Hillary Clinton testifies before the House Select Committee on Benghazi, October 22, 2015. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
What
if Hillary Clinton Were a Whistleblower?
By John Kiriakou, Reader
Supported News
05 July 16
Conservative
and other Republican-leaning websites over the July 4 long weekend began
preparing their readers for the possibility—the likelihood, maybe—that Hillary
Clinton would not be indicted as a
result of her email scandal. And this is despite the fact that former President
Bill Clinton may have improperly and inappropriately inserted himself into the case by
“running into” Attorney General Loretta Lynch on the tarmac at an airport in
Phoenix, AZ. The former President claimed later that the two had spoken for 20
minutes, but only about his grandchildren. His wife’s case, he said, wasn’t
discussed. That meeting came within a day of news reports that the
presumptive Democratic presidential nominee had met with the FBI for
three-and-a-half hours to talk about her email server.
More
importantly, Attorney General Lynch went so far as to say that she would have
to assess whether or not Hillary Clinton had “criminal intent” when she had the
email server set up and when she sent classified emails from it.
Either
this is a red herring or the Justice Department, the FBI, and the judge in my
case owe me and others an apology and the President owes me a pardon.
Four
years after I blew the whistle on the CIA’s torture program I was charged with
five felonies, including three counts of espionage (for speaking about torture
with reporters from the New York Times and ABC News), one count of violating
the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (for confirming the name of a former
CIA colleague; the reporter never revealed the name, and it was never made
public), and one count of making a false statement, a “throwaway charge,” the
basis of which was never clear to me.
In my
very first hearing, my judge, a Bill Clinton appointee who reserves all
national security cases for herself (me, Jeffrey Sterling, Ed Snowden, and
others), said that she would not respect precedent from the Tom Drake case, saying that a defendant in a
national security case had to have criminal intent to be prosecuted for
espionage. That begged the question of whether a defendant could then
“accidentally” commit espionage. “That’s exactly what it means,” the judge
said. I didn’t stand a chance.
But in
Hillary Clinton’s case, it seems that everything rests on the notion of
criminal intent. Did Hillary, then, set up her email server specifically to
subvert the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)? Did she set up her email server
for the express purpose of passing classified information to people not
entitled to receive it? Of course not. But that’s not the standard, at least
it’s not in the federal Eastern District of Virginia.
I
understand that life isn’t fair. I understand the reality of American politics
that some people get special treatment and others don’t. I understand that I
wasn’t married to a president and that I’m not a former Secretary of State. I
sincerely appreciate the fact that two—yes, TWO—FBI agents who worked on my
case have discreetly apologized to me in the past six months, saying that they
were ordered to go after me for political reasons.
But
the Constitution says that all Americans are equal, even if they are named
“Clinton.”
We know that Hillary sent and received classified information on an
unsecured email system. That’s a crime. I don’t care whether or not she had
criminal intent. My own trial judge says that it doesn’t matter. But if Hillary
didn’t have criminal intent, and that’s the reason the Justice Department uses
to not prosecute her, then Tom Drake and I, at the very least, deserve a
pardon. Otherwise, the system really is as corrupt as so many Americans say it
is.
John
Kiriakou is an Associate Fellow with the Institute for Policy Studies in
Washington DC. He is a former CIA counterterrorism operations officer and
former senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Reader
Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to
republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported
News.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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