Former U. S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey writes this morning in the Wall Street Journal that a criminal charge is justified in the case if Hillary Clinton's emails.
Mukasey notes that, as the number of classified emails on Mrs. Clinton's private server has climbed above 1,300, her explanations look "increasingly improvisational and contrived." Possibly most devastating to Mrs. Clinton is the news that SAP, or Special Access Program, documents were on her home brew server. Mukasey points out that this is a level so high that even the inspector general for the intelligence community didn't initially have that access.
Mukasey observes:
The server also contained messages showing her contempt for classification procedures. This was bred at least in part by obvious familiarity with exactly “how it works”—such as when, an email shows, she directed a staff member simply to erase the heading on a classified document, converting it into “unpaper,” and send it on a “nonsecure” device.
Information disclosed by the State Department also reflects that in August 2011, when the State Department’s executive secretary suggested that he could provide Mrs. Clinton with a BlackBerry that would keep her identity secret but might generate communications that would be discoverable under the Freedom of Information Act, Huma Abedin, Mrs. Clinton’s closest aide, intervened and said the idea “doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”
Further, Mrs. Clinton’s own memoir, “Hard Choices” (2014), apparently written at a time when she wished to stress how delicate were the secrets she knew, and how carefully she handled them, reports that she “often received warnings from Department security officials to leave our [BlackBerrys], laptops—anything that communicated with the outside world—on the plane with their batteries removed to prevent foreign intelligence services from compromising them.
“Even in friendly settings we conducted business under strict security precautions, taking care where and how we read secret material and used our technology,” Mrs. Clinton tells readers. She even read classified material “inside an opaque tent in a hotel room. In less well-equipped settings, we were told to improvise by reading sensitive material with a blanket over our head.”
Originally focused solely on Mrs. Clinton's emails, the FBI now is trying to learn if Clinton Foundation donors received special consideration from the State Department. Obviously, the potential for blackmail here is tremendous if the server was hacked, as we have reason to believe it was. But do investigators have enough to charge her?
No criminality can be charged against Mrs. Clinton in connection with any of this absent proof that she had what the law regards as a guilty state of mind—a standard that may differ from one statute to another, depending on what criminal act is charged.
Yet—from her direction that classification rules be disregarded, to the presence on her personal email server of information at the highest level of classification, to her repeated falsehoods of a sort that juries are told every day may be treated as evidence of guilty knowledge—it is nearly impossible to draw any conclusion other than that she knew enough to support a conviction at the least for mishandling classified information.
This is the same charge brought against Gen. David Petraeus for disclosing classified information in his personal notebooks to his biographer and mistress, who was herself an Army Reserve military intelligence officer cleared to see top secret information.
The simple proposition that everyone is equal before the law suggests that Mrs. Clinton’s state of mind—whether mere knowledge of what she was doing as to mishandling classified information; or gross negligence in the case of the mishandling of information relating to national defense; or bad intent as to actual or attempted destruction of email messages; or corrupt intent as to State Department business—justifies a criminal charge of one sort or another.
Mukasey predicts that our public officials will do their duty.
It should be noted that Mukasey is an adviser to the Jeb Bush campaign.