A Marine Corps officer, who received a potential career-ending fitness report for sending classified messages on a personal email server, will be citing the latest decision on Hillary Clinton’s email scandal to fight his punishment, according to a report on Thursday.
Reservist Maj. Jason Brezler self-reported that he had used a Yahoo! email account to send classified messages to warn about a potentially corrupt Afghan police chief in July of 2012.
Seventeen days later, Ainuddin Khudairaham, a servant of the police officer that Brezler warned about, shot and killed three Marines. Another Marine was severely wounded a couple days later.
One of Brezler’s attorneys, Michael J. Bowe, believes his client received a “completely opposite finding … involving infinitely less sensitive and limited information,” compared to Clinton. He sued the service in 2014 and his case has been before a federal court since then.
Bowe intends to use Clinton’s case “as one of the many, and most egregious examples” of how severely Brezler was punished.
On Tuesday, FBI Director James Comey recommended that no federal charges should be brought against Clinton even though the FBI found 110 classified and eight top-secret emails on her private server.
Comey also noted that Clinton’s use of a private, unclassified email server was “extremely careless”.
Brezler was not charged criminally in his case. A board of inquiry recommended his removal from the service in December 2013 after it found that Brezler knowingly kept more than 100 classified documents on his personal hard drive and thumb drive so he could write a book about his experiences in Afghanistan.
However, Brezler handed over all of this information voluntarily.
Brezler has appealed the decision, but the Marine Corps and Navy Department have upheld their verdict up to this point.
