According to a U.S. government source, Hillary Clinton chatted about an Afghan spy’s ties to the CIA in one of the classified email chains found on her personal, unsecured server.
Such highly sensitive information is considered by members of the intelligence community to be the “crown jewels” of the United States government because if the information is compromised, our national security could be damaged and people could die. In this particular case, the emails may have been referring to a spy who was originally exposed in the New York Times and eventually murdered by the Taliban.
Via Catherine Herridge and Pamela K. Browne of Fox News:
The discussion of a foreign national working with the U.S. government raises security implications – an executive order signed by President Obama said unauthorized disclosures are “presumed to cause damage to the national security.”
The U.S. government official said the Clinton email exchange, which referred to a New York Times report, was among 29 classified emails recently provided to congressional committees with specific clearances to review them. In that batch were 22 “top secret” exchanges deemed too damaging to national security to release.
Hillary Clinton in January dismissed reports that her emails contained a high level of classified material. During an interview on NPR, she said that “the best we can determine” is that the emails in question were a forward of a New York Times article on a classified drone program that had been retroactively classified.
“How a New York Times public article that goes around the world could be in any way viewed as classified, or the fact that it would be sent to other people off of the New York Times site, I think, is one of the difficulties that people have in understanding what this is about,” Clinton said.
But as Fox News reported, “confirmation that one of these exchanges concerned a reported CIA asset means the emails went beyond issues like the drone strike campaign.”
Based on the timing and other details, the email chain likely refers to either an October 2009 Times story that identified Afghan national Ahmed Wali Karzai, the half-brother of then-Afghan president Hamid Karzai, as a person who received “regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency” — or an August 2010 Times story that identified Karzai aide Mohammed Zia Salehi as being on the CIA payroll. Ahmed Wali Karzai was murdered during a 2011 shoot-out, a killing later claimed by the Taliban.
While the Clinton campaign claims the government classification review has gone too far, Executive Order 13526, in a section called “classification standards,” says, “the unauthorized disclosure of foreign government information is presumed to cause damage to the national security.”
National security and intelligence experts told Fox that “security clearance holders are trained to not confirm or deny details of a classified program in an unclassified setting, which would include a personal unsecured email network, even if the classified program appears in press reports.”
“The rules of handling classified information dictate if something is reported in open source [news reports] you don’t confirm it because it’s still classified information,” said Dan Maguire, who spent more than four decades handling highly classified programs and specialized in human intelligence operations.
Clinton should have known better. As secretary of state, she signed at least two non-disclosure agreements on Jan. 22, 2009, and received a briefing from a security officer.
As part of the NDA for “sensitive compartmented information” (SCI), Clinton acknowledged any “breach” could result in “termination of my access to SCI and removal from a position of special confidence and trust requiring such access as well as the termination of my employment or any other relationships with any Department or Agency that provides me with access to SCI.”
It is remains unclear how classified materials “jumped the gap” from a classified system to her personal server.
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