Robert Baer, a former CIA agent turned intelligence and security analyst critical of the War on Terror, was interviewed on CNN International this past Saturday and when asked his thoughts on Hillary Clinton’s email scandal, he told CNN he thought she should be disqualified from becoming president.
Baer argued that if Clinton had top secret information on her private server or personal phone that was either sent or received, it would be a “deal breaker” for a Clinton presidency. Baer told CNN that when he was on assignment, such top secret and classified information wasn’t permitted to be received, let alone putting it on a private server would have been viewed as an even bigger mistake – one that would get him or anyone else fired:
"If this was on her server and it got into her smartphone, there's a big problem there," he claimed. "Seriously, if I had sent a document like this over the open Internet, I'd get fired the same day — escorted to the door, and gone for good, and probably charged with mishandling classified information."
When Baer was asked if it were possible that these emails could have fallen through the cracks due to the size of government, he shot back:
“No. When I was overseas at various stations, I had encrypted communications, and I wasn’t even allowed to receive documents like this over highly encrypted communications. We were worried about leakage, and the rest of it, storage, leaving it in hard drives. It couldn’t be sent from Washington. This is very, very serious stuff. And, in the discipline of the national security establishment, you never let this stuff out of your hands, and especially on a handheld. And if this in fact, were on her handheld, was sent to her, or she forwarded it [in] any way, I wonder if she’s capable of being president.”
Baer told CNN that having such classified documents sent across the internet could easily be hacked, if not hacked already, and “is a transgression that I don’t think the president of the United States should be allowed to have committed.”
