![\"Questions](\"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/HillaryClinton_c0-392-4928-3264_s561x327.jpg\")
<\/a>Questions are mounting over why the Justice Department has not yet opened a criminal investigation against Hillary Rodham Clinton for mishandling a mountain of classified information. (Associated Press)<\/p><\/div>\n
With U.S. intelligence<\/a> officials scrambling to contain damage from potentially hundreds of spy agency secrets in Hillary Rodham Clinton<\/a>\u2019s private emails, questions are mounting over why the Justice Department<\/a>has not yet opened a criminal investigation against the Democratic presidential front-runner for mishandling a mountain of classified information.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n While some secrecy experts believe Mrs. Clinton<\/a> will be able to build a strong case that material on her server was not classified at the time it was moving through her emails, others assert that what the former secretary of state did was far more egregious than the mishandling of information that saw former CIA<\/a> Director David H. Petraeus<\/a> sentenced to two years probation and a $100,000 fine.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t see how the Justice Department<\/a> would be able to avoid at least investigating this,\u201d said Kevin Carroll<\/a>, a former CIA<\/a> officer and secrecy lawyer in Washington<\/a>. \u201cWhat Petraeus<\/a> did was really small in comparison, because there was no exposure of any information to any foreign intelligence services.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Petraeus<\/a> pleaded guilty to improperly handling hard-copy binders of classified military files and sharing them with his mistress and biographer.<\/p>\n \u201cIn contrast,\u201d said Mr. Carroll<\/a>, \u201cit\u2019s certain that foreign intelligence services had access to the stuff on Hillary Clinton\u2019s email.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cInformation put on her home-cooked server and then sent around to other accounts is a very, very serious counterintelligence breach, and they\u2019re going to have to have a really substantial look at the damage that\u2019s been done to every agency that\u2019s had its intelligence compromised,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n But there\u2019s a catch. While officials combing tens of thousands of emails that moved through Mrs. Clinton<\/a>\u2019s server have pointed to the presence of \u201chundreds\u201d of pieces of classified information \u2014 apparently none of the messages had any official classification markings on them.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a situation that has triggered heated debate over the extent to which such information wasn\u2019t necessarily classified at the time Mrs. Clinton<\/a>was emailing it.<\/p>\n \u201cTo the best of my understanding, there is no comparison between the Clinton email issue and the Petraeus case,\u201d says Steven Aftergood<\/a>, who heads the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. \u201cEveryone agrees that there was no information in the Clinton emails that was marked as classified. So it would be difficult or impossible to show that those who sent or received the emails knowingly or negligently mishandled classified information.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cA deeper issue,\u201d according to Mr. Aftergood<\/a>, \u201cis the subjective nature of classification itself.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt is entirely possible for the State Department<\/a> and the intelligence community to differ about the classification status of a particular item of information,\u201d he said. \u201cIf the State Department<\/a> learned about the information through its own diplomats, it is entitled to consider the information unclassified. If the IC discovered it from a clandestine informant, IC officials would properly deem it classified. So, in a sense, both sides might be right.\u201d<\/p>\n While speculation surges about entire sections that have been redacted or \u201cblacked out\u201d from thousands of pages of emails that the State Department<\/a> has released from Mrs. Clinton<\/a>\u2019s private server, at least one email chain appears to contain what Mr. Aftergood<\/a> described as \u201cdiplomatically sensitive\u201d information.<\/p>\n The March 2011 chain, which the department released in June, reveals how Mrs. Clinton<\/a>\u2019s team was strategizing behind the scenes to try to bring about a \u201cQuad Deal\u201d in which the U.S., Britain, France and Turkey would uphold a no-fly zone in the Middle East \u2014 and, more importantly, to make it appear as if Turkey was taking the lead on the initiative.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m worried that [France] and\/or the U.K. know about the Turks idea and want to derail it,\u201d states one of the emails, sent to Mrs. Clinton<\/a> by her then-senior adviser, Jake Sullivan.<\/p>\n Without question, the email offers raw insight into top U.S. officials\u2019 private assessments toward American allies. It also shines a light on the secret diplomatic workings of U.S. policy toward Turkey, and sources have told The Washington Times that Turkish officials were outraged about it upon its release in June.<\/p>\n However, that is not to say the email includes undeniably classified information that came from the U.S. intelligence<\/a> community \u2014 or that American intelligence agencies would now deem it to be damaging.<\/p>\n \u201cSome of the information in the email looks like it could have been diplomatically sensitive at that time,\u201d said Mr. Aftergood<\/a>. \u201cBut all of that information is within the jurisdiction of the State Department<\/a> to classify or not, as it sees fit. It is hard to see any trace of information in this particular email that might have been obtained from an intelligence agency.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Carroll<\/a> agreed.