Will we continue to hear the ‘Clinton defense’ for mishandling classified material?

On Friday, the U.S. Navy is to sentence Petty Officer First Class Kristian Saucier to as much seven years in prison for privately retaining pictures he took of the nuclear propulsion system of the submarine on which he was serving. His attorney will invoke the failure of the U.S. attorney general to prosecute former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for email violations as a reason that Saucier should be placed on probation rather than jailed.

{mosads}The dam is about to burst. We need to decide whether there will be a separate Clinton standard of behavior in front of the law, or whether we will follow the equal protection concepts embodied in our Constitution. This dilemma was created when the Justice Department decided that any and all amounts of sloppiness are acceptable when handling classified information. Just as broadly, we need to examine an ethos of irresponsibility surrounding those things that might be important in keeping us safe.

In the Saucier case, we’re talking about the way our nuclear Navy powers its ships. For reasons I never quite understood, the Navy chose to classify information about its nuclear propulsion systems as “Confidential,” the level below “Secret.” And yet, this information is among the most zealously guarded in the Defense Department, and its discovery has been a priority for foreign governments for half a century. Even people with above-Top-Secret clearances (I was one) have no access to the information without a strictly enforced need to know. That Saucier put such information at risk, even if he just wanted the pictures as mementos, is utterly unacceptable.

And yet, it’s just “Confidential” stuff. Isn’t that all Clinton’s emails were? Here is the crux of why the concept of intent has been too loosely applied in the Clinton case, and why the implications are so troublesome. No one is suggesting that Saucier is a spy, but his actions foreseeably placed secrets at risk, just as Clinton’s handling of her emails exposed them to easy hacking efforts.

It is easy to say that Saucier’s violation is more flagrant or more obvious, since no one argues about the critical nature of the information he harbored. But that only works if one accepts the idiotic argument that Clinton and her aides trafficked in unclassified information just because they didn’t bother classifying it.

If Saucier’s attorney is at all astute about national security matters, he can raise the point that a secretary of State cannot possibly do her job without constantly handling classified material, especially in light of the fact that much, if not most, State Department cable traffic is classified at the “Secret” level and above. That attorney might also be aware that failing to classify documents appropriately is a violation in itself, not an excuse to electronically fling those documents around for the sake of convenience, and without concern for the consequences.

What to do now? Nothing. The part of government that deals in classified information will continue to function in a setting where the job is made more difficult because people just don’t care enough. It will cost us, even though the consequences themselves are often classified, and we, as private citizens, don’t know the degree to which our own officials have harmed us. An anecdote might help to clarify this.

In my first year at the Pentagon, my boss and I discussed the revelation by a New York Times reporter of the slipshod way in which the Chinese were handling their missile program, something that gave us a bonanza of satellite information. Within days, the Chinese completely changed their protocols, cutting off this valuable source. I asked my boss why the well-known reporter was able to get away with such shenanigans. His response: “Welcome to Washington. People leak stuff to reporters, and we don’t do anything because we might have to go after big guys.”

My first boss always said that things had to hit rock bottom before they changed. I hope that won’t mean discovering a North Korean or Pakistani submarine with an American propulsion system, or some new and attributable catastrophe in the Middle East. It would be an unpleasant way to relearn a lesson.

Blady, M.D., is a former program officer for the under secretary of Defense for policy and senior analyst for the under secretary of Defense for intelligence.

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