An MSNBC legal analyst noted Friday afternoon that the Obama administration has prosecuted people for mishandling of classified information similarly to how former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton may have, as news broke that the State Department found 22 emails containing top-secret information on Clinton’s private server.
“People do go to jail for mishandling classified information,” Ari Melber said. “They have been prosecuted in the Obama administration for that.”
The State Department announced Friday that it would not release the 22 emails to the public because the information contained in the correspondences is classified.
Federal investigators are examining whether Clinton sent or received classified information over her unauthorized and unsecure private email server when she served as secretary of state.
Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon went into damage control mode Friday, and said the emails uncovered by the State Department weren’t marked as classified when Clinton handled them.
“Now, no one here has come up with evidence that Hillary Clinton was the originator, was the creator of any of this material that gets that legal level. The problem, of course, with that defense is it may catch you on the law, but it doesn’t catch you on policy,” Melber said.
“At the end of the day, what the Inspector General of the intelligence community is concerned about here in this breaking news is that these materials were on a private server and they were at least later determined to be classified and in some cases, allegedly top-secret … That’s a problem for policy even if it doesn’t in any way suggest that Hillary Clinton broke criminal law,” he added.
The Democratic front-runner and her team have stated in the past that she never mishandled classified information. They are now saying today that the issue is about “over-classification run amok.”
(h/t WFB)
