Clinton campaign ruffled by State Department emails FBI probe
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MARCH 25, 2016
WASHINGTON
Los Angeles Times
State Department declares 22 Clinton emails Top Secret
LOS ANGELES, JANUARY 29 – The private email server Hillary Clinton used while secretary of State reemerged as a liability for her presidential run, as the State Department acknowledged Friday that 22 messages stored on the server contain top-secret information.
Cinton has long denied any of the messages that went through the unprotected server in her home contained highly sensitive material. The State Department said none of the messages were marked top secret at the time they were sent — although it is looking into whether they should have been.
The administration refused to discuss the contents of the messages, which it acknowledged hours before the latest batch of about 1,000 pages of Clinton email is to be disclosed publicly. The messages marked top secret are being excluded from the disclosure.
“I’m not going to speak to the content of these documents,” said State Department spokesman John Kirby at a briefing with reporters. “I understand there’s great curiosity. I’m just going to put that right out at the top. I am not going to speak to the content of this email traffic.”
“You don’t start granting people close to Clinton immunity unless you are seriously looking at charges against your target,” one former official told me.
He said the documents have been marked as highly sensitive “at the request of the intelligence community because they contain a category of top-secret information.”
The Clinton campaign issued a statement Friday denying the documents contain any sensitive government secrets.
“We firmly oppose the complete blocking of the release of these emails,” spokesman Brian Fallon said.
“After a process that has been dominated by bureaucratic infighting that has too often played out in public view, the loudest and leakiest participants in this interagency dispute have now prevailed in blocking any release of these emails. This flies in the face of the fact that these emails were unmarked at the time they were sent, and have been called ‘innocuous’ by certain intelligence officials.”
The campaign also said the emails were never previously classified by the State Department because there was nothing sensitive in them. One of the emails, the statement said, focuses on the contents of a published news article.
“This appears to be over-classification run amok,” the campaign said.
Intelligence agencies typically take the position that information deemed classified remains so even if it has been publicly revealed and widely discussed. As a result, an email discussing a news story about a classified program could be considered classified. How many of Clinton’s emails fall into that sort of category is not known.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the emails in question were part of seven separate “back-and-forth email chains,” and that none originated with Clinton. None of the emails she received had the mandatory markings required when classified information is transmitted, Feinstein added.
“It has never made sense to me that Secretary Clinton can be held responsible for email exchanges that originated with someone else,” said Feinstein, who has endorsed Clinton. “The only reason to hold Secretary Clinton responsible for emails that didn’t originate with her is for political points, and that’s what we’ve seen over the past several months.”
The latest iteration of Clinton’s email troubles comes as an unwelcome distraction to her campaign, just three days before the first votes are cast in the race for the Democratic nomination. Polls show Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) are in close to a dead heat in Iowa, which will hold its caucuses Monday.
The emails are the focus of an FBI probe that began six months ago, and could go on for months longer. Even if Clinton is not ultimately found by law enforcement to have done anything wrong, the prospect of an FBI investigation dragging into the general election campaign is unsettling to Democrats.
Despite the campaign’s best efforts, Clinton has been unable to put to rest questions about her use of the private server. At a nationally broadcast town hall in Iowa earlier this week, a young voter in the audience asked Clinton to explain why so many voters of his generation don’t trust her. She attributed that problem to all the attacks she has endured from political opponents during her long career. But she found herself once again trying to explain why she did nothing inappropriate.
“I’m not willing to say it was an error in judgment because nothing I did was wrong,” she said.
Although Clinton’s Democratic rivals have avoided attacking her on the email issue, Republicans have pounded her on the topic, and the latest news will undoubtedly figure heavily in their criticisms.
Will Hillary get charged, or what? 
CHARLES GASPARINO / New York Post
NEW YORK, MARCH 20 – James Comey and his investigators are increasingly certain that presidential nominee Hillary Clinton violated laws in handling classified government information through her private email server, career agents say. Some expect him to push for charges, but he faces a formidable obstacle: the political types in the Obama White House who view a Clinton presidency as a third Obama term..
With that, agents have been spreading the word, largely through associates in the private sector, that their boss is getting stonewalled, despite uncovering compelling evidence that Clinton broke the law.
Exactly what that evidence is — and how and when it was uncovered during Comey’s months-long inquiry — has not been disclosed. For the record, the FBI had no comment on the matter, and government sources say no final decision has been made.
Clinton denies she did anything wrong, claiming she had no idea she was getting classified information (a violation of federal law) on her private server during her years as Obama’s secretary of state because the documents she received contained no such headings.
And as FBI director, Comey can only recommend charges to the hacks in the Obama Justice Department. Indeed, many law enforcement officials who know the FBI chief and the bureau’s inner workings believe the evidence would have to be overwhelming for Comey to even recommend charges, much less for DOJ to pursue them.
Still, some FBI staffers suggest the probe’s at a point where Comey might quit in protest if Justice ignores a recommendation to pursue a criminal case against Clinton.
Just how close Comey is to any recommendation — whether to indict or exonerate Clinton — is difficult to know. But agents believe the probe is nearing an end. A State Department staffer who set up Clinton’s email server, for instance, was recently granted immunity from prosecution to provide Comey’s team with evidence.
“You don’t start granting people close to Clinton immunity unless you are seriously looking at charges against your target,” one former official told me.
I’m also told Comey and his team increasingly doubt Clinton’s story. Most officials know private email servers are easier to hack into than secure government servers. They also know that even documents not labeled “classified” may be top secret.
That’s why they’re supposed to be sent only through government accounts. Those who don’t follow those rules, like former CIA Director David Petraeus, have faced consequences.
Another matter for Comey & Co.: whether Clinton comingled her official State Department business with her role at the Clinton Foundation, and whether she wiped clean messages that show her using her office at State for foundation work.
Law enforcement sources also say Comey’s record as a prosecutor shows he has zero tolerance for such abuses.
As US attorney for the Southern District after the Nasdaq stock market crashed, Comey led an obstruction investigation that targeted Internet banker Frank Quattrone. That probe focused on a single (and some would say non-dispositive) sentence from a single email he appeared to approve, “Let’s clean up those files.”
Quattrone was convicted and faced several years in jail, though a successful appeal and deferred prosecution agreement with the government put the matter to rest.
Comey’s prosecution of domestic diva Martha Stewart followed a similar pattern. Stewart sold shares of a company owned by one of her friends just before a corporate announcement sent the stock into a tailspin.
But she did not go to jail for what the feds began investigating: insider trading. Instead, Comey & Co. had to settle on obstruction-of-justice charges based on allegedly misleading information Stewart gave about her trade. Even this was no slam dunk: At trial, witnesses contradicted each other. At least one of the charges in the case was dropped. (One prosecution witness later faced perjury charges over his testimony but was eventually acquitted.)
Yet in the end, Comey prevailed. Stewart was convicted and sentenced to several months in prison.
Yes, there are key differences with these cases, the biggest being political: Comey had the backing of his boss, then-President George W. Bush, to address alleged Wall Street improprieties.
FBI sources say he has no backing from President Obama and Attorney General Loretta Lynch to recommend charges against the former secretary, since a Clinton presidency may be the best chance to preserve the Obama legacy.
That leaves Comey in a bind: Does he do what is politically expedient and deny the reality that Clinton’s email server activities violated the law, or follow the evidence to wherever it takes him?
Here’s hoping he uses the same standards against Clinton as he used against Stewart and Quattrone.
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