Bondi: Probe Into Signal Chat Unlkely  03/28 06:12

   

   WASHINGTON (AP) -- FBI Director Kash Patel was not part of a Signal chat in 
which other Trump administration national security officials discussed detailed 
attack plans, but that didn't spare him from being questioned by lawmakers this 
week about whether the nation's premier law enforcement agency would 
investigate.

   Patel made no such commitments during the course of two days of Senate and 
House hearings, declining to comment on the possibility and testifying that he 
had not personally reviewed the text messages that were inadvertently shared 
with the editor-in-chief for The Atlantic who was mistakenly included on an 
unclassified Signal chat.

   That Patel would be grilled on what the FBI might do was hardly surprising.

   Even as President Donald Trump insisted "it's not really an FBI thing," the 
reality is that the FBI and Justice Department for decades have been 
responsible for enforcing Espionage Act statutes governing the mishandling -- 
whether intentional or negligent -- of national defense information like the 
upcoming attack plans against Houthi rebels shared on Signal, a publicly 
available app that provides encrypted communications but is not approved for 
classified information.

   The Justice Department has broad discretion to open an investigation, though 
Attorney General Pam Bondi, who introduced Trump at a Justice Department event 
this month, signaled at an unrelated news conference on Thursday that she was 
disinclined to do so and took the same stance in a later Fox News interview, 
when she said she was confident that the episode had been a mistake.

   She repeated Trump administration talking points that the highly sensitive 
information in the chat was not classified, though current and former U.S. 
officials have said the posting of the exact launch times of aircraft and times 
that bombs would be released before those pilots were even in the air would 
have been classified.

   Bondi also quickly pivoted to two Democrats, former Secretary of State 
Hillary Clinton and former President Joe Biden, who found themselves under 
investigation but never charged for allegedly mishandling classified 
information. Indeed, the department has conducted multiple high-profile 
investigations into government officials accused of mishandling classified 
information or leaking it, albeit with significant differences in underlying 
facts and outcomes. There's also precedent for public officials either to avoid 
criminal charges or be spared meaningful punishment.

   "In terms of prior investigations, there were set-out standards that the 
department always looked at and tried to follow when making determinations 
about which types of disclosures they were going to pursue," including the 
sensitivity of the information exposed the willfulness of the conduct, said 
former Justice Department prosecutor Michael Zweiback, who has handled 
classified information cases.

   A look at just a few of the notable prior investigations:

   Hillary Clinton

   The 2016 Democratic presidential nominee was investigated but not charged 
for her use of a private email server for the sake of convenience during her 
time as secretary of state in the Obama administration.

   The politically fraught criminal investigation was initiated by a 2015 
referral from the intelligence agencies' internal watchdog, which alerted the 
FBI to the presence of potentially hundreds of emails containing classified 
information on that server. Law enforcement then set out to determine whether 
Clinton, or her aides, had transmitted classified information on a server not 
meant to host such material.

   The overall conclusions were something of a mixed bag.

   Then-FBI Director James Comey, in a highly unusual public statement, 
asserted that the bureau had found evidence that Clinton was "extremely 
careless" in her handling of classified information but recommended against 
charges because he said officials could not prove that she intended to break 
the law or knew that the information she and her aides were communicating about 
was classified.

   The decision was derided by Republicans who thought the Obama administration 
Justice Department had let a fellow Democrat off the hook. Among those critical 
were some of the very same participants in the Signal chat as well as Bondi, 
who as Florida's attorney general spoke at the 2016 Republican National 
Convention and mimicked the audience chant of "Lock her up!"

   David Petraeus

   Among the biggest names to actually get charged is Petraeus, the former CIA 
director sentenced in 2015 to two years' probation for disclosing classified 
information to a biographer with whom he was having an extramarital affair.

   That material consisted of eight binders of classified information that 
Petraeus improperly kept in his house from his time as the top military 
commander in Afghanistan. Among the secret details in the "black books" were 
the names of covert operatives, the coalition war strategy and notes about 
Petraeus' discussions with President Barack Obama and the National Security 
Council, prosecutors have said.

   Petraeus, a retired four-star Army general who led U.S. forces in Iraq and 
Afghanistan, wound up pleading guilty to a single misdemeanor count of 
unauthorized retention and removal of classified material as part of a deal 
with Justice Department prosecutors. Some national security experts said it 
smacked of a double-standard for its lenient outcome.

   Comey himself would later complain about the resolution, writing in a 2018 
book that he argued to the Justice Department that Petraeus should have also 
been charged with a felony for lying to the FBI.

   "A poor person, an unknown person -- say a young black Baptist minister from 
Richmond -- would be charged with a felony and sent to jail," he said.

   Jeffrey Sterling

   A former CIA officer, Sterling was convicted of leaking to a reporter 
details of a secret mission to thwart Iran's nuclear ambitions by slipping 
flawed nuclear blueprints to the Iranians through a Russian intermediary.

   He was sentenced in 2015 to 3 1/2 years in prison, a punishment 
whistleblower advocates and other supporters decried as impossible to square 
with Petraeus' misdemeanor guilty plea just a month earlier.

   The details of the operation disclosed by Sterling were published by 
journalist James Risen in his 2006 book "State of War."

   Sterling was charged in 2010, but the trial was delayed for years, in part 
because of legal wrangling about whether Risen could be forced to testify. 
Ultimately, prosecutors chose not to call Risen as a witness, despite winning 
legal battles allowing them to do so.

   James Cartwright

   A former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Cartwright pleaded 
guilty to making false statements during an investigation into a leak of 
classified information about a covert cyberattack on Iran's nuclear facilities.

   The plea ended a Justice Department investigation that began after the 2012 
leak to reporters of information about use of a computer virus called Stuxnet 
that disabled equipment the Iranians were using to enrich uranium.

   Charging documents unsealed by prosecutors say Cartwright falsely told 
investigators that he did not provide or confirm classified information 
contained in a news article and in a book by New York Times journalist David 
Sanger.

   In a written statement released to reporters after the hearing, Cartwright 
stressed that he was not the initial source of the leak about Stuxnet but spoke 
to reporters about material they already knew.

   Cartwright was later pardoned by Obama.