The screen capture below (at the bottom, due to layout limitations) is from a rather ironic, public-domain web posting that is currently freely available online at the State Department, from 2012, when a particular employee worked there who since has resigned to pursue elected office.
In that light, I have three questions:
- 22 e-mails from a State Department employee’s personal, non-secured server are being declared “Top Secret” and withheld in full (not even in redacted form) from we the taxpayers. Since official classification is not just based on title or identification but on content, why is this declaration by the very same State Department for which the employee worked not sufficient by itself for prosecution?
- At least one of that State Department employee’s e-mails, placed on purpose on a non-secure personal server, contained information identified as “HCS-O,” which is the intelligence code for human spying. Since classification is not just based on content but on title or identification, why is this not sufficient by itself for prosecution?
- Who in State Department is going to be charged and jailed for contempt of court for open defiance of the Federal court order by releasing only a small minority (1,000 pages out of an 8,000-page batch) of that employee’s e-mails before the deadline?
Bonus question (phrased three ways…answer either or all):
I did not name the employee on purpose because that person’s name should not matter to the ostensibly celebrity-blind scales of justice. SO…
a) What do you think would happen to any non-famous, low-level employee who conducted sensitive government business (including using classified-level content) on a non-secure, personal e-mail server with 1,300 messages taken all, or in part, from classified documents?
b) Put another way, would/should that hypothetical grunt be given the exact same treatment, in strict equivalence, as the person now being investigated? Or
c) Put another way, is/should there be a double standard for high-level, corporately funded managerial elites and ordinary government employees?