The rules are different when you’ve got a 50-50 shot of moving into the Oval Office.

John Schindler is a security expert and former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer.He writes at The Observer,

Hillary Clinton, is a proven security risk of a serious kind. This column has reported in detail on Ms. Clinton’s troubles with our nation’s secrecy laws, the year-long scandal known as EmailGate that is currently under far-reaching investigation by the FBI. More than a thousand of the “unclassified” emails on Ms. Clinton’s private server of bathroom infamy were actually classified, with at least 22 of them being top secret, the highest official classification level.

Some of those top secret emails include incredibly sensitive information about intelligence sources and methods, such as details about our spies operating abroad under deep cover. Other emails Ms. Clinton and her staff considered unclassified actually included top secret-plus intelligence reports, including verbatim lifting of highly classified information, a felonious sort of plagiarism.

There is every reason to think that multiple foreign intelligence services had access to Ms. Clinton’s unencrypted email. The Romanian hacker who was extradited to the United States for his successful cracking into Ms. Clinton’s email in 2013 stated, “it was easy… easy for me, for everybody.” If a lone Balkan hacker was able to do this, imagine how simple a task this would have been for the Russian and Chinese intelligence services, with their thousands of highly trained cyber experts.

Nevertheless, the mainstream media continues to low-ball the national security implications of EmailGate, resorting to wordsmithing to obfuscate what Ms. Clinton and her staff we really up to at the State Department. The Obama White House has followed suit, insisting that, despite the FBI investigation into EmailGate, Ms. Clinton represents no security risk, and she should receive intelligence briefings as the putative Democratic nominee—while they seem less certain that Mr. Trump should get them too.

The Washington Post has now joined the fray, with assertions that Mr. Trump may represent an unacceptable security risk, bolstered by comments from former top intelligence officials indicating that giving Mr. Trump access to any secrets may be a bad idea.

Furthermore, The Daily Beast has alleged that the Intelligence Community is up in arms about giving classified presentations to Mr. Trump, based on his well-honed tendency to speak off the cuff, plus his occasional indulgence of conspiracy theories. There’s no doubt that plenty of individuals in the Intelligence Community loathe Mr. Trump and hope he never becomes president. However, there’s nothing like a consensus among our spies that the putative GOP nominee is a security risk.

In the first place, the IC, as insiders call it, is a vast, sprawling enterprise, with 16 different agencies that employ tens of thousands of Americans of every race, background, sexual orientation, and political persuasion. There is no “IC position” on much of anything, except that the sun rises in the East. For every spy who can’t stand Mr. Trump, there’s at least one who despises Ms. Clinton, particularly because she and her staff are walking around free after flagrantly breaking security rules that any IC employee would be arrested for violating.

...There is reason to doubt that Mr. Trump could qualify for a top secret security clearance if he applied for any IC job. Investigators would have questions about his multiple foreign wives, his bankruptcies, his rumored ties to organized crime, plus the fact that several of his top campaign officials possess curious ties to Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Similarly, it seems doubtful that Barack Obama could have obtained a top secret clearance either, given his admitted drug use, associations with convicted terrorists, and trips to strange places like Pakistan in his youth. Ms. Clinton definitely could not “get cleared,” as the spies say, while she is under FBI investigation for possible violations of the Espionage Act. Not to mention that some of her top campaign official possess ties to the Kremlin that are every bit as questionable as the Trump campaign’s. The rules are different when you’ve got a 50-50 shot of moving into the Oval Office.

It’s too soon to guess how Donald Trump will react when he has the veil of secrecy lifted and IC briefers start giving him classified presentations. He may find them valuable—or not. As always, much will depend on the quality of the briefers and how Mr. Trump interacts with them.

What’s not in doubt is that, just like everyone else who is “read on” for top secret information, he will learn the rules governing how the IC keeps its secrets. If Mr. Trump chooses to violate those rules, for instance blabbing in public about what he’s learned from the spy agencies, he will face grave legal consequences. The country would then be in the unenviable position of having the presidential nominees of both our parties under FBI investigation for violating our secrecy laws.

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