Surely, Hillary Clinton hopes for the happy conclusion to the maddening string
of primaries and caucuses that have exhausted her. Surely, she hopes to be the
presidential nominee of the Democratic Party this year. And surely, she hopes
to be elected president. These hopes are realistic probabilities in her own
mind.
But if she is hoping for the end to her legal woes, that is a false hope –
and she knows it.
The relentless barrage of bad legal news for Clinton, which has been relegated
to below-the-fold stories because of the primary news position of the presidential
primary contests, must keep her and her lawyers up late at night. While her
husband has been arguing with military veterans at her political rallies and
while Marco Rubio and Donald Trump have been mocking each other’s body parts,
a series of curious developments has occurred in the Clinton email scandal.
It is fair to call this a scandal because it consists of the public revelation
of the private and probably criminal misdeeds of the nation’s chief diplomat
during President Barack Obama’s first term in office. Clinton’s job as secretary
of state was to keep secrets. Instead, she exposed them to friend and foe. The
exposure of state secrets, either intentionally or negligently, constitutes
the crime of espionage. For the secretary of state to have committed espionage
is, quite simply, scandalous.
We are not addressing just a handful of emails. To date, the State Department
has revealed the presence of more than 2,000 emails on her private server that
contained state secrets – and four that were select access privilege, or SAP.
The SAP emails require special codes in order to access them. The codes change
continually, and very few people in the government have the codes. SAP is a
sub-category of “top secret,” and it constitutes the highest level
of protected secrecy, for the utmost protection of the government’s gravest
secrets. It is unheard of for SAP-level data to reside in a non-secure, vulnerable
venue – yet that is where Clinton caused four SAPs to reside.