Saturday, October 22, 2016

Well...how about it?

Andrew McCarthy believes that for mishandling ‘top secret’ information and lying about it, Hillary Clinton should be prosecuted. He writes about this week's guilty plea by Marine General Cartwright
to making false statements to FBI agents who were investigating his mishandling of classified information. The general admits to falsely concealing his communications with two journalists. They involved “Stuxnet,” a covert American–Israeli operation to infect the computer systems that controlled Iran’s main nuclear-enrichment facility. The information was top secret, regarding a crucial program. Its exposure caused diplomatic problems and threatens our spy agencies’ relationships with foreign intelligence services, which are based on the ability to keep secrets secret.

...In light of General Cartwright’s prosecution for lying about his mishandling of classified information, it is worth revisiting Mrs. Clinton’s representation to the FBI that she did not know what “(C)” meant. For four years, Clinton was secretary of state, a job in which classified information is stock-in-trade. On starting her tenure, Clinton signed a document acknowledging that she had “received a security indoctrination concerning the nature and protection of classified information.” In the last paragraph, right over her signature, Clinton acknowledges that she has been provided with the aforementioned executive order signed by her husband in 1995 — the one that explains, in painstaking detail, what classified information at the confidential level is.

Well, in those classified documents she studied lo those dozen years, the “(C)” designation is ubiquitous. It often appears numerous times in a single document — even on a single page. Yet, despite spending a decade-plus as a daily, top-level consumer of classified information, Clinton looked a room full of FBI agents and federal prosecutors in the eye and told them she didn’t know what the “(C)” designation meant.

Hillary Clinton said she did not know what “(C)” meant. Hillary Clinton told the FBI she could not recall any training regarding how classified information was to be handled, and yet she wrote extensively about it in her memoir, and — as a condition of getting access to such information — she signed a government declaration attesting that she had gotten precisely such training.

This week, after General Cartwright’s guilty plea, the Justice Department and the FBI thumped their chests and told us that if any government official, no matter how powerful, mishandles classified information and then lies about it, that official will be prosecuted — at least for the false statements.

Well . . . how about it?
Read more here.

No comments: