But five sets of top-secret documents could easily contain more sensitive information than eight email chains that may have referred to top-secret material only briefly and/or in passing.Ĭomey said Clinton's treatment of "very sensitive, highly classified information" was "extremely careless." On its face, that judgment could support charges under 18 USC 793, which encompasses "gross negligence" in the handling of information "relating to the national defense"-a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison. In July 2016, when then–FBI Director James Comey announced that the FBI had not found enough evidence to justify criminal charges against Clinton, he reported that 110 messages in 52 unsecured email chains had been "determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received." He said "eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent 36 chains contained Secret information at the time and eight contained Confidential information, which is the lowest level of classification."īy comparison, the FBI's list of items seized at Mar-a-Lago includes five mentions of "various" or "miscellaneous" top-secret documents, three mentions of "miscellaneous secret documents," and three mentions of "confidential documents." We don't know how many documents were in each set or the precise nature of the information they discussed. That theme was a staple of Trump's campaign rallies, where his supporters would chant "Lock her up!" at the mention of Clinton's name. Trump added that "you'd be in jail" if it were up to him. And it's a disgrace and honestly, you ought to be ashamed." In my opinion, the people that have been long-term workers at the FBI are furious.…We're going to get a special prosecutor, because people have been, their lives have been destroyed for doing one-fifth of what you've done. When I speak, I go out and speak, the people of this country are furious. never been anything like it, and we're going to have a special prosecutor. "If I win," Trump told Clinton during a debate a month before the 2016 presidential election, "I'm going to instruct the attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation, because there's never been so many lies, so much deception. But first let's compare what Clinton did to what Trump did. That explanation raises additional questions about Trump's seemingly cavalier treatment of sensitive information, which I'll get to later.
How so? According to a statement that Trump representative John Solomon read on Fox News after the search warrant and inventory were unsealed, Trump had a "standing order" as president that automatically declassified material he moved from the Oval Office to his residence at the White House. But in his case, he says, the documents at Mar-a-Lago, despite their labeling, were not actually classified.
Trump has long maintained that Clinton's mishandling of classified material when she ran the State Department was egregious enough to justify sending her to prison. On the face of it, Trump's handling of these documents, which he took with him from the White House when he left office in January 2021, raises national security concerns at least as serious as those raised by Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server as secretary of state. The top-secret documents included some that were labeled "SCI," or "sensitive compartmented information," an especially restricted category derived from intelligence sources. According to a search warrant inventory that was unsealed on Friday, the FBI found 11 sets of classified documents, ranging from "confidential" to "top secret," when it searched former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach last Monday.
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