Hillary Clinton Is In Some Kind of Email Shit Again
A longstanding fear among Hillary Clinton’s supporters is that U.S. authorities will attempt to indict the front-runner candidate for mishandling classified information as Secretary of State—a move that would almost certainly help derail Clinton’s entire campaign. Today is not a good day for those supporters! Among this morning’s revelations:
- According to Ken Dilanian of NBC News, several emails stored on Clinton’s infamous personal email server (which was housed in a server rack installed in her Westchester home) indirectly identified undercover federal agents stationed overseas: “A handful of emails forwarded to Hillary Clinton’s personal server while she was Secretary of State contained references to undercover CIA officers—including one who was killed by a suicide attack in Afghanistan, according to U.S. officials who have reviewed them.”
- According to Eli Lake and Josh Rogin of Bloomberg View, a number of Congressional Republicans are pushing the White House’s National Security Council to review whether or not Clinton should retain the top-level security clearance she gained as Secretary of State. One of those Republicans, Mike Pompeo of Kansas’ Fourth District, told Lake and Rogin, “It’s important, given all the information we now know, that the House of Representatives work alongside the executive branch to determine whether it’s appropriate for Secretary Clinton to continue to hold her security clearances.”
- Finally, the Daily Caller dug up a 2007 video in which Clinton admitted to ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos that she often received and read “classified information” when she served as First Lady between 1993 and 2001, even though she was never explicitly granted the security clearance to do so. It’s unclear who exactly provided that information to Clinton, but if wasn’t President Bill Clinton himself, the former First Lady likely has some explaining to do. Bradley Moss, a Washington lawyer who often handles lawsuits concerning security classifications (and who happens to be representing Gawker in our own case against the State Department), told the Daily Caller that there would be “numerous questions and concerns that would obviously be raised about the appropriateness of that having happened” if some other staffer provided the classified information to Clinton.
There is some good news for Clinton’s campaign, though. The aforementioned NBC News report, about the emails on Clinton’s server which somehow referred to the identities of undercover agents, apparently corrects a bombshell report by New York Observer columnist John R. Schindler, who claimed earlier this week that “Ms. Clinton’s ‘unclassified’ emails included Holy Grail items of American espionage such as the true names of Central Intelligence Agency intelligence officers serving overseas ... [including those] serving under non-official cover.” That would suggest Clinton’s email practices may have risked the identities, and thus the lives, of C.I.A. agents posing as State Department diplomats in hostile territories.
Three U.S. officials told NBC News, however, that “there was no email on Clinton’s server that directly revealed the identity of an undercover intelligence operative. Rather, they said, State Department and other officials attempted to make veiled references to intelligence officers in the emails—references that were deemed classified when the messages were being reviewed years later for public release.”
The Justice Department has not yet announced whether it will seek charges against Clinton. The F.B.I. investigation into her email practices remains ongoing.
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