The intelligence community has most likely conducted a damage assessment of the classified information that passed through Hillary Clinton’s private server during her tenure as secretary of state, according to a top Republican in the House. The assessment has not yet been made public.
“There is zero probability that the intelligence community hasn’t looked into the ramifications of former Secretary Clinton’s emails and the security risk they may present,” Kansas Republican Rep. Mike Pompeo said in a statement to the Washington Examiner on Monday.
“This is the intelligence community doing its job, just like it does every day, to determine the risk of any breaches and minimize the damage as much as possible,” said Pompeo, who serves on the House Select Committee on Benghazi.
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The damage assessment is required whenever classified information is handled improperly outside of government channels, but the status of the assessment into the server Clinton surreptitiously stored in her basement has not been reported.
During her tenure leading the State Department from 2009 to 2013, Clinton used the server to send or receive more than 2,100 classified messages, with 22 marked at the highest level of “top secret.” The intelligence community has been particularly concerned about content carrying the designation of “top secret/special access program,” which involves human intelligence presently deployed on the ground.
A January letter from the intelligence community’s inspector general advised Congress that at least some content on Clinton’s server reached that highest level. Inspector General of the Intelligence Community Charles McCullough told Senate leaders he had viewed sworn declarations involving “several dozen emails containing classified information determined by the IC element to be at the CONFIDENTIAL, SECRET and TOP SECRET/SAP information.” Those declarations came from an intelligence agency that went unnamed.
Asked whether Clinton had been made aware of the results of the assessment, Clinton’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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Speaking in response to the initial TS/SAP classification reports in January, Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon responded by calling the issue an “interagency dispute,” adding, “it does not change the fact that these emails were not classified at the time they were sent or received.”
Experts have pointed out that information is rarely classified at the time of its creation, a criticism that holds particularly true of 104 classified messages Clinton personally authored and sent over the server.
FBI Director James Comey has said repeatedly over the past several weeks that his agency is in no hurry to finish investigating charges of potential criminal misconduct related to the server. “The urgency is to do it well and promptly,” he said at an event in Buffalo this month, adding that “well comes first.”
