Hillary Clinton Knew About Criminal Penalties for Mishandling Classified Information

Hillary Clinton Knew About Criminal Penalties for Mishandling Classified Information

Last Friday, the State Department revealed that investigators had found 268 more classified emails stored on Hillary Clinton’s homebrew server. That discovery brought the grand total of sensitive messages stored where they never should have been stored to over 600.

We’ve still got three more releases to go, and there’s no indication that we shouldn’t expect to find more classified content. This is a huge concern—and one that the mainstream media is still bent on covering up; but what should concern us even more is that Clinton exposed sensitive information in spite of her full knowledge of the consequences of those actions.

When Clinton was appointed Secretary of State, she signed a “Sensitive Compartmented Information Nondisclosure Agreement.” This means that she knew 1) what constitutes SCI, 2) how the release of SCI could harm the U.S., and 3) what criminal penalties she could face if caught even negligently handling SCI.

The Washington Free Beacon got their hands on a copy of the NDA:

Clinton received at least two emails while secretary of state on her personal email server since marked “TS/SCI”—top secret/sensitive compartmented information—according to the U.S. intelligence community’s inspector general.

The State Department said in September that Clinton’s private email system, set up at her Chappaqua, N.Y., home, was not authorized to handle SCI.

The Democratic presidential frontrunner defended her unauthorized possession of SCI and her sending of emails containing classified information by claiming that the information was not marked as classified when it was sent or received.

The language of her NDA suggests it was Clinton’s responsibility to ascertain whether information shared through her private email server was, in fact, classified.

“I understand that it is my responsibility to consult with appropriate management authorities in the Department … in order to ensure that I know whether information or material within my knowledge or control that I have reason to believe might be SCI,” the agreement says.

The Clinton campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the NDA.

You can read the full NDA here, courtesy of the Free Beacon.

Even if we assume for the sake of argument that Clinton is simply that dense when it comes to classified material (which I don’t believe to be the case) further investigation by the excellent Free Beacon shows that Clinton was made fully aware of the possibility that “malicious actors” would attempt to hijack her private email account.

The WFB has the memo in hand:

The February 2011 memo, obtained by the Competitive Enterprise Institute through an open records request and shared with the Washington Free Beacon, warned of “a dramatic increase … in attempts by [redacted] to compromise the private home e-mail accounts of senior [State] Department officials.”

All of Clinton’s official email communications as secretary of state took place through a personal email address housed on a “homebrew” server in her Chappaqua, N.Y., home.

According to the memo, written specifically for Clinton by Eric Boswell, then the State Department’s top diplomatic security official, the unnamed hackers were attempting to breach officials’ email accounts via a technique known as “phishing.”

“Specifically, the actors are sending cleverly forged e-mails to victims’ private web-based accounts (e.g. Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo),” he wrote. “These ‘spear phishing’ messages appear to be sent by U.S. government officials but are designed to trick recipients into activating embedded malicious code by clicking on an attachment or link.”

Oh, and those “cleverly forged emails?” Clinton definitely received one.

We should be used by now to the media and progressive surrogates making excuses for Clinton’s attitude, her policy failures, and her lies—but this is beyond the pale. This goes beyond “negligence”—which is a weak standard to begin with—and barrels right into “knowing.”

Hillary Clinton knowingly made herself, her staff, and her countrymen vulnerable to the attacks of malicious hackers. Who will hold her responsible?

I think we already know the answer to that.

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