Alana Goodman reports for the Washington Free Beacon on a high-profile prosecutor’s assessment of the scandal involving Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton’s State Department emails.
The lead prosecutor of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard predicted on Tuesday that the FBI would recommend Espionage Act charges in its investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email server.
“No honest FBI will ever not [recommend] criminal charges in this case,” former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova said during an event hosted by conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch. “There are going to be referrals for a series of criminal charges involving violations of the espionage statutes, the grossly negligent mishandling of classified information, the grossly negligent storage of classified information.”
Fox News reported last year that the FBI’s probe of Clinton’s private server is partially focused on potential violations of a section of the Espionage Act. The section in question prohibits individuals with security clearances from handling classified information in a way that constitutes “gross negligence.”
In 1986, diGenova was the chief U.S. prosecutor in the case against Jonathan Pollard, one of the most notorious spies of the last half-century. Pollard, a former U.S. Navy intelligence analyst, pleaded guilty to an Espionage Act violation for passing top-secret information to Israel. He was sentenced to life in prison, but was paroled in 2015 after a lengthy lobbying campaign by his supporters.
DiGenova, a long-time critic of Clinton, said the FBI might recommend lower level charges, as in the Espionage Act case against former CIA director David Petraeus.