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s certainly indiscrete, and it would probably be marked SECRET on aState Department<\/a> or [Pentagon] system,\u201d he said. \u201cBut it\u2019s kind of borderline as to whether it\u2019s classified.\u201d<\/p>\n PDB materials included?<\/p>\n But when it comes to sections redacted from other email chains on Mrs. Clinton<\/a>\u2019s server, intelligence officials appear to have no doubt about the clandestine origin of the most sensitive material lacing the emails.<\/p>\n Last week saw Inspector General for the Director of National Intelligence I. Charles McCullough III \u2014 the chief oversight watchdog for the entireU.S. intelligence<\/a> community \u2014 warn in a letter to top lawmakers of the House and Senate intelligence committees that there were \u201cpotentially hundreds of classified emails\u201d on the server, at least some of which \u201cincluded IC-derived classified information and should have been handled as classified.\u201d<\/p>\n The warning also was submitted to the Justice Department<\/a>, where officials have said no decisions have yet been made about whether to open a criminal investigation.<\/p>\n One former senior Justice Department<\/a> official, who spoke with The Times on condition of anonymity, said it is possible that intelligence officials referred the case to the department \u201cout of an abundance of caution\u201d in order to avoid being accused of covering something up should there be the kind of highly classified information in the emails that revealed sensitive American intelligence sources.<\/p>\n \u201cWe really don\u2019t know the contours of what\u2019s in all these emails yet, so it\u2019s hard to speculate,\u201d the former official said, adding that \u201cthe more shocking thing here is just the sheer number of emails that were moving through this server, off the State Department<\/a>\u2019s secure grid.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSecretary Clinton<\/a> should have said to her staff, \u2018Hey, we really need to be careful about what\u2019s being sent around in these emails.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Bewildering as such factors may be, Mr. Carroll<\/a> argues that the more vital issues revolve around the questions of what classified material is actually in the emails \u2014 as well as the extent to which it was stored on a server vulnerable to penetration by foreign intelligence services.<\/p>\n \u201cThe big issue, I suspect, is the presence or absence of materials derived from the Presidential Daily Brief,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The PDB, as it is known in intelligence circles, is among the most closely guarded classified documents in Washington<\/a> \u2014 particularly because it often contains revealing information about sourcing that only the highest-level officials in the executive branch are authorized to see.<\/p>\n According to Mr. Carroll<\/a>, it is well within the bounds of possibility that officials from Mrs. Clinton<\/a>\u2019s inner circle may have at times stripped the classified markings from information in the PDB and moved it through emails on her server.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Justice Department<\/a> at least has to investigate it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n While the intelligence warning to lawmakers last week made no specific reference to the PDB, one U.S. official told The Times that the intelligence community has been informed that secret information in some of Mrs. Clinton<\/a>\u2019s emails originated from the FBI, the DNI and the CIA<\/a> as well as a spy satellite agency.<\/p>\n The official said the intelligence community\u2019s first response was to take steps to secure the handling of remaining emails and make sure they were handled on top-secret servers to avoid any further breaches, and then to assess any damage to national security from the insecure handling and release of information already in some of the publicly disseminated emails.<\/p>\n \u201cContainment first, then a damage assessment, is how this must be handled,\u201d the official said.<\/p>\n It is believed the emails remain on a thumb drive in the possession ofMrs. Clinton<\/a>\u2019s private attorney, David Kendall, who declined a request by The Times to comment for this article.<\/p>\n Mr. Kendall is well familiar with the legal implications associated with improper handling of classified materials: He represented Mr. Petraeus<\/a>last year.<\/p>\n While the Petraeus case may be very different from Mrs. Clinton<\/a>\u2019s in detail, there is other precedent by which the Justice Department<\/a> may pursue a criminal investigation.<\/p>\n Among the more high-profile instances of a former official facing charges for storing classified information on a personal device is one that came in the mid-1990s and involved material on several laptops owned by John M. Deutch, who, at the time, had just retired as director of the CIA<\/a>.<\/p>\n Mr. Deutch ultimately was pardoned by President Bill Clinton in 2001.<\/p>\n Mr. Carroll<\/a>, meanwhile, highlighted another case that he has personally been involved in during recent years \u2014 representing Maj. Jason Brezler, a 35-year-old reservist who was dismissed from the Marine Corps after emailing a classified document to U.S. military officials in Afghanistan who had requested the document.<\/p>\n Mr. Brezler has sued to challenged his dismissal. His case is pending in federal court.<\/p>\n \u2022 <\/strong>John Solomon contributed to this report.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Calls mount for Hillary Clinton criminal investigation amid email data breach fears Critics say former secretary of state\u2019s actions compare unfavorably to David Patreaus\u2019 By Guy Taylor – The Washington Times With U.S. intelligence officials scrambling to contain damage from … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19136\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}