Washington – The director of the FBI, Kash Patel, was not part of a signal chat in which other national security officials of the Trump administration discussed detailed attack plansBut that will not avoid being interrogated by legislators this week about whether the main agency for the application of the Law of the Nation would investigate.
Patel did not make such commitments during the two -day course of the Senate and Chamber audiences. Instead, he testified that he had not personally reviewed the text messages that were inadvertently shared with the Atlantic Chief Editor that was included in error in an un classified signal chat.
That patel was roasted in what the FBI could do was not surprising.
Even when President Donald Trump insisted on “it is not really a thing of the FBI”, the reality is that the Department of Justice and the FBI for decades has been responsible for enforcing the statutes of the spying act that govern the mismanagement, whether intentional or negligent, of the national defense information such as the shared type in the signal, an application publicly available That provides encrypted communications but is not approved for classified information.
The Department of Justice has a broad discretion to open an investigation, although it is not clear if Attorney General Pam Bondi, who introduced Trump into An event of the Department of Justice This month would authorize such consultation. Administration officials Trump insist that the shared details were not classified, although the espionage law technically criminalizes the mismanagement of any information considered close national defense information, even if it is not classified.
Multiple high profile figures have been found under investigation in recent years about their management of government secrets, but the differences in underlying facts and the results make it impossible to forecast what could happen in this case or if a responsibility can be expected. There is also a precedent for public officials to avoid criminal charges or save significant punishment.
“In terms of previous investigations, there were established standards that the department always observed and tried to continue when making determinations on what types of disseminations were going to look,” said former justice prosecutor Michael Zweiback, who has managed classified information investigations.
These factors include the sensitivity of the exposed information and the will of behavior.
A look at some of the previous notable research:
The 2016 Democratic presidential candidate was investigated but not accused For its use of a private email server for the sake of convenience during its time as Secretary of State in the administration of Obama. There seems to be some parallel with the episode of Signal Chat.
Politically tense criminal investigation was initiated by a 2015 reference of the Surveillance rolling of intelligence agenciesthat alerted the FBI about the presence of potentially hundreds of emails that contain information classified on that server. Police then set out to determine whether Clinton, or their assistants, had transmitted information classified on a server not intended to house said material.
The general conclusions were a kind of mixed bag.
The then director of the FBI, James Comey, in a very unusual public statement, said that the office had found evidence that Clinton was “extremely neglected” in his classified information management, but recommended the charges because he said that officials could not prove that he intended to violate the law or knew that the information about which she and her assistants were communicating.
The decision was ridiculed by Republicans who thought that the Obama Administration Department had let a Democratic fellow out of the hook. Among the critics were some of the participants in the signal chat, as well as Bondi, who, as Florida Attorney General, spoke at the 2016 Republican National Convention and imitated the song of the hearing of “Block it!”
Among the most important names that are really charged is Petraeus, The former director of the CIA Sentenced in 2015 to two years of probation for revealing classified information to a biographer with which he was having an extramarital issue.
That material consisted of eight classified information folders that Petraeus maintained incorrectly at home since his time as the main military commander in Afghanistan. Among the secret details in the “black books” were the names of the undercover agents, the coalition war strategy and the notes on Petraeus’s discussions with President Barack Obama and the National Security Council, prosecutors said.
Petraeus, a general withdrawn from the four -star army that directed the US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, ended up declaring guilty of a single minor crime of unauthorized retention and eliminating material classified as part of an agreement with the prosecutors of the Department of Justice. Some national security experts said they hit a double standard for their indulgent result.
The same Comey would complain later about the resolution, writing in a 2018 book that argued before the Department of Justice that Petraeus should also have been accused of a serious crime for lying to the FBI.
“A poor person, an unknown person, for example, a young Black Baptist Minister from Richmond, would be accused of a serious and sent to jail,” he said.
A former CIA officer, Sterling was convicted of leaking a reporter details of a secret mission to frustrate Iran’s nuclear ambitions by sliding defective nuclear planes to the Iranians through a Russian intermediary.
He was sentenced in 2015 to 3 1/2 years in prisonA complainant of punishment defenders of the complainants and other supporters denounced as impossible to square with Petraeus’s guilt declaration, only one month earlier.
The details of the operation revealed by Sterling were published by the journalist James Risen in his 2006 book “State of the war”.
Sterling was accused in 2010, but the trial was delayed for years, partly due to legal disputes about whether they can be forced to testify. Ultimately, prosecutors decided not to call Risen as a witness, despite winning legal battles, which allowed them to do so.
