Hillary Clinton’s nightmare is not the sudden resurgence of Bernie Sanders.
It is the fidelity to the rule of law of the FBI.
The recent revelations of the receipt by Clinton of a Special Access Program
email, as well as cut and pasted summaries of state secrets on her server and
on her BlackBerry nearly guarantee that the FBI will recommend that the Department
of Justice convene a grand jury and seek her indictment for espionage. Here
is the backstory.
It seems that every week, more information comes to light about Clinton’s grave
legal woes. Her worries are in two broad categories: One is her well-documented
failure to safeguard state secrets and the other is her probable use of her
position as secretary of state to advance financially her husband’s charitable
foundation. The FBI is currently and aggressively investigating both. What I
will describe below is in the state secrets category. It is apparently not new
to the FBI, but it is new to the public.
Among the data that the FBI either found on the Clinton server or acquired
from the State Department via its responses to Freedom of Information Act requests
is a top-secret email that has been denominated Special Access Program. Top
secret is the highest category of state secrets (the other categories are confidential
and secret), and of the sub-parts of top secret, SAP is the most sensitive.
SAP is clothed in such secrecy that it cannot be received or opened accidentally.
Clinton — who ensured all of her governmental emails came to her through her
husband’s server, a nonsecure nongovernmental venue — could only have received
or viewed it from that server after inputting certain codes. Those codes change
at unscheduled times, such that she would need to inquire of them before inputting
them.
The presence of the SAP-denominated email on her husband’s server, whether
opened or not, shows a criminal indifference to her lawful obligation to maintain
safely all state secrets entrusted to her care. Yet, Clinton has suggested that
she is hopelessly digitally inept and may not have known what she was doing.
This constitutes an attempted plausible deniability to the charge of failing
to safeguard state secrets.