The Espionage Act is back to being enforced as it is written. Bad news for Mrs. Clinton and her underlings?

At National Review, Andrew McCarthy writes about

Restoring the rule of law to the protection of classified information.

On Tuesday, the Justice Department announced the arrest of a former CIA officer on a felony charge of unlawfully retaining classified information. Jerry Chun Shing Lee (a/k/a “Zhen Cheng Li”) is charged in a complaint with one count of unlawfully retaining classified information, a felony carrying a potential ten-year prison sentence.

…Like Petraeus’s journals, Lee’s notebooks contain handwritten notes of highly classified missions, meetings, and sources. Lee’s offense does not appear to involve retaining classified information in digital form on non-government servers or transmitting it by email.

…the Justice Department finds that traitorous intent is not an element of the offense. The prosecution must merely show that Lee acted willfully: i.e., aware that his conduct was illegal, he intentionally retained classified information in a place not authorized for its storage (and during a time when he was no longer authorized to possess it).

…As I have recently explained, the misimpression that Clinton’s case is primarily about “extreme carelessness” rather than willful misconduct is the result of Obama administration sleight-of-hand. Mrs. Clinton should have been investigated (and charged) under section 793(e) since she, like Lee, willfully and unlawfully retained classified information in unauthorized places (and transmitted it to unauthorized people). The gross-negligence felony (793(f)) should have been the prosecutors’ fallback position — i.e., even if a jury somehow rejected the overwhelming evidence that she willfully mishandled the intelligence, she could still be convicted if the jury concluded she was grossly negligent.

…the Espionage Act is back to being enforced as it is written. If the email investigation were reopened under those terms, it would be bad news for Mrs. Clinton and her underlings.

Read more here.