The federal criminal investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s
failure to secure state secrets was ratcheted up earlier this week, and at the
same time, the existence of a parallel criminal investigation of another aspect
of her behavior was made known. This is the second publicly revealed expansion
of the FBI’s investigations in two months.
I have argued for two months that Clinton’s legal woes are either grave or
worse than grave. That argument has been based on the hard, now public evidence
of her failure to safeguard national security secrets and the known manner in
which the Department of Justice addresses these failures.
The failure to safeguard state secrets is an area of the law in which the federal
government has been aggressive to the point of being merciless. State secrets
are the product of members of the intelligence community’s risking their lives
to obtain information.
Before she was entrusted with any state secrets — indeed, on her first full
day as secretary of state — Clinton received instruction from FBI agents on
how to safeguard them; and she signed an oath swearing to comply with the laws
commanding the safekeeping of these secrets. She was warned that the failure
to safeguard secrets — known as espionage — would most likely result in aggressive
prosecution.
In the cases of others, those threats have been carried out. The Obama Department
of Justice prosecuted a young sailor for espionage for sending a selfie to his
girlfriend, because in the background of the photo was a view of a sonar screen
on a submarine. It prosecuted a heroic Marine for espionage for warning his
superiors of the presence of an al-Qaida operative in police garb inside an
American encampment in Afghanistan, because he used a Gmail account to send
the warning.
It also prosecuted Gen. David Petraeus for espionage for keeping secret and
top-secret documents in an unlocked drawer in his desk inside his guarded home.
It alleged that he shared those secrets with a friend who also had a security
clearance, but it dropped those charges.