As for her vulnerability to prosecution, Clinton refused to entertain the possibility or to even answer a question about it. My colleague Ruth Marcus presents the best case as to why Clinton will not be indicted. However, many informed national security experts would take a different view.

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Clinton’s defenders claim that her conduct is less egregious than that of retired Gen. David Petraeus and Sandy Berger. Former Justice Department lawyers strenuously disagree, saying her conduct is far more serious in four respects.

First, there are large number of classified emails; even if we focus only on the ones that were in the highly restricted “SAP” category and not publicly released, there are 22 emails containing information at the highest level of classification. If one includes all the classified material — which Clinton originally denied — you get more than 2,000 emails. That is a whole lot more than what Sandy Berger was able to take from the National Archives.

Second, the argument that she did not know or should not have known the material was highly classified defies common sense. This was not merely “sensitive” or “secret” information, but information at the highest level of classification, something a junior foreign service officer would know is classified. “SAP” is information even more sensitive than “top secret” (itself defined as “information, the unauthorized disclosure of which reasonably could be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security that the original classification authority is able to identify or describe”) that is distributed on a need-to-know basis. A former high-ranking national security official explains that it usually refers to “very, very sensitive collection or a covert action.” The official explains, “The SAP designator simply restricts the number of people who can access the program. In other words, it is so sensitive that it is not generally available even to people who are cleared.”

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Third, the potential damage to national security and dissemination of information are far greater in the case of Clinton than in previous instances. A second former national security official explains, “The person to whom Gen. Petraeus showed the restricted material was a reserve officer and had top secret clearance; to be sure, she was not necessarily cleared to see everything that was in the material he showed her, but she was a person with enough discretion to treat material like that with appropriate care.” He continues, “She returned the material to him and nothing that she saw was disclosed to anyone or found its way into her book.” By contrast, Clinton’s material was available to the outside world, and some of which, we know from previous disclosures, made its way into the public realm. As this official observes, “Beyond the issue of classified information, Mrs. Clinton’s use of a personal server potentially gave our adversaries a window into the life of the senior foreign policy official in our government — something that any good intelligence officer would give his eye-teeth to have.”

Finally, the precedent Clinton set made a mockery of the entire classification system, roping in underlings and defying the entire ethos that governs handling of national security intelligence. If the FBI does not move forward, why would any mid-level official abide by strict, sometimes terribly inconvenient rules, and how would the Justice Department prosecute far less egregious cases than Clinton’s without evidencing a double standard for enforcement?