Politics & Policy

Getting Elected President: The Only Way Hillary Could Now Get a Security Clearance

(Chris Bergin/Reuters)
Yes, Comey says, she ‘sent or received’ e-mails that were classified at the time.

FBI Director James Comey made the amazing statement that no “reasonable prosecutor” would charge Hillary Clinton for her national-security breaches. What he apparently meant is that the “extremely careless” way, in his words, in which Hillary handled classified information somehow doesn’t meet the “gross negligence” standard that has resulted in the indictment of many federal officials for their handling such information. Alternately, he may have concluded that there was no way a jury would convict a well-known figure such as Hillary without clear evidence that she intended to violate the law.

We apparently won’t know more, because Comey took no questions after his statement today. Left unanswered is what civil or administrative penalties would be normally applied to someone who treated classified information the same way that Hillary has. Would such as person even be considered for a national-security clearance if she wasn’t elected President in November? I doubt it. Rudy Giuliani told Fox News that he’s seen thousands of background checks and that Hillary would never be given national-security clearance with her record.

Also left unanswered by Comey today is the status of the parallel investigation the FBI is conducting into possible corruption involving the State Department and the Clinton Foundation. No doubt some reporter would have asked Comey what the status of that investigation was and whether he believes that probe will be finished before Americans go to the polls to elect a president in November. Another question no reporter got to ask was whether any of the deleted e-mails painstakingly recovered from Clinton’s several e-mail servers bear on the investigation of the Clinton Foundation.

POLL: Was Hillary Let Off the Hook Because She’s an Elitist Politician?

Hillary Clinton’s campaign issued a statement saying it was gratified that the investigation into her e-mails has ended with no criminal charges. But it made no mention of the systematic dismantling of her various statements on the entire e-mail matter. Consider that the FBI has now proven that almost everything Hillary Clinton has said about the matter is, in fact, untrue.

“I can only repeat what happens to be the case — that I did not send nor receive information that was marked classified at the time that it was sent or received,” she said last September 8 in an interview with ABC News.

#share#Comey laid out the facts:

‐The FBI found 110 e-mails on Clinton’s server that were classified at the time they were sent or received. He also said she had a responsibility to see that several messages she handled clearly indicated they were classified.

‐Comey also reported that Clinton had used not one but multiple private e-mail servers and devices while at State. That destroys the main explanation she gave for having a private server installed: She wished to use only a single device for “convenience.”

‐In addition, Comey noted that Clinton’s lawyers never actually read the 30,000 of her e-mails they deleted after she left State. Thousands of them turned out to be work-related — contrary to her assertions.

‐Hillary Clinton claims there is no evidence her e-mails were hacked by hostile foreign actors. But Comey clearly indicated that we wouldn’t know if they were, and that the assumption must be that they were — especially given that Hillary sent and received e-mails when she was on the soil of hostile foreign powers. John Kerry, Hillary’s successor at State, has publicly stated that he assumes that all of his e-mails will be hacked by foreign powers when he writes them.

RELATED: FBI Rewrites Federal Law to Let Hillary Off the Hook

So what remains of the scandals surrounding Hillary Clinton? We may know more when the FBI report on the matter is delivered to the Justice Department. That report will no doubt provide a lot more detail about Hillary’s negligence, and the odds are that the report will leak. Let’s hope for the sake of voters making an informed judgement that the report is delivered to Justice before the November election.

#related#Hillary’s suspicious and reckless behavior in the e-mail scandal also makes it imperative that the FBI wrap up its investigation into the Clinton Foundation as quickly as possible. As Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cash shows, there is plenty of smoke suggesting that the foundation exercised undue influence over State Department decisions during Hlllary’s tenure there. If we are to avoid a possible constitutional crisis, in the event Hillary Clinton were to become president, we need to know as much as possible about the other scandals at State for which Hillary may have responsibility.

And the e-mail story may have a final act. Morgan Wright, a noted cybersecurity specialist, told Fox News today that Julian Assange of Wikileaks has claimed he has some of Hillary Clinton’s compromised e-mails and will release them. That would provide real proof of just how much Hillary Clinton’s recklessness may have damaged our national security.

John Fund is National Review’s national-affairs reporter and a fellow at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity.
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