It’s been confirmed: the Democratic frontrunner in the race for the White House put the lives of numerous Americans at risk. And she did so by sending highly sensitive information from her private, unsecured email account, all because she was supposedly incapable of accessing email on her computer.
Last week, the State Department announced they would not release 22 of Hillary Clinton’s emails to the public. They explained that some of the information contained in these emails, which Clinton sent from a private, unsecured email account during her tenure as secretary of State, was indeed “top secret.”
Although the State Department did its best to downplay the content of the emails by stating that the information was not classified at the time Clinton sent and received it, new information seems to contradict that narrative. The information contained in those 22 withheld emails was indeed very sensitive. So sensitive, in fact, that it put the lives of numerous Americans at risk.
Fox News reported Monday that the emails contained “operational intelligence,” which is information about covert operations to gather intelligence as well as details about the assets and informants working with the U.S. government.
While the Fox News report didn’t get too specific on exactly the kind of information Clinton’s private emails use put at risk, The Observer confirms that it was in fact information that would put the lives of American intelligence agents at risk. John R. Schindler writes:
Discussions with Intelligence Community officials have revealed that Ms. Clinton’s ‘unclassified’ emails included Holy Grail items of American espionage such as the true names of Central Intelligence Agency intelligence officers serving overseas under cover. Worse, some of those exposed are serving under non-official cover. NOCs (see this for an explanation of their important role in espionage) are the pointy end of the CIA spear and they are always at risk of exposure – which is what Ms. Clinton’s emails have done.
Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.), who’s on the House Intelligence Committee, told Fox News that Clinton had to have known that the information she was emailing from her personal server was sensitive regardless of whether it was marked classified at the time she sent it. Pompeo said (emphasis added):
There is no way that someone, a senior government official who has been handling classified information for a good chunk of their adult life, could not have known that this information ought to be classified, whether it was marked or not. […] Anyone with the capacity to read and an understanding of American national security, an 8th grade reading level or above, would understand that the release of this information or the potential breach of a non-secure system presented risk to American national security.
Although she did graduate from Yale Law and Wellesley College, which have reputations of being academically rigorous, Clinton was known among her staff as being rather helpless, even downright incompetent.
In 2009, Clinton’s chief of staff at the State Department said in an email to another staffer that the then-secretary did not know how to access email from her computer, The Hill reported.
Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, told State Department official Lewis Lukens that there could be a ‘problem,’ because Clinton ‘does not know how to use a computer to do email — only [Blackberry],’ he wrote in a 2009 email released on Monday. ‘But I said [it] would not take much training to get her up to speed,’ he claimed.
While it may come as a surprise that the woman who was once fourth in line to ascend to the presidency couldn’t work her email, we’re talking about a lady who hasn’t driven a car since 1996. Those emails in which Clinton asked her staff for more iced tea and repeated fax machine assistance make a lot more sense now.
