Well, whaddya know? Maybe those Hillary Clinton emails didn’t include top-secret information after all.
At least, that’s the conclusion reportedly drawn by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s office — overruling the finding of Intelligence Community Inspector General Charles McCullough that two Clinton emails (from a sample of just 40) contained highly classified info.
Hmm. Clapper answers to the president — who issued clear marching orders months ago, announcing that Clinton’s server scam was “not a situation in which America’s national security was endangered.”
Oddly, news of Clapper’s finding got leaked to Politico soon after the Washington Free Beacon reported Clinton did indeed, right after taking over at State, acknowledge her responsibility to properly guard classified info — and that “negligent handling” of it could bring criminal penalties.
Until the Beacon broke that news, even the State Department was unclear on whether Clinton ever signed the Sensitive Compartmented Information Nondisclosure Agreement. By so doing, she promised not to put classified info at risk — by, say, storing it on a home-brewed email server.
Which she immediately turned around and did, because she didn’t want a record of her communications available to . . . the government of the United States of America.
That said, Clapper’s ruling whitewashes Clinton’s most serious known violations, and could serve as a pretext for shutting down the FBI’s probe into Clinton’s server use. But it shouldn’t.
Because her emails still include plenty of “born classified” info — stuff any top official knows must be kept safe.
“If a foreign minister just told the secretary of state something in confidence, by US rules that is classified at the moment it’s in US channels and US possession,” J. William Leonard, head of the US Information Security Oversight Office from 2002 to 2008, told Reuters in August.
And any high-ranking official knows those rules. That’s why two former CIA chiefs have faced prosecution for breaking them.
But the Obama administration is plainly bent on seeing that Hillary Clinton will skate for doing the same.