Hillary Clinton’s decision to wipe clean her email server has already done enormous damage to US intelligence efforts. The logic is so clear and compelling that it is amazing to me that only now, and only via an email to the blog Powerline, has the extent of her reckless (at best) action become clear. Scott Johnson passes along this, from  reader he terms “knowledgable”:

I saw your note on Clinton emails. You and everyone else are missing the real problem and scandal. It is not the emails she saved and turned over to the State Department. It is the erased server, but not for the reasons most people are talking about.

A Secretary of State has broad SCI clearances which means she has access to sources and methods. We know now that HC had classified information on her email server because of what she turned over. What we don’t know is what she didn’t turn over. This creates a massive Counter-Intelligence (CI) problem.

The CI community knows she managed to jump the “air gap” on some information but because she erased the server they do not know the full extend of the jump. If she had turned over the server to the proper authorities the CI community could calibrate the extent of the potential damage. Now, barring a recovery of server data, they cannot. This means that CI has to treat all sources and methods to which the Secretary of State (and others potentially) was exposed as compromised.

Its even worse. By not turning over the server she prevented a forensic examine from determining if she was hacked and by what methods. She undermined any ability to exploit that knowledge to limit damage to US national security or to undermine and prevent a future use of similar hacking tools.

No matter what she says, this action has done irreparable damage to US national security. By not turning over the server she deserves at a minimum to lose her security clearance. Anyone with the level of clearance she had would be attached to a polygraph and debriefed by CI.

The Secretary chose to protect her political viability over the security of the country. Let’s hope for the country’s sake that the FBI can reconstruct her server.

Because Hillary wiped the server clean -- including even the emails she herself said were government business -- our intelligence agencies will be unable to find out which emails were hacked and by which foreign country or terrorist group.

That means that our intelligence services must assume that everything was hacked and that none of our secrets are secret any more. It means that our enemies all know just how we obtain evidence. Including what our satellites can see, who our spies are, and what we’re able to learn by electronic eavesdropping.

In other words we now have to rebuild from scratch everything. Because we can’t learn what’s been learned by our enemies and must assume the worst. All thanks to Hillary Clinton.

It’s a catastrophe.