Washington Free Beacon reporter Lachlan Markay appeared on Fox Business Network's Lou Dobbs Tonight Friday to discuss his story on Hillary Clinton signing non-disclosure agreement from her time at the State Department, which laid out criminal penalties for mishandling of classified information.
As the nation’s chief diplomat, Hillary Clinton was responsible for ascertaining whether information in her possession was classified and acknowledged that "negligent handling" of that information could jeopardize national security, according to a copy of an agreement she signed upon taking the job.
A day after assuming office as secretary of state, Clinton signed a Sensitive Compartmented Information Nondisclosure Agreement that laid out criminal penalties for "any unauthorized disclosure" of classified information.
Experts have guessed that Clinton signed such an agreement, but a copy of her specific contract, obtained by the Competitive Enterprise Institute through an open records request and shared with theWashington Free Beacon, reveals for the first time the exact language of the NDA.
"I have been advised that the unauthorized disclosure, unauthorized retention, or negligent handling of SCI by me could cause irreparable injury to the United States or be used to advantage by a foreign nation," the agreement states.
Clinton received at least two emails while secretary of state on her personal email server since marked "TS/SCI"—top secret/sensitive compartmented information—according to the U.S. intelligence community’s inspector general.
The State Department said in September that Clinton’s private email system, set up at her Chappaqua, N.Y., home, was not authorized to handle SCI.
Markay said he got the document through a Freedom of Information Act request from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, D.C.
"It's been common knowledge that she signed a document along these lines, but the specific language that appears above her signature hasn't been public until now," Markay said.
Dobbs asked Markay to lay out the significance of his reporting.
"It shows that it was her responsibility to know whether information in her possession was classified, so this excuse that nothing was marked classified when she sent or received it is pretty much irrelevant when you're talking about things that are marked top-secret or even secret or lower levels of classification," Markay said.
Politico reported later Friday on an anonymous source claiming the U.S. intelligence community had retreated from claims that two Clinton emails were considered top-secret, but it updated the story with a spokesman for National Intelligence director James Clapper saying the review was "ongoing" and that no such determination had been made.