From – aei.org – by Marc A. Thiessen

This morning National Public Radio aired a story about emailing classified information which, they said, had “nothing to do with Hillary Clinton.” It involved a Marine named Jason Brezler. NPR reports:

Four years ago, Jason Brezler sent an urgent message to a fellow Marine in Afghanistan, warning him about a threat. The warning wasn’t heeded, and two weeks later, three U.S. troops were dead.

Now the Marine Corps is trying to kick out Maj. Brezler because the warning used classified information….

In 2010 he was at a remote base in Helmand. … the local police chief, Sarwar Jan, turned into a problem. “Sarwar Jan, he was a threat to not only the Afghans but our own Marines,” Brezler says. The chief was maybe linked to the Taliban. He was also alleged to be a pedophile who preyed on local boys — something alarmingly common among Afghan warlords…. Brezler couldn’t fire Sarwar Jan, but he could kick him off the base. “We put Sarwar Jan on the next helicopter. And, once he left, we could have probably had a parade the next day through the bazaar. The Afghans were absolutely elated,” he says….

Brezler went home. In the summer of 2012 he was still in the Marine Reserves, and working as a Brooklyn firefighter. On the side he was getting a master’s degree.

“I’m sitting at a conference table in Oklahoma, taking I believe a public budgeting class, and I received an email, and the title was ‘SARWAR JAN IS BACK,’ all caps, exclamation point, exclamation point,” he says.

It was a forwarded request for information from a Marine in Helmand. … Brezler searched his laptop — it was the same one he’d had with him in Helmand — and found the dossier on Sarwar Jan. He attached it, hitting “reply all” and then “send.” That set off a chain of consequences, including one Brezler never intended, according to his lawyer, Mike Bowe.

“As soon as he sends it, the Marine on the other side says, ‘This is marked classified,’ ” Bowe says. “So, at the first break during class, [Brezler] calls on his cellphone to his [commanding officer] and he says, ‘Look, this is what just happened,’” says Bowe, “so he self-reports right away like he’s supposed to do.”

Brezler told his commander he had emailed a classified document from a non-secure Yahoo account. His commander, who had served with Brezler in Fallujah, told him to notify their intelligence officer but not worry too much about it.

“He said all right, it sounds like minor spillage,” Brezler recalls….

On Aug. 10, 2012, just 17 days after Brezler’s warning, one of Sarwar Jan’s underage servants grabbed an assault rifle and killed three unarmed Marines at the base gymnasium in Helmand….

Brezler felt worse a few months later when he heard that the parents of one of the murdered Marines had no details about their son’s death. They were asking for help from their congressman, New York Republican Pete King.

“It was at that point that I said to myself, ‘This isn’t OK.’ That family, they probably don’t really know this attack was in the preventable range,” he says.

Brezler met with Rep. King, and the congressman started pushing the issue in the media.

And that’s when the U.S. Marine Corps got serious — about investigating Jason Brezler.