Hillary Clinton and the FBI
by Andrew P. Napolitano
AntiWar.com
September 08, 2016
On Sept. 2, the FBI released a lengthy explanation of its investigation of Hillary Clinton and a summary of the evidence amassed against her. It also released a summary of Clinton’s July FBI interrogation.
The interrogation was in some respects standard and in others very troubling. It was standard in that she was confronted with emails she had sent or received and was asked whether she recalled them, and her judgment about them was challenged. The FBI was looking for gross negligence in her behavior about securing state secrets.
The failure to secure state secrets that have been entrusted to one for safekeeping is known as espionage, and espionage is the rare federal crime that does not require prosecutors to prove the defendant’s intent. They need only prove the defendant’s gross negligence.
At one point during the interrogation, FBI agents attempted to trick her, as the law permits them to do. Before the interrogation began, agents took the hard copy of an innocuous email Clinton had sent to an aide and marked it “secret.” Then, at her interrogation, they asked Clinton whether she recognized the email and its contents. She said she did not recognize it, but she questioned the “secret” denomination and pointed out to the agents that nothing remotely secret was in the email.
By examining the contents of the email to see whether it contained state secrets, which it clearly did not, Clinton demonstrated an awareness of the law – namely, that it is the contents of a document or email that cause it to be protected by federal secrecy statutes, not the denomination put on it by the sender.
This added to the case against her because she later told the FBI that she had never paid attention to whether a document contained state secrets or not. In the strange world of espionage prosecution, this denial of intent is an admission of guilt, as it is profoundly the job of the secretary of state to recognize state secrets and to keep them in their secure government-protected venues, and the grossly negligent failure to do so is criminal.
The FBI notes of the interrogation recount that Clinton professed serious memory lapses 39 times. She also professed ignorance over what “C” means in the margin of a government document. “C” in the margin means “confidential,” which is one of the three levels of federal state secrets. The other two levels are “secret” and “top secret.” Under federal law, Clinton was required to keep in secure government venues all documents in those three categories. The FBI found that she had failed to do so hundreds of times.
The Rest…HERE
