Whoever, being an officer, employee, contractor, or consultant of the United States, and, by virtue of his office, employment, position, or contract, becomes possessed of documents or materials containing classified information of the United States, knowingly removes such documents or materials without authority and with the intent to retain such documents or materials at an unauthorized location shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for not more than one year, or both.
Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, note, or information, relating to the national defense, (1) through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, or (2) having knowledge that the same has been illegally removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of its trust, or lost, or stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, and fails to make prompt report of such loss, theft, abstraction, or destruction to his superior officer—
Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.
Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended [edit: intention isn’t relevant when the issue is negligence] to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless [edit: thankfully she was only extremely careless, and not grossly negligent] in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.
For example, seven e-mail chains concern matters that were classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level when they were sent and received. These chains involved Secretary Clinton both sending e-mails about those matters and receiving e-mails from others about the same matters. There is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position, or in the position of those government employees with whom she was corresponding about these matters, should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation. In addition to this highly sensitive information, we also found information that was properly classified as Secret by the U.S. Intelligence Community at the time it was discussed on e-mail (that is, excluding the later “up-classified” e-mails).
None of these e-mails should have been on any kind of unclassified system, but their presence is especially concerning because all of these e-mails were housed on unclassified personal servers not even supported by full-time security staff, like those found at Departments and Agencies of the U.S. Government—or even with a commercial service like Gmail….
Separately, it is important to say something about the marking of classified information. Only a very small number [edit: i.e. multiple] of the e-mails containing classified information bore markings indicating the presence of classified information. But even if information is not marked “classified” in an e-mail, participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it [edit: without a doubt]…
Although there is evidence of potential [edit: actual, not potential] violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information [edit: ya think?], our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case. Prosecutors necessarily weigh a number of factors before bringing charges. There are obvious considerations, like the strength of the evidence, especially regarding intent [edit: as well as the opinion of my boss, a Democratic political appointee, and again, intent doesn’t matter]. Responsible decisions also consider the context of a person’s actions, and how similar situations have been handled in the past [edit: so if we can find someone else who got off in the past we can just ignore the law here too].
So the FBI basically admits Clinton broke the law but says it doesn’t care. All in time for Obama to go campaigning with Clinton later in the day.
theartofmadeline
andulkaphoto
2087
jbbartram-illu
discoholicmusic
yousharknotpass
jacobvanloon
stormborns
turnnoffyourmind
