FBI Files Reveal ‘Blatant Disregard’ For Classified Information

BY Paul Sperry · @paulsperry_ | October 18, 2016

At the last presidential debate, Hillary Clinton again apologized for setting up an unauthorized private email server in her basement, while assuring voters she has the utmost respect for classified information: “I take classified material very seriously, and always have.”

But FBI investigators who interviewed her and those assigned to protect her and the classified material that came into her orbit tell another story. They say she exhibited a blatant disregard for the classification process and security procedures in general.

Newly released FBI notes quote a member of the former secretary of state’s protective detail who complained that Clinton “frequently and blatantly disregarded” security protocols, including refusing to follow a standard rule to leave her unsecured cell phone outside secure facilities known as SCIFs. Such electronic devices pose a threat to security, because foreign intelligence agencies can take remote control of them and use them to conduct surveillance inside the SCIF.

“Clinton’s treatment of agents on her protective detail was so contemptuous that many of them sought reassignment,” the FBI document said.

When FBI investigators interviewed Clinton, she insisted she “never” brought her phone into the SCIF and always kept it outside.

In that July interview, agents showed her a dozen examples of classified information that turned up on her unclassified email system, which she accessed through her phone. Asked about the security breaches, Clinton in each case shrugged that she “had no concerns” about them.

For instance, agents said, “Clinton never had a concern with how classified information pertaining to the drone program was handled.”

She even stated she “did not pay attention to the level of classified information.”

When her email scandal first broke last year, her campaign argued that much of the information the government deems secret is actually “overclassified.” But FBI agents interviewed career diplomats who upon seeing the classified emails she sent and received agreed they were not overclassified, but were in fact highly sensitive, particularly those concerning the US drone program and other secret military programs.

According to a recently released FBI 302 interview summary, one diplomat “stated that after seeing the above referenced documents, he now understood why people were concerned about this matter.”

The Clintons have a long history of showing reckless disregard for classified information.

As soon as the Clintons stepped into the White House in 1993, President Clinton ordered the mass declassification of America’s secret nuclear archive from 1945 to 1994 over the strenuous objections of career Pentagon officials, who protested that divulging the information would help foreign bad actors construct, steal or sabotage nuclear weapons or glean details about the capabilities of the US nuclear arsenal.

Former Reagan Pentagon official Frank Gaffney likened it to a Pearl Harbor attack on the US national security structure.

“This policy actually had the effect of turning shelves of restricted data into unclassified documents,” Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy, told Investor’s Business Daily in 1999.

Staffers at the Energy Department, which controls the nation’s nuclear weapons program, were ordered to declassify materials “at such an extraordinary speed that they weren’t even able to review the boxes, let alone the files — to say nothing of the individual papers,” he added.

Clinton even had Energy’s Office of Classification renamed the Office of De-classification.

Gaffney noted that the information the Clinton administration declassified “got down to data that bear on nuclear weapons design, where nuclear materials are held and where nuclear weapons are stockpiled.”

For Chinese communist spies trying to collect such information, it “did make it easier for them,” a nuclear weapons security expert told IBD at the time. “There’s no question about it.”

Several years after the unprecedented declassification effort, the Chinese suddenly made great strides in sharpening their nuclear capability and threatening the US with ICBMs fitted with multiple warheads.

Hillary Clinton, who would carry her dangerously cavalier attitude toward classified information and U.S. security into the White House with her, would likely readopt such a declassification program. Her campaign chairman, John Podesta, has already indicated that she would declassify certain military files as president and commander in chief.

Podesta served as President Clinton’s chief of staff. In 1995, he was among the White House aides who urged Clinton to sign an executive order automatically declassifying all government documents containing historical information 25 years or older.