Courtesy of Pam Martens
Hillary Clinton at Press Conference on Status of Her Emails (2015 Photo)
The Washington Post is reporting this morning that the FBI is conducting a criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton’s handling of emails during her tenure as Secretary of State. Clinton substituted her own private server in place of the government’s secure system. The Post also reports that the FBI has “secured the cooperation of Bryan Pagliano, who worked on Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign before setting up the server in her New York home in 2009.” According to the article, Pagliano has been given a grant of immunity by the Justice Department.
While Hillary Clinton has said that none of the emails were classified at the time they were sent, the Post notes that “I. Charles McCullough III, the inspector general of the intelligence community, has indicated that some of the material intelligence officials have reviewed contained information that was classified at the time it was sent.”
Another deeply troubling element in the story is that material now ruled to have been classified was authored by Clinton as well as by top aides, including Jacob Sullivan, who is “now advising Clinton’s campaign on foreign policy and is thought to be a likely candidate for national security adviser if she is elected president.” (That sentence is likely sparking more outrage throughout the U.S. intelligence community today, raising further fears about Hillary Clinton as Commander in Chief.) A total of 22 emails that were transmitted over Clinton’s private server have now been ruled to be “Top Secret” and cannot be released to the public, even in redacted form.
As someone who previously handled classified material for our government, which invariably involves protecting the lives of fellow Americans, I can find no possible excuse for the cavalier attitude that Hillary Clinton demonstrated as Secretary of State.
In my early twenties, after passing multiple background checks, I became part of a group of editors for a subcontractor to the Navy to edit the equipment manuals for the Polaris and Poseidon nuclear missile class of submarines. The manuals did not have the highest security classification, “Top Secret,” but one below that, “Secret.”
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