Hillary Clinton's Emails Are 'Really A Concern,' 'Also A Felony,' According To A Memo Addressed To President Obama From Senior Intelligence Officials

"Your White House has also made excuses for deliberate security violations by Secretary Clinton that would have gotten senior officials like us fired and probably indicted. We look with suspicion at what we see as contrasting and totally inappropriate attempts by the administration and media to play down the importance of Secretary Clinton's deliberate disregard of basic security instructions and procedures."

"The contrast between the copious evidence – some of it self-admitted – of Secretary Clinton's demonstrable infractions, on the one hand, and the very sketchy, circumstantial evidence used to convict and imprison Jeffrey Sterling, on the other, lend weight to the suspicion that there is one law for the rich and powerful in the United States and another for the rest of us."

"Intelligence professionals (in contrast to the occasional political functionary) take the compromise of classified information with utmost seriousness. More important: this is for us a quintessentially nonpartisan issue. It has to do, first and foremost, with the national security of the United States... We believe the American people are entitled to prompt and full disclosure, and respectfully suggest that you ensure that enforcement of laws protecting our national security does not play stepchild to political considerations on this key issue."

Hillary Clinton's emails contained CONFIDENTIAL, SECRET, and even TOP SECRET and Special Access Programs (SAP) information. This information was held on a private server in Mrs. Clinton's New York home, unguarded either physically or with proper network security.

"The mishandling of SAP information can neutralize intelligence programs costing billions of dollars, wreck liaison relationships assiduously cultivated for decades, and get a lot of people killed."

"In fact, there have been reports that Secretary Clinton's emails were, indeed, hacked successfully by foreigners. The Romanian hacker who goes by the name Guccifer claimed earlier this month that he had repeatedly hacked her email server. He described the server as 'like an open orchid on the Internet' and that 'it was easy … easy for me, for everybody.' Guccifer has been extradited from Romania and is now in jail in Alexandria, Virginia, where the FBI is said to be questioning him on the emails. There have also been credible claims that Russian intelligence and other foreign services were able to hack the Secretary's server."

"It is virtually certain they know what was in Secretary Clinton's emails – including the ones she thought she had deleted. It is likely that they have also been able to determine which foreign intelligence agencies and other hackers were able to access the emails."

"Apart from the guidelines for proper handling of classified information, outlined in Executive Order 13526 and 18 U.S.C Sec. 793(f) of the federal code, there is some evidence of a cover-up regarding what was compromised. This itself would be a violation of the 2009 Federal Records Act and the Freedom of Information Act."

"Numerous messages both in New York and in Washington have reportedly been erased or simply cannot be found. In addition, the law cited above explicitly makes it a felony to cut and paste classified information removing its classification designation. Retaining such information on a private email system is also a felony. In one of Secretary Clinton's emails, she instructed her staff simply to remove a classification and send the information to her on her server."

"So the question is not whether Secretary Clinton broke the law. She did. If the laws are to be equally applied, she should face the same kind of consequences as others who have been found, often on the basis of much less convincing evidence, guilty of similar behavior."

If Hillary Clinton were to become President, the memo suggests she would be open to blackmail, by various government officials, foreign governments and any number of hackers.

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