Wednesday night during NBC's Commander-in-Chief national security forum, former Secretary of State and Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was repeatedly put on the defensive over her use of multiple private email servers and her compromising of U.S. national security.
During the forum a Navy Veteran, who held a top secret compartmentalized security clearance during his service, explained to Clinton that if he had transmitted classified information in the way she did multiple times on a private system, he would have been prosecuted and imprisoned. Clearly irritated, Clinton responded by again lying about transmitting marked classified information and lectured the veteran about how classified information works.
"I did exactly what I should have done," Clinton claimed while pointing her fingers and raising her voice.
Watch:
Navy vet asks Clinton how she expects those with access to classified info to trust her as president #NBCNewsForum https://t.co/4vxgBhRqgU
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) September 8, 2016
FBI director James Comey confirmed in July that Clinton did in fact have information marked as classified on her private server, proving again Clinton keeps pushing the lie that nothing she sent or received was marked classified at the time.
"From the group of 30,000 emails returned to the State Department in 2014, 110 emails in 52 email chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received," Comey said.
Further, the FBI report released last week about the criminal investigation into Clinton's server shows information found on Clinton's server was marked "(C)": classified confidential. Clinton claims she thought this marking indicated alphabetization of her emails, not classified information.
Clearly the issue of going to prison for mishandling classified information is a touchy subject for Clinton, but the least she could have done in answering the question posed at the forum was show some respect.
It should be noted a Marine who allegedly sent a classified memo warning about a potential attack in Afghanistan, which left three Marines dead, is currently being prosecuted for doing so.
The attorney representing a Marine officer accused of mishandling classified information by warning troops in Afghanistan about the threat of an insider attack said he plans to argue that his client deserves the same leniency that Hillary Clinton received.
“And certainly, if Secretary Clinton becomes the next commander-in-chief, it would the ultimate hypocrisy for her to declare others unfit for service based on alleged misconduct equal to or less serious than that she herself engaged,” said Michael Bowe.
Bowe represents Maj. Jason Brezler, who used his personal email account in 2012 to send a classified briefing document to the operations officer at a U.S. base in Afghanistan about Sarwar Jan, an Afghan police chief who had recently arrived at the installation. Brezler had kicked Sarwar off a different U.S. installation two years earlier for unethical behavior.
Seventeen days after Brezler sent the email, a boy working as one of Sarwar’s personal servants killed three Marines on the base: Staff Sgt. Scott Dickinson, 29, Cpl. Richard Rivera, 20, and Lance Cpl. Greg Buckley, 21.