Hillary Clinton may not have faced criminal charges for her “extremely careless” treatment of classified information, but other government officials who mishandled sensitive secrets have suffered severe consequences.
FBI Director James Comey indicated this week that he declined to recommend an indictment against the former secretary of state because his team found scant evidence of her intent to break the law, despite the series of misstatements she made regarding her private email network.
The legal community has since commenced a heated debate over the question of whether intent is a requirement for criminal charges involving the improper storage of classified documents.
While Clinton’s case is unique in both its scope and complexity, the following three individuals faced criminal charges for what many have considered less serious violations of the law.
John Deutch, CIA director
John Deutch narrowly avoided submitting to a plea deal related to his mishandling of classified information when then-President Bill Clinton pardoned him in 2001.
Deutch, a former CIA director, stored highly-classified information on his personal computers and faced backlash over a withering inspector general report on the matter, much like Hillary Clinton.
When the Justice Department moved to press charges against Deutch, he entered a plea bargain that involved an acknowledgment of his guilt. However, Deutch reportedly entered that deal too late in the day to file the papers publicly, and Bill Clinton issued his pardon clearing Deutch of charges the very next day.
Observers have drawn parallels between Hillary Clinton’s conduct and the actions that landed Deutch in trouble because, among other similarities, Deutch used the same system to conduct his personal and official affairs. The overlap resulted in the transfer of classified information onto an unclassified system.
Deutch would have faced grave legal consequences for his improper record-keeping practices had Bill Clinton not spared him from the FBI’s case.
Rickie Roller, Marine sergeant
In 1993, Roller was sentenced to five years in prison after he accidentally took hard-copy classified documents home from his office in a gym bag.
Upon discovering several weeks later that he had removed the classified documents from government property, Roller decided he would not return them to Marine Headquarters for fear that he could lose his job or face other punishment. Instead, he planned to destroy the records.
But before he could do so, movers whom Roller had hired to pack up his belongings in preparation for a job transfer found the papers in his personal desk and reported Roller to the authorities.
Roller was convicted under the federal statute forbidding “gross negligence” in the treatment of classified material. He was able to have his five-year sentence commuted to 10 months.
Arthur Gonzalez, Air Force staff sergeant
Gonzalez was also charged with gross negligence in 1979 after he accidentally tossed a pair of top secret documents into a pile of his personal mail and took them on a trip to Alaska.
After finding the sensitive records, he placed them in a desk drawer and later testified that he had intended to recover them before returning to his base at the end of the trip.
But Gonzalez forgot about the documents when he left and they were later discovered by the next occupant to stay in the room in which Gonzalez had placed the documents.
The staff sergeant spent five months in prison.
