A security expert said the discovery that Hillary Clinton sent or received information classified above “top secret” on her private server means someone involved “is looking at possible jail time.”
Jim Hanson, executive vice president of the Center for Security Policy, said Wednesday an inspector general’s finding that “special access program” intelligence passed through Clinton’s server was the most compelling indication to date that Clinton or a member of her staff committed a crime by mishandling classified material.
“Next to the very fact that she built an unsecured email system to do official business on, this is by far the biggest revelation,” Hanson told the Washington Examiner.
Clinton struggled to explain away the latest details to emerge in a nearly year-long controversy over her use of a private email network while serving as secretary of state.
After the intelligence community inspector general relayed to Congress the discovery of information classified above “top secret” among Clinton’s emails, a campaign spokesman and, hours later, Clinton herself blamed the revelation on a Republican-orchestrated leak.
Clinton’s spokesman, Brian Fallon, attempted to cast intelligence watchdog Charles McCullough as the mastermind behind a GOP leak despite the fact that McCullough was appointed by President Obama and heavily supported by Democrats.
“I think that he put two Republican senators up to sending him a letter so that he would have an excuse to resurface the same allegations he made back in the summer that have been discredited,” Fallon said Wednesday, referring to McCullough’s concerns in July that at least two Clinton emails contained top secret intelligence.
Those findings have not been discredited, but were once called into question when, in November, an anonymous source told Politico that McCullough might be reconsidering that finding. Officials quickly disputed that report.
McCullough’s discovery of at least two “top secret” emails on Clinton’s server last year prompted an FBI investigation into Clinton’s treatment of sensitive material.
But the letter made public Tuesday suggested intelligence officials from an unnamed agency had found even more highly classified information among Clinton’s records.
Hanson said anyone allowed to view “special access programs” information must first be “read on” to the program through a process designed to limit the number of people who are able to encounter the information.
“Any special access programs have a completely separate process where you are read on to the program,” Hanson said. “As in, someone reads to you a list of things you can and cannot do.”
“It’s a physical conversation,” he explained. “It is a human being reading you the information and then you signing and agreeing to the conditions and the potential penalties for its misuse.”
Hanson said there are few “technical means” of transmitting SAP information given its highly sensitive nature. In most cases, he noted, SAP information should be encountered in hard copy form inside a facility designed to protect classified intelligence known as a SCIF.
“In no way, shape or form is there any legitimate way that SAP information should have been anywhere outside a SCIF. It should never have happened,” Hanson said. “How it got from there into Hillary’s unsecured email system means someone committed a crime, even if it was inadvertent. You just cannot do that.”
Clinton’s most frequent defense — that nothing she sent or received was “marked classified” at the time — was undermined by forms made public in November that bore her signature.
At the start of her State Department tenure, Clinton signed her name to a “classified nondisclosure agreement” that specified, among other things, that she was responsible for the “protection” of “marked or unmarked classified information.”
Clinton repeated her argument that the lack of markings on the classified information in her emails should spare her culpability when she told NPR Wednesday nothing in her inbox had been marked classified.
“As the State Department has confirmed, I never sent or received any material marked classified, and that hasn’t changed in all of these months,” she said. “This, seems to me to be, you know, another effort to inject this into the campaign. It’s another leak.”
Clinton said her team had determined the “special access program” information in question was limited to an email that simply contained the text of a New York Times article about drones. She also pointed to the State Department’s repeated assertions that any classification upgrades have been made retroactively.
But Hanson said intelligence officials would be “highly” unlikely to flag a news article as containing SAP information, and argued that any official who would raise such a serious concern about an article alone “should lose their job.”
One remote possibility, Hanson said, was that Clinton or members of her staff were discussing a sensitive topic on which the New York Times had speculated in an article.
“If it was covered under SAP, then the Clintonistas who were discussing it were still forbidden,” he said. “Even if it was in the New York Times, and they’re saying it, that doesn’t remove their responsibility.”
Hanson also dismissed Clinton’s argument that the investigation of classified material on her server was nothing more than an “interagency dispute” between the intelligence community and the State Department.
“[The intelligence community is] the one in the position to know,” he noted, “not the State Department and not Hillary’s campaign.”
