Byron Tau’s Wall Street Journal article on the internal government review conducted by the IC Inspector General related to Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server/account during her tenure as Secretary of State seems to me to be a bombshell. I take it that we cannot necessarily trust Madam Hillary to take care that confidential national security information is treated with care commensurate with its importance if such treatment conflicts with her personal interests. In ordinary life, she would be deemed too careless or irresponsible to be entrusted with such information. You probably already knew that, but this is news:
An internal government review found that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sent at least four emails from her personal account containing classified information during her time heading the State Department.In a letter to members of Congress on Thursday, the inspector general of the intelligence community concluded that Mrs. Clinton’s email contains material from the intelligence community that should have been considered “secret”—the second-highest level of classification—at the time it was sent. A copy of the letter to Congress was provided to The Wall Street Journal by a spokeswoman for the inspector general.As a result of the findings, the inspector general referred the matter to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s counterintelligence division. An official with the Department of Justice said Friday that it had received a referral to open an investigation into the potential mishandling of classified information. Initially, a Justice Department official said Friday morning the investigation was criminal in nature, but the department reversed course hours later without explanation.“The department has received a referral related to the potential compromise of classified information. It is not a criminal referral,” an official said.The four emails in question “were classified when they were sent and are classified now,” said Andrea Williams, a spokeswoman for the inspector general. The inspector general reviewed just a small sample totaling about 40 emails in Mrs. Clinton’s inbox—meaning that many more in the trove of more than 30,000 may contain potentially confidential, secret or top-secret information.The inspector general’s office concluded that Mrs. Clinton should have used a secure network to transmit the emails in question—rather than her personal email account run off a home server.“None of the emails we reviewed had classification or dissemination markings, but some included IC-derived classified information and should have been handled as classified, appropriately marked, and transmitted via a secure network,” wrote Inspector General I. Charles McCullough in the letter to Congress.The emails in question left government custody and are on both Mrs. Clinton’s personal home email sever as well as a thumb drive of David Kendall, Mrs. Clinton’s personal attorney.
Whole thing accessible via Google here.
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