Emails imperil both candidates

I am a former Foreign Service officer who worked for 21 years in the State Department and used to handle large volumes of classified material, including the specialized compartmented variety (SCI). The rules about this stuff are clear: it must be handled in protected channels and certainly not in personal email accounts or on unclassified servers (even if they are in your own house). Virtually all information going to and from the Secretary of State is normally classified at the “confidential” level or above, often including purely logistic stuff that for anyone else might be public.

Once upon a time, when I was an office director in State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, I would write analytical pieces for the Secretary of State’s “Morning Summary” based entirely on open source material. The editor, who was the last person to see them before publication, would always classify them confidential. I objected and asked for an explanation. “You wrote it,” he said, “and it is going to the Secretary of State, so that makes it at least confidential.” We compromised: the texts got classified, but the titles did not. I still list them among my publications.

So there is a lot of what a reasonable person would regard as over-classification of materials going to the Secretary, including stuff that becomes useless the day after a trip to say, Moscow, because it concerns arrival procedures and hotel room numbers. It should not be assumed that mishandling of classified material necessarily compromises national security. That is particularly the case for emails on a private server that was apparently never hacked, or we would have heard about it by now.

The real problem arises when an official takes highly classified material (especially SCI), tries to purge or obscure its origins, and puts it into an unclassified channel. There is some evidence this was done with a few previously discovered materials, but the FBI concluded that the violations did not meet the threshold for a reasonable prosecutor to proceed against Hillary Clinton on that basis, which requires intent to make information available outside classified channels.

The new emails discovered since then won’t meet the threshold for prosecution either if Newsweek is correct:

There is no indication the emails in question were withheld by Clinton during the investigation, the law enforcement official told Newsweek, nor does the discovery suggest she did anything illegal. Also, none of the emails were to or from Clinton, the official said. Moreover, despite the widespread claims in the media that this development had prompted the FBI to “reopen” of the case, it did not; such investigations are never actually closed, and it is common for law enforcement to discover new information that needs to be examined.

I would be the first to admit that FBI Director Comey was put in a tough spot: he had to investigate these newly discovered emails. Doing so without informing Congress, when he had already testified that the case was not going anyplace, would have been risky. But in saying that he was pursuing the investigation further (not reopening it, as the press has reported, echoing the Trump campaign) without the clarifications Newsweek provides, Comey erred in a way that has huge political ramifications that he certainly should have anticipated. I can only imagine the political pressures brought to bear.

Hillary Clinton showed poor judgment in using a private email server, as Comey has charged and she has admitted. Just as important: Clinton aide Huma Abedin was a disaster waiting to happen. Her grossly excessive private employment while a government official and her husband’s dreadful sexting obsession should have been ample warning that she was accustomed to both abusing and abuse. Clinton would do well to sacrifice her to the gods of public opinion.

Should Americans be concerned about the compromise of national security information? Yes, of course. But there is no clear evidence of that in either the earlier stage of the investigation or in the effort just now beginning. They should of course also be concerned about the hacking of private emails by the Russian government, which is using them to help Donald Trump’s campaign after he appealed for Moscow’s help in publicizing Clinton’s staff emails. They don’t prove much other than the high competence of some of the staff and Bill Clinton’s willingness to work for foreigners who also gave donations to the Clinton Foundation, which isn’t what I would call the worst idea he ever had. President Obama could be making much more of the Russian connection than he has so far. Emails imperil both candidates.