You thought it was dead, but it was just lying dormant waiting for the right moment to rise and to the maximum possible damage.

The Trump administration is investigating the email records of dozens of current and former senior State Department officials who sent messages to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email, reviving a politically toxic matter that overshadowed the 2016 election, current and former officials said. As many as 130 officials have been contacted in recent weeks by State Department investigators — a list that includes senior officials who reported directly to Clinton as well as others in lower-level jobs whose emails were at some point relayed to her inbox, said current and former State Department officials. Those targeted were notified that emails they sent years ago have been retroactively classified and now constitute potential security violations, according to letters reviewed by The Washington Post. State Department investigators began contacting the former officials about 18 months ago, after President Trump’s election, and then seemed to drop the effort before picking it up in August, officials said.

…

The list of State officials being questioned includes prominent ambassadors and assistant secretaries of state responsible for U.S. policy in the Middle East, Europe and Central Asia. But it also includes dozens of current and former career bureaucrats who served as conduits for outside officials trying to get important messages to Clinton.

What is interesting is that the Democrats understand exactly what the stakes are here. They don’t care about Hillary’s gravy infused ass bouncing off the curb. They don’t care about has beens like Susan Rice or Samantha Power. The stakes here are nothing less than the next generation of Democrat foreign policy apparatchiks.

To many of those under scrutiny, including some of the Democratic Party’s top foreign policy experts, the recent flurry of activity surrounding the Clinton email case represents a new front on which the Trump administration could be accused of employing the powers of the executive branch against perceived political adversaries. … A former senior U.S. official familiar with the email investigation described it as a way for Republicans “to keep the Clinton email issue alive.” The former official said the probe was “a way to tarnish a whole bunch of Democratic foreign policy people” and discourage if not prevent them from returning to government service.

If people like Phillipe Reines, just for instance, because I know he’d never do anything totally skeevy, broke some security policy or regulation, or if Jake Sullivan was found to have, say, stripped classification markers from emails so he could send them to Hillary’s private email, then their ability to obtain a future security clearance would be zero without White House direction…and that would cause a reopening of this scandal which no president would want.

In short, every Democrat in the State Department who communicated with Hillary Clinton about government matters, particularly classified matters, will have their clearance in placed in jeopardy.

But there is more. Several of the documents located on Hillary Clinton’s bathroom server originated inside the highly secure SIPRNet and could only be seen in a SCIF. Either someone violated the law and downloaded those documents/images or someone violated the law by bringing into the SCIF a smartphone and using the camera to take a picture of the document/image. These people’s careers are over.

What is hilarious is the way the Washington Post shills on this, Greg Miller, Greg Jaffe and Karoun Demirjian, blatantly engage in the use of Democrat talking points to defend the Democrats who are now under investigation.

Former Obama administration officials, however, described the probe as a remarkably aggressive crackdown by an administration with its own troubled record of handling classified material. Trump has improperly disclosed classified information to foreign officials and used phones that national security officials warned were vulnerable to foreign surveillance, according to current and former officials.

What you’re reading there is not an argument it is a very lame excuse. Trump can’t “improperly disclose” classified material because he is the at the top of the nation’s classification system. He can literally declassify whatever he wishes. The major breaches of security under Trump have all originated with leakers trying to damage his presidency.

Imagine, though, a world in which 130 Democrats who worked for Hillary Clinton are unable to ever again hold a security clearance or work in the Federal government. Imagine the baristas regaling customers about the wars they started for no particular reason or the nations they turned over to Islamic extremists simply to show they weren’t Bush. What a wonderful place it would be, right?

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