UPDATE:
See my new diary. It seems there’s once again a lot less to this story than initial reports indicate. The SAP material in question is references to our drone program. The emails discussed media reports and regional reaction to our drone strikes. So yes, this is technically a security violation, but about the most totally meaningless violation possible.
Original diary begins below:
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I know this will go over like a lead balloon here, but if this is real then it’s the first really big deal of the Clinton emails story. According to Politico:
Intelligence officials have discovered sensitive national security information on Hillary Clinton’s server that goes beyond the “top secret” level, the intelligence community inspector general told lawmakers in a letter last week.
In a copy of the Jan. 14 correspondence obtained by POLITICO, Intelligence Community Inspector General I. Charles McCullough III told both the Senate Intelligence and Senate Foreign Relations committees that intelligence agencies found messages relating to what are known as “special access programs,” or SAP. That’s an even more restricted subcategory of sensitive compartmented information, or SCI, top secret national security information derived from sensitive intelligence sources.
Obviously none of us has seen this stuff, but SAP (unlike the mass of “confidential” stuff which is in my opinion a bunch of BS that for the most part never should have been classified) is as tightly held as anything can be. Whoever sent this to Clinton is in a world of hurt — there’s no way (short of clear evidence this came from some alternate, publicly available source material) that Justice can decline to prosecute this. And Clinton needs to be able to document that she had never been briefed on this SAP material or she could personally be in trouble for not reporting the breach (if there was one.)
I think it’s unlikely that she had been briefed on it because she’s not stupid — she wouldn’t have made the mistake of letting this slide. Still means the story will live on through the whole election cycle, though.
