Clinton aide reported to have walked out of FBI interview

[pnwmom]

332. A strict definition of "foreign government information" would mean that the State Department --

whose mission is to work with foreign governments -- would be forced to abandon almost all use of .gov accounts (which are the functional equivalent of Hillary's private email), and send everything classified all the time.

Clearly the State department has been interpreting that phrase to mean something like "sensitive foreign information."

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/hillary-clinton-prosecution-past-cases-221744

“If you consider the business of the State Department is foreign diplomacy….if everything that concerns foreign government information were to be classified then, arguably, the majority of State Department emails should be,” Aftergood said.

Asked about the presence of such information in unclassified accounts, one former federal prosecutor said: “If that is, in fact, a basis for criminal prosecution then the State Department should shut down its email system.”

Lawyers say the broad circulation of the information State now says is classified points to another potential problem with prosecuting Clinton: the question of how many others would or should be charged in such a case. Almost all of the now-classified messages on her account were sent by other State officials. Should they be prosecuted? What about those who didn’t send her such information but wound up with that information in their work accounts and even personal ones investigators are now combing through?

“On the theory people are putting forward for making this criminal, every single one of those people [who sent a classified message on an unclassified system] is equally guilty, probably more guilty” than Clinton, the ex-prosecutor said. “People three or four levels down, closer to the information, presumably had greater reason to know if it contained classified information … It would make no sense to aim your fire at the person at the end of the chain, instead of at the beginning of the chain.”

In addition, attorneys noted that mishandling of diplomatic information that doesn’t have an obvious national security component to it probably couldn’t be prosecuted under the Espionage Act, which is the felony statute most widely cited in discussions of the potential legal fallout of the Clinton email flap.