There is little doubt the Hillary Clinton lied about her email.  Even her most fervent supporters, providing the most contorted euphemisms, must admit that she was being less than truthful.

The large volume of emails has obscured the significance of the possible breach.  The serious breach deals with seven e-mails concerning matters that were classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program (SAP) level.  This is the highest security classification, the most sensitive type of top-secret information.  An inspector general, the FBI, and members of Congress cannot have access to this information without "a need to know."  This classification contains sources and methods of collection that could put human assets at risk.

Were Clinton's emails hacked?  The FBI's Director Comey stated, "We did not find direct evidence that Secretary Clinton's personal e-mail domain, in its various configurations since 2009, was successfully hacked."  However, Marcel Lazăr Lehel, the Romanian hacker who calls himself Guccifer, claimed that Clinton's server was "like an open orchid on the Internet" and that it "was easy … easy for me, for everybody."  It has been reported that Lehel admitted that he lied about this.  Could he have been advised to change his story for everyone's benefit?  However, there is no doubt that he hacked Sidney Blumenthal's emails to Clinton in March 2013.

Was Clinton's server an "open orchid"?  Congressman Jason Chaffetz asked Director Comey, "Are you implying in that statement that the private email servers of Secretary Clinton were perhaps less secure than a Gmail account?"  Comey responded, "Yes."  Congressman Rod Blum then reported that "the going rate to hack into somebody's Gmail account: $129.  For corporate emails, they can be hacked for $500 or less."  Director Comey admitted that "it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton's personal email account." 

If "hostile actors" do not have every one of her emails, they are not doing their job.  Putin's Kremlin has one of the most sophisticated cyber-warfare systems in the world.  Even the North Koreans, Iran, and every Islamic terrorist group can probably raise the cash needed to access unsecured emails.  "Guccifer" was not living in his mother's basement hacking in his undershorts.  However, he was much closer to that than to the multi-billion-dollar intelligence agencies that prowl the internet.

Was the information that was hacked significant?  Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright believed that it was not.  Albright stated, "She [Clinton] has said she made a mistake, and nobody is going to die as a result of anything that happened on emails."

Bush administration undersecretary of defense for intelligence General Jerry Boykin disagreed with Albright.  Boykin asserted, "China and Russia and even North Korea access through cyber-attacks to the names of the people that are helping us and the sources and methods that we're using to get that intelligence.  People can be killed as a result of that!"

This was also the belief of Judge Andrew Napolitano, who stated, "One of the reasons there is so much anxiety about Mrs. Clinton from the intelligence community is the belief that some of the materials that she handled with such extreme carelessness (I'm using Jim Comey's phrase – in my opinion, it was criminal, but in the FBI Director's opinion it was extreme carelessness) contained the names of American undercover intelligence agents, some of whom are no longer with us.  This is the belief of a lot of people in the intelligence community."

The significance of these possible leaks has been illustrated by the fate of the Iranian scientist Shahram Amiri.  Amiri was executed for treason on August 3, 2016.  He was providing the U.S. intelligence on Iran's nuclear program.  According to Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., "in the emails that were on Hillary Clinton's private server, there were conversations among her senior advisors about this gentleman."

Amiri's death cannot be conclusively attributed to hacked State Department emails.  However, there are quite possibly other sources and agents who have been exposed.  Certainly the U.S. intelligence community is aware of any such cases.  They cannot be revealed for several reasons.  Even if Amiri was not exposed by hacked emails, the perception is there, and it will have a chilling effect on others who might want to engage in espionage for the United States.  He will join the ranks of Shakeel Afride, who helped the CIA track down Osama bin Laden and now languishes in a Pakistani jail.

John Dietrich is a freelance writer and the author of The Morgenthau Plan: Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy, Algora Publishing, 2013.