The State Department said Wednesday that former department officials involved in the mishandling of classified information under then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton could be denied future security clearances in the federal government.
Spokesman John Kirby told reporters that the State Department will allow the FBI to finish its investigation before it takes any step on its own related to the officials involved. The FBI said Tuesday that it would not recommend criminal charges against Clinton herself.
Once the FBI is done, Kirby said, the State Department would make its own decisions about what to do about former Clinton staffers. Kirby said it’s possible that decisions by the State Department could still affect people who no longer work in the department.
“The State Department’s process for reviewing potential cases of mishandling of information does not apply exclusively to current employees,” Kirby said.
“Our process can result in a variety of outcomes, including counseling, issuing warnings, security infractions, security violations and possibly the revoking of an individual’s clearance,” he added.
Those actions could affect Clinton’s former staffers such as Jake Sullivan, Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin and Philippe Reines. Kirby didn’t name any of those former officials, but did indicate that the decisions of the State Department could affect those officials if they decided to seek employment in other federal agencies.
“While a former employee cannot be disciplined if he or she is no longer employed by the department, there could be repercussions, including issuing a security violation or infraction, which would be kept in their file … or of course revoking an individual’s security clearance, assuming that individual still needed the clearance to work in another federal agency,” he said.
He said in this way, State could “weigh in” on the decisions of other agencies to grant or deny security clearances to former officials in the future.
