Hillary Clinton – Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was found to have maintained a private email server during her four-year tenure at the Department of State. The server was located in a bathroom closet in a loft in Denver, Colorado, and included classified information. Worse yet, Clinton used 13 mobile devices to send and receive emails on the server, and five iPads. Some of the mobile devices were destroyed with hammers.
Despite Hillary Clinton’s denials, there were hundreds of emails on her private server that included classified information. As Fox News noted last year (original links):
Critics of the Clintons suspected that she sought to shield her communications from Freedom of Information Act requests and government records requirements. More specifically, they suspected that she and her husband were using her position as Secretary of State to raise funds, including from foreign donors, for their family foundation, which in turn supported their lifestyles, and that the email server concealed relevant information.
Bill Clinton – In what became known as the “Socks case,” Judicial Watch, a private non-profit organization, sued the government to compel it to provide audio tapes made by the White House when Bill Clinton was president and participating in interviews with a historian. President Clinton allegedly hid the tapes in his sock drawer when he left the White House, the better to claim them as “personal” rather than presidential records.
Joe Biden
James Comey – Outgoing FBI director, who had just been fired by President Trump, leaked memoranda of his conversations with the president to the press, via a Columbia University professor — who later became his lawyer — who then leaked them to the media. Comey did so, he later admitted, hoping to trigger the appointment of a special counsel to probe allegations of “Russia collusion” — even though he and the FBI knew that the primary source of the claims, the so-called “Steele dossier,” was a fraud. The Department of Justice investigated the leaks but declined to do anything about it, saying Comey did not intend to leak to the media.
Barack Obama
Mike Pence – Just as Biden was found to have kept classified documents at his personal resident, so, too, former Vice President Pence was found to have government documents at his home, apparently taken as part of his effort to compose his political memoirs in anticipation of his presidential campaign in 2024. Pence returned the documents after they were discovered. Still, like Biden, Pence had no authority to take the documents, even as vice president. The Department of Justice declined to prosecute Pence just before it indicted Trump.
Lyndon Johnson – As conservative radio host Mark Levin has noted, the president most associated with the Vietnam War removed sensitive federal records, sealed them for 50 years, and even destroyed some of them. From the Miller Center at the University of Virginia:
Leon Panetta – Then-CIA Director Panetta allegedly leaked classified information to a filmmaker behind Zero Dark Thirty, a film about the search for Al Qaeda terrorist leader Osama bin Laden that was originally intended for release before the 2012 elections. A draft inspector general’s report suggested that Panetta had revealed the unit involved in the mission, as well as its commander, as screenwriter Mark Boal was present for a CIA event.
Despite Hillary Clinton’s denials, there were hundreds of emails on her private server that included classified information. As Fox News noted last year (original links):
(Clinton reportedly said she did not know “C” stood for “classified.”)Intelligence Community Inspector General I. Charles McCullough III laid out the findings of the Clinton documents review by intelligence agencies that identified “several dozen” additional classified emails – including specific intelligence known as “special access programs” (SAP).
According to a 2018 Department of Justice inspector general’s report, “81 email chains containing approximately 193 individual emails that were classified from the CONFIDENTIAL to TOP SECRET levels at the time the emails were drafted on UNCLASSIFIED systems and sent to or from Clinton’s personal server.”
Critics of the Clintons suspected that she sought to shield her communications from Freedom of Information Act requests and government records requirements. More specifically, they suspected that she and her husband were using her position as Secretary of State to raise funds, including from foreign donors, for their family foundation, which in turn supported their lifestyles, and that the email server concealed relevant information.
Bill Clinton – In what became known as the “Socks case,” Judicial Watch, a private non-profit organization, sued the government to compel it to provide audio tapes made by the White House when Bill Clinton was president and participating in interviews with a historian. President Clinton allegedly hid the tapes in his sock drawer when he left the White House, the better to claim them as “personal” rather than presidential records.
Joe Biden
James Comey – Outgoing FBI director, who had just been fired by President Trump, leaked memoranda of his conversations with the president to the press, via a Columbia University professor — who later became his lawyer — who then leaked them to the media. Comey did so, he later admitted, hoping to trigger the appointment of a special counsel to probe allegations of “Russia collusion” — even though he and the FBI knew that the primary source of the claims, the so-called “Steele dossier,” was a fraud. The Department of Justice investigated the leaks but declined to do anything about it, saying Comey did not intend to leak to the media.
Barack Obama
Mike Pence – Just as Biden was found to have kept classified documents at his personal resident, so, too, former Vice President Pence was found to have government documents at his home, apparently taken as part of his effort to compose his political memoirs in anticipation of his presidential campaign in 2024. Pence returned the documents after they were discovered. Still, like Biden, Pence had no authority to take the documents, even as vice president. The Department of Justice declined to prosecute Pence just before it indicted Trump.
Lyndon Johnson – As conservative radio host Mark Levin has noted, the president most associated with the Vietnam War removed sensitive federal records, sealed them for 50 years, and even destroyed some of them. From the Miller Center at the University of Virginia:
One week after President Johnson’s death on January 22, 1973, his longtime personal assistant Mildred Stegall transferred to the Lyndon B. Johnson Library custody of eight sealed Federal Records Center (FRC) boxes. She stated that Johnson considered the materials contained in the FRC boxes to be very sensitive and that he had instructed they were to remain sealed for fifty years after his death. The boxes contained recordings of some of Johnson’s telephone conversations from November 22, 1963, through January 2, 1969. Stegall also transferred custody of reel-to-reel analog tapes of many meetings held in the Cabinet Room in 1968. [1]
Leon Panetta – Then-CIA Director Panetta allegedly leaked classified information to a filmmaker behind Zero Dark Thirty, a film about the search for Al Qaeda terrorist leader Osama bin Laden that was originally intended for release before the 2012 elections. A draft inspector general’s report suggested that Panetta had revealed the unit involved in the mission, as well as its commander, as screenwriter Mark Boal was present for a CIA event.
8 Cases Where Mishandling of Classified Information Went Unpunished
Do we really have "one set of laws"? A review of 17 examples of alleged mishandling of classified information suggests a double standard.
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