Hillary Clinton could be prosecuted in federal court for failing to tell President Barack Obama about her private email server at the time she was running it, according to a veteran FBI agent.

Obama said flatly during a '60 Minutes' interview on Sunday that 'No,' he did not know Clinton sidestepped security protocols with her a home-brew email setup while she was his secretary of state.

The FBI agent who spoke with DailyMail.com has had a 20-year career in federal law enforcement and serves in a supervisory capacity in a domestic FBI field office.

He said on Friday that failing to put Obama in the loop could be enough to send her to prison for ten years.

YOU THINK SHE'S ANGRY NOW? An FBI agent says Hillary Clinton could go to prison just for failing to tell President Barack Obama that she was sidestepping security protocols and running her own private email server when she ran the State Department

'NO': Obama said flatly Sunday on '60 Minutes' that he wasn't aware Clinton was operating a home-brew email server while she was America's top diplomat

The federal Espionage Act includes a provision that criminalizes 'gross negligence' by officials charged with safeguarding national defense information.

ESPIONAGE ACT: THE LETTER OF THE LAW ... from 18 U.S. Code § 793 - Gathering, transmitting or losing defense information (f) Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, note, or information, relating to the national defense, (1) through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, or (2) having knowledge that the same has been illegally removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of its trust, or lost, or stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, and fails to make prompt report of such loss, theft, abstraction, or destruction to his superior officer — Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both. Advertisement

Separately, the law's text makes a criminal of any security clearance holder who fails to notify his or her 'superior officer' when a breach of security occurs through such negligence.

'If investigators conclude that the former secretary [Clinton] was criminally careless in how she approached the security of the sensitive documents in her possession, then this part of the law could be used to prosecute her,' the agent said, on condition of anonymity.

'"Gross negligence" just means "serious carelessness",' he clarified.

His voice became more deliberate and quiet when DailyMail.com asked him to address the notification clause in what is technically known as '18 USC 793.'

'The secretary's superior is the President of the United States,' the FBI agent noted.

'So unless he were aware of what she was doing when she was doing it, it seems there could be a legal problem [for her].'

The FBI's investigation of Hillary Clinton's private email server is focusing on whether she violated the Espionage Act – especially the 'gross negligence' portions of the statute – according to a report Thursday from the Fox News Channel

The law applies to 'any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, note, or information, relating to the national defense' – even if it's not considered 'classified.'

It calls for a 10-year prison sentence for anyone convicted of 'gross negligence' that permits such information to be 'removed from its proper place.'

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THE COST OF GROSS NEGLIGENCE? DailyMail.com found that Datto Inc, one of the two companies tasked with managing Clinton's private email server, operates this unsecured server farm with open trash dumpsters near a public road in Pennsylvania

Using an unsecured computer network to host sensitive information could qualify, according to the FBI agent who spoke with DailyMail.com on Friday morning.

'The only way setting up your own email server for messages about sensitive information isn't negligent is if it's deliberate – which is far worse,' he said.

Clinton has staked her public defense on a repeated claim that she never knowingly sent or received information through her 'clintonemail' domain that was 'marked classified' at the time.

But the Espionage Act's text indicates that her intentions may not matter: A lack of judgment in handling sensitive documents could be enough to trigger the statute.

As intelligence sources spoke to Fox News on Thursday, others at the FBI spilled to The New York Times that they're furious with President Barack Obama for pre-empting their probe with a declaration that the former secretary of state never put America's national security at risk.'I don't think it posed a national security problem,' Obama said Sunday on the CBS News program '60 Minutes.'

While it was clearly a mistake for Clinton to abandon the secure 'State.gov' email system in favor of something she exclusively controlled, Obama said, 'this is not a situation in which America's national security was endangered.'

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest walked that conclusion back on Tuesday, saying that 'the president was making an observation about what we know so far, which is that Secretary Clinton herself has turned over a bunch of email to the State Department, and the review of that email has garnered some differing assessments about what's included in there.'

Obama, he said, was not attempting 'to undermine the importance or independence of the ongoing FBI investigation.'

NO SHE CAN'T, MAYBE: The specter of a criminal investigation has hung over Hillary Clinton all summer long, and a federal indictment would bring her high-flying presidential campaign crashing down to earth

A raft of FBI agents vented anonymously to the Times about seeing the White House step on their investigation.

Ron Hosko, a retired senior F.B.I. official who now leads the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, said it was wrong of Obama to 'suggest what side of the investigation he is on' while an investigation is still underway.

'Injecting politics into what is supposed to be a fact-finding inquiry leaves a foul taste in the F.B.I.’s mouth,' Hosko told the Times, 'and makes them fear that no matter what they find, the Justice Department will take the president’s signal and not bring a case.'

Obama previously found himself in hot water with federal investigators following a Super Bowl Sunday interview in February 2014 when he downplayed a then-swirling scandal over the IRS targeting right-wing groups politically.

Asked while federal investigators were poring through documents whether mass corruption inside America's tax-collection agency was a factor, he responded: 'Not even mass corruption – not even a smidgen of corruption.'