NPR: Don't forget the Marine charged with e-mailing classified info

Hot Air readers should remember Major Jason Brezler. We featured his story just a little over a year ago when the US Marine Corps had begun action to discharge Brezler from its ranks over classified information “spillage.” The Daily Beast’s Michael Daly first reported on the legal battle of a Marine Corps officer and New York City firefighter who unintentionally violated the law — in an attempt to warn people of a danger that went tragically ignored, and in which lives were needlessly lost.

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NPR updates the story to find that nothing much has changed:

Brezler had sent away a local Afghan warlord in 2010 with a taste for underage boys and reported links to the Taliban. Two years later, as a Marine Reserve officer, he discovered that Sanwar Jan had returned, underaged boys and all. Brezler promptly forwarded his case file via Yahoo e-mail to warn about the danger Jan, forgetting that one of the documents was classified. He self-reported the spillage, as required, and his commanding officer thought nothing much would come of it. While the Naval Criminal Investigative Service conducted an intense probe of Brezler, no one paid attention to the warning:

On Aug. 10, 2012, just 17 days after Brezler’s warning, one of Sarwar Jan’s underage servants grabbed an assault rifle and killed three unarmed Marines at the base gymnasium in Helmand.

“I don’t know if I’ve ever been so angry and so sad at the same moment in my life. This is precisely what we didn’t want to happen,” Brezler says.

Brezler felt worse a few months later when he heard that the parents of one of the murdered Marines had no details about their son’s death. They were asking for help from their congressman, New York Republican Pete King.

“It was at that point that I said to myself, ‘This isn’t OK.’ That family, they probably don’t really know this attack was in the preventable range,” he says.

Brezler met with Rep. King, and the congressman started pushing the issue in the media.

And that’s when the U.S. Marine Corps got serious — about investigating Jason Brezler.

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Hey, all Brezler did was to act in an “extremely careless” manner. He may have had some classified information on his unsecured home server — er, laptop — but there was no intent to commit a crime. Under the FBI’s and Department of Justice’s rules, that means that not only should Brezler be left alone, he should be elected to high public office.

In fact, the differences in Brezler’s case makes the disparate treatment of Hillary and the Marine major even more egregious. Brezler self-reported his mishandling, and expected some kind of punishment for it, but he (inadvertently!) committed that act in an attempt to save lives and assist the US military in distinguishing what turned out to be a deadly threat. Brezler did all he could to promote transparency, both of his actions and of threats that emerged in his absence. Hillary Clinton deliberately set up a system to evade transparency, didn’t self-report, evaded and lied constantly about the system while destroying evidence — sometimes with hammers. And she did that all during the time that Congress had an open investigation into the State Department’s failure to discern emerging threats in Benghazi and provide appropriate security for its consulate.

That recalls the case of another man in uniform, Kristian Saucier, who just got a year in prison for violations of 18 USC 793. Part of the rationale behind the DoJ’s full-court press against Saucier was the fact that he tried to destroy his laptop by making it a pistol-range target and disposing of his cellphone. Saucier’s mother Kathleen appeared on Fox & Friends this weekend to demand equal treatment between her son and Hillary Clinton:

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Saucier also accepted responsibility for violating regulations on handling classified information, something Hillary still hasn’t done. Why hasn’t the government held Hillary to the same standard they do with Brezler, or they did with Saucier?

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David Strom 6:00 AM | April 26, 2024
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