"Senior Intelligence Officials Said"

[Valin]

Real Clear Politics:

Charles Lipson

September 9, 2015

 

There’s a bigger story hidden inside the New York Times report that “a special intelligence review of two emails that Hillary Rodham Clinton received as secretary of state on her personal account — including one about North Korea’s nuclear weapons program — . . . contained highly classified information when Mrs. Clinton received them, senior intelligence officials said.” The review was undertaken by the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which presumably originated the material. They concluded that the material had originally been given the U.S. government’s highest secrecy classification. Even if one of Clinton’s aides stripped the markings (a felony), Secretary Clinton surely knew satellite intelligence and North Korean nuclear deployments are the U.S. government’s most highly classified information.

 

The media correctly saw the news as political trouble for Hillary, but they missed two other crucial elements of the story. Somebody high up in the intelligence community leaked that story. And Hillary faces far more than political trouble. She’s being fitted for an orange jumpsuit.

 

The NYT story came from anonymous sources. For Camp Clinton, the most ominous words are “senior intelligence officials said.” They signal just how furious the intelligence community is at the gross mishandling of their crown jewels. Since the intelligence agencies must now sort through everything Hillary has given to the State Department, plus whatever the FBI can scrape from the server, you can expect the leaks to keep on coming. Worse yet for her, the spy agencies must conduct a full-scale damage assessment, based on the high likelihood her server was hacked by foreign governments (and perhaps some 17-year-old in his parents’ basement in Belgrade).

 

(Snip)