Sunday, January 7, 2018

Restoring the Rule of Law to the Protection of Classified Information

In the Clinton-email case, her intent, regardless of her motive, was clearly criminal.
The Justice Department is reviving investigations involving Hillary Clinton’s emails and the degree to which the State Department during Mrs. Clinton’s tenure as secretary was put in the service of the Clinton Foundation. Good. Indeed, it is long overdue. It underscores a point we’ve tried to make repeatedly here: You don’t need a special counsel for this kind of thing; such investigations are what we have a Justice Department full of career prosecutors for. The perverse institution of the independent prosecutor should be shunned whenever possible — and its jurisdiction tightly confined in the rare necessary case.
All that said, investigations involving the mishandling of classified information by officials with privileged access to it will go nowhere unless the Justice Department restores the rule of law: Investigators and prosecutors applying congressional statutes, not rewriting them as dictated by their political masters.
As we have recounted (see, e.g., here), in April 2016, when the Clinton-emails investigation was in full swing but before it was anywhere close to completion, President Obama gave a nationally televised interview in which he made clear that he did not want criminal charges brought against his former secretary of state — and the already certain Democratic candidate to succeed him. Obama made two duplicitous points: Mrs. Clinton (1) had exhibited “carelessness,” but nothing worse, by using a private, non-secure email system to conduct State Department business, and (2) had not intended to endanger American national security when she stored and transmitted classified information on this system.
Read the rest from Andrew C. McCarthy HERE.

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