Garbage In, Garbage out: Who can bear the smell!
Image Credit: Flickr.com/soundfromwayout

Well, FBI Director James Comey finally came out and announced today the FBI would not recommend to the Justice Department that it seek a criminal indictment of Hillary Clinton for her handling of classified material. Before I write another word concerning what I think about this charade, let me offer the video below with James Comey’s full press conference.     

This video replaces a small snippet of the announcement I originally had in this place. In its entirety, it is much more damning than the original snippet.

The Announcement

The verbatim transcript of the most important part of this press conference is the following:

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. For example, seven email chains concerned matters that were classified at the TOP SECRET, SPECIAL ACCESS PROGRAM at the time they were sent and received. Those chains involved Secretary Clinton both sending emails about those matters and receiving emails about those same matters. There is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position, or in the position of those with whom she was corresponding about those matters, should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation.

In addition, Comey described all the FBI did to recover the classified emails, and the possibility, even the probability, that many of these emails were hacked by hostile powers.  He noted they found no overt evidence for hacking, but that the sophistication of hostile countries’ intelligence services were such that the FBI would not expect to detect any hacking. In addition, he gave numbers of the classified emails of all types, which as I recall numbered in the thousands in total. [N.B. It turns out they were only in the hundreds. I misheard. CBT 7/6/2016] He also described how Clinton’s nonsecure email servers (she had more than one), had absolutely no safeguards to keep out hackers. To show such gross negligence is in itself a felony. As I listened to Comey, I became increasingly certain that the FBI would most certainly recommend that Justice seek an indictment. But then, for reasons I do not understand, at the very end he announced they would not recommend seeking an indictment.

The Law

What screams out in Comey’s presentation to anyone, such as myself, who has ever had to handle classified material was the misplacement of TOP SECRET/SAP information. I know for a fact the safeguards placed on SECRET/SAP materials are even more onerous than for ordinary TOP SECRET. TOP SECRET/SAP information is generally the most highly sensitive information the nation has: The kind that gets good guys killed when the bad guys get it. Any information classified with a /SAP suffix generally must reside in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF (pronounced “skiff”). To remove that information without official authorization is all by itself a felony that does not require criminal intent. The statute that would be violated is 18 U.S. Code § 793, subsection f. This statute, also known as the Espionage Act of 1917, declares in that particular subsection

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.

The emphasis in this quote is mine. Notice this particular section of the statute does not say the government must prove the accused to have had intent to violate the statute; the government needs only to prove one of two things:

1. The accused “through gross negligence permits the same [the classified information] 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. The accused “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.”

Again the emphases in these quotes are mine.

In his presentation Director Comey said of Clinton and her colleagues that “there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.” In an affair that is this serious, there is not a gnat’s worth of difference between extremely careless and gross negligence. So why did he not recommend that indictments be sought for both Clinton and some of her colleagues?

The Election

There is no way Comey’s announcement will mark finished to this issue. One thing the Obama administration will have to explain is just why they prosecuted and saw convicted General David Petraeus, but not Hillary Clinton. Petraeus’ sins against the country were similar in kind to what Clinton and company are accused to have done, but they were infinitesimal by comparison. Rather than hang out TOP SECRET/SAP material for all the world’s intelligence services to see on unsecured servers, Petraeus shared SECRET material with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, who was also a Reserve Army officer with a SECRET clearance (as well as Petraeus’ paramour, it must be admitted). It would seem Petraeus’ biggest sin was sharing the information with an officer who had the clearance, but not the need to know. I write this not to excuse Petraeus nor to say he should not have been prosecuted and punished, but to ask just why the hell the administration does not go after Clinton with the same zeal it went after Petraeus!

Between now and the November election, I expect the two sides to traverse this entire issue again and again, with every word spoken by anyone of eminence to be repeatedly parsed by both sides to persuade the undecided to vote for them.

This entire affair of Clinton’s mishandling of the most sensitive classified information there is smells to high heaven! If Clinton gets away with it because of her political power as the Democratic Party standard bearer, then respect for the law, let alone the FBI, might well be lost. For then we will be living on George Orwell’s Animal Farm, where it was  said that “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” But then that may depend on what the meaning of the word “is” is.

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