WarSclerotic

Hillary Classified Emails Included Names of Undercover CIA Agent, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, February 1, 2016

A lifetime ago the left went mad over Valerie Plame, claiming that her exposure endangered her life, even though in no way, shape or form was Plame ever in a position in which she would be endangered. The same does not appear to be true of the CIA agents in Hillary Clinton’s classified emails.

From John R. Schindler at the Observer, it appears that the worst is true of Clinton’s email scandal… it endangered American lives.

Discussions with Intelligence Community officials have revealed that Ms. Clinton’s “unclassified” emails included Holy Grail items of American espionage such as the true names of Central Intelligence Agency intelligence officers serving overseas under cover. Worse, some of those exposed are serving under non-official cover. NOCs (see this for an explanation of their important role in espionage) are the pointy end of the CIA spear and they are always at risk of exposure – which is what Ms. Clinton’s emails have done.

Not only have these spies had their lives put in serious risk by this, it’s a clear violation of Federal law. The Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, enacted due to the murder of the CIA’s station chief in Athens after his cover was blown by the left-wing media, makes it a Federal crime to divulge the true identity of any covert operative serving U.S. intelligence if that person has not previous been publicly acknowledged to be working for our spy agencies.

People really go to jail for breaking this law. John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer, recently emerged from two years in prison for unauthorized disclosure of classified information, including exposing the identity of an Agency colleague who was serving under cover.

This is about as bad as it gets. And all of this happened because Hillary Clinton wanted to preemptively protect her presidential aspirations by blocking transparency. This is the cost of that.

And there’s another troubling wrinkle.

Four emails from Sidney Blumenthal, Hillary’s close friend and factotum, were withheld by the Intelligence Community because they were judged to be entirely classified. How Mr. Blumenthal, who held no U.S. Government position after January 2001, when Bill Clinton left the White House, had access to classified information a decade after that is not explained.

This column has previously detailed how Mr. Blumenthal was running an impressive private intelligence agency for the Secretary of State, and that his emails to Ms. Clinton inexplicably included highly sensitive Top Secret Codeword intelligence from the National Security Agency. Since Mr. Blumenthal’s emails were illegally accessed by a private hacker, they can be safely assumed in to be in the hands of numerous foreign intelligence services.

Blumenthal is a deeply troubling individual whom even Obama Inc. did not want anywhere near the White House. His son Max is a rabid bigot who wants to destroy Israel and whose hate mails were routinely forwarded by his father to Hillary. Some of them may have shaped her view of Benghazi. Sidney Blumenthal had all sorts of troubling business interests and an agenda for the Libyan War.

There are many problems with him having classified information. And his email was hacked by Guccifer and partly made public.

And what about those 30,000 emails that Ms. Clinton had deleted? “I’ll spend the rest of my career trying to figure out what classified information was in those,” stated an exasperated Pentagon counterintelligence official, “everybody is mad as hell right now.” “The worst part,” the counterspy added,” is that Moscow and Beijing have that information but the Intelligence Community maybe never will.”

So we’ve got an escalating mess and a major national security breach and a woman who wanted to be president so badly that she put the lives of CIA personnel at risk in a preemptive coverup.

This is worse than Watergate. Much worse.