it mildly, but consider this particular statute.
18 USC 973
(f)
Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, note, or information, relating to the national defense, (1) through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, or (2) having knowledge that the same has been illegally removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of its trust, or lost, or stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, and fails to make prompt report of such loss, theft, abstraction, or destruction to his superior officer—
This is very serious.
Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.
Note the phrase, " gross negligence". It doesn't even require intent.
2 comments:
Gary,
This is a very good discussion of the article presented here. It is a profound statement t when you say that the "average Joe" has no real understanding of the gravity of such a breach of US security. The Intel community is freaking over the fact that Hillary is treating this breach of confidential with such unimportance. Her statement that she had no documents marked as confidential may be a truth, but the documents are confidential right out of the box. They need no marking to be confidential. So, Hillary is trying to fool the great uninformed public. As Vlad Lenin said: "If you tell a lie enough, it becomes the truth." This is a perfect example. Hillary should be in jail and certainly not a Presidential candidate. But this is what the Intell community fears.
Squid
Squid,
The originator of the document has a responsibility to apply the proper classification. Had I as a DEA agent when I was overseas (using the DOS communication system) tried to send a communication (cables at that time), the transmitter in the cable room would have marched into my office to inform me that the message needed a classification. Let's say Hillary as Secstate had received a classified message without markings, she would have known enough to make sure one was applied before she sent it on. She would also have admonished whoever sent such info unclassified. That's why I suspect that her team removed the classifications when the issue broke.
This morning I heard Alan Dershowitz tell Elizabeth Hasselback of Fox News that Hillary has no legal problem because there were no markings on documents when she handled them. It all depends on what she knew at the time. Nonsense. She knew the information she was handling should have been classified or was. Either her communications were going around unclassified when they should have been or the classification markings have been tampered with. Either way she can't claim ignorance. She wasn't Joe Sixpack. She was the SecState.
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