A
little less than a year ago, on July 29, 2015, the FBI released a statement that
wasn’t covered by any of the major news outlets, wasn’t the leading story on
the local news, and was never committed to the black and white of the
newspaper. It wasn’t news “worthy of dissemination” but, given the recent statement
issued by FBI Director James B. Comey regarding Secretary Clinton’s use of a
private email server the verdict announced last summer is finally being brought
to light. First,
let us review a small section of the statement from 2015:
“Bryan H. Nishimura, 50, of Folsom, pleaded guilty today to
unauthorized removal and retention of classified materials, United States
Attorney Benjamin B. Wagner announced… According to court documents, Nishimura
was a Naval reservist deployed in Afghanistan in 2007 and 2008. In his role as
a Regional Engineer for the U.S. military in Afghanistan, Nishimura had access
to classified briefings and digital records that could only be retained and
viewed on authorized government computers. Nishimura, however, caused the
materials to be downloaded and stored on his personal, unclassified electronic
devices and storage media. He carried such classified materials on his
unauthorized media when he traveled off-base in Afghanistan and, ultimately, carried
those materials back to the United States at the end of his deployment. In the
United States, Nishimura continued to maintain the information on unclassified
systems in unauthorized locations, and copied the materials onto at least one
additional unauthorized and unclassified system.”
When
looking at the “crime” and the penalty it is pretty straightforward and should
be easily applied to future situations. This is especially true when you
consider the fact that this is pretty much a textbook example of Section 793, subsection
(f),”Gathering, transmitting or losing defense information“, of the US Code
which outlines the following:
“Whoever, being
entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing,
code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint,
plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, note, or information, relating to the
national defense, (1) through gross negligence permits the same to be removed
from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his
trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, or (2) having knowledge
that the same has been illegally removed from its proper place of custody or
delivered to anyone in violation of its trust, or lost, or stolen, abstracted,
or destroyed, and fails to make prompt report of such loss, theft, abstraction,
or destruction to his superior officer— Shall be fined under this title or
imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.”
So
now let us consider the case at hand. While clearly a much more complicated investigation
than the one previously detailed, the results are much more concise in the
transgressions committed by Secretary Clinton during her time at the State
Department. First let us determine if any of those emails contained classified
information that would warrant charges based on the aforementioned statute. For
this, I reference two sections from the recently issued statement:
“From the group of 30,000 e-mails returned to the State
Department, 110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning
agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or
received. Eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at
the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time;
and eight contained Confidential information, which is the lowest level of
classification. Separate from those, about 2,000 additional e-mails were “up-classified”
to make them Confidential; the information in those had not been classified at
the time the e-mails were sent… Because she was not using a government
account—or even a commercial account like Gmail—there was no archiving at all
of her e-mails, so it is not surprising that we discovered e-mails that were
not on Secretary Clinton’s system in 2014, when she produced the 30,000 e-mails
to the State Department.”
…
“Separately, it is important to say something about the
marking of classified information. Only a very small number of the e-mails
containing classified information bore markings indicating the presence of
classified information. But even if information is not marked “classified” in
an e-mail, participants who know or should know that the subject matter is
classified are still obligated to protect it.”
And, just as in the case of Bryan
H. Nishimura, intention is not a factor in determining whether or not someone
has broken the law. There is a reason why security measures are in place,
systems are monitored, and all correspondences are catalogued… these are steps
we need to take to protect our information and maintain the level of security
necessary in this world. While the FBI is kid in the following section, I would
qualify the actions of the State Department, including Secretary Clinton, as
grossly negligent:
“Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary
Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of
classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in
their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information… None
of these e-mails should have been on any kind of unclassified system, but their
presence is especially concerning because all of these e-mails were housed on
unclassified personal servers not even supported by full-time security staff,
like those found at Departments and Agencies of the U.S. Government—or even
with a commercial service like Gmail.”
What really matters here is that this was a breach of national
security and, while they haven’t been able to determine whether or not hostile
parties have accessed classified information the FBI admitted noted that “…we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained
access to Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail account.” We were put at
great risk by Secretary Clinton and she should be facing charges. But…
“Although there is evidence of potential violations of the
statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that
no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case… To be clear, this is not to
suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity
would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often
subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are
deciding now.”
And
there is the double standard clearly stated by the FBI Director himself. Of
course, today’s
testimony makes me think a little about his “interesting” perspective on
the law:
Yet Comey said
while Clinton showed “great carelessness,” he did not see evidence she and
those with whom she corresponded “knew when they did it they were doing
something that was against the law.”
He said no
reasonable prosecutor would bring a case based only on what is known as “gross
negligence.” At the same time, he suggested that if Clinton had worked at the
FBI, she could be subject to a range of disciplinary measures including
suspension or termination.
“You could be
walked out,” he said.
Basically,
he is stating that if you get pulled over on the highway but you didn’t realize
that you were speeding then you didn’t break the law. Yeah, my head hurts too.
While there are many trying to assign motive to Director Comey, I am not going
to do so, his more recent statements pretty much sum up his thought process and
qualification to hold his position.
All
I will say is that there is no way I will ever trust Secretary Clinton… not now
and certainly not as someone running for the Presidency. But, if you believe in
double standards and hypocrisy, by all means cast your vote for Hillary. Personally,
I would much rather vote for someone who believes in self-sufficiency and
personal responsibility… but I will settle for Trump.
