From the Frank Church era through the Iraq War, Americans learned that they cannot necessarily take at face value whatever the Central Intelligence Agency says. But there is at least one area where CIA expertise is probably reliable.
Agency analysts can be trusted on the simple question of whether a piece of information constitutes classified intelligence. To lower that bar still further, the agency’s opinion on such questions can easily be considered more trustworthy than that of Hillary Clinton’s self-serving campaign spin-doctors.
Over the weekend, the CIA released its own review of Hillary Clinton’s unsecured email server — the one she used as secretary of state to hide her work product from her employer and the public for years. In their opinion, Clinton mishandled classified information, including highly classified information about North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. This, despite her campaign’s protestations that this information had not yet been marked classified (as if this mattered), or that the material was over-classified solely due to bureaucratic inertia.
Assuming that there exists no vast Joe Biden conspiracy in multiple agencies of the Obama administration, Clinton’s culpability in this matter seems inescapable. In 2009, she made a conscious choice to place herself above the rules of her own department and federal regulations, setting up her own personal server to sequester her work email correspondence from the agency she led. Not only did she have the server set up in her own home, but she also used her own money to hire a State Department employee to moonlight for her and set it up.
This decision was clearly calculated. It was also fateful, not only because it violated rules on government transparency — for years thwarting lawful Freedom of Information requests for her email correspondence — but also because her unsecured server became a potential access point for U.S. national secrets.
Now, the combined expertise of the CIA, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the Inspector General for the intelligence agencies points to the fact that Clinton jeopardized highly sensitive information.
These officials’ analysis not only impugns Clinton’s behavior in office, but it also demonstrates that she has lied repeatedly in offering explanations in the time since her private server became public knowledge. For all of her protestations that she followed the rules, she did not. She claimed to have neither sent nor received classified information on this server, and she did both. She claimed to have been only a “passive recipient” of such information, but she wasn’t.
In an interview last Friday, Clinton told Andrea Mitchell that “it certainly doesn’t make me feel good” that poll after poll shows a majority of Americans believe she is dishonest and untrustworthy. The problem is, she made the choices that brought public opinion to this point. And even in offering a few recent half-hearted apologies lately — usually for causing “confusion” — she continues to speak and act as if she did nothing wrong or damaging to anyone. As many parents have had to explain to young children, you’re not really sorry if you maintain you did nothing wrong.
Clinton’s husband, the former president, survived a huge scandal mostly because he knew when to stop lying and start apologizing. Secretary Clinton seems to believe she can skip this step by re-launching her campaign yet again, this time with plans to inject more “spontaneity” and “self-effacing humor.” When that fails, she may end up being the only person surprised by it.
