As the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton's off-the-book's email setup continues, reports indicate the probe is shifting its focus on a possible violation of the Espionage Act due to the former Secretary Of State's improper methods of handling sensitive information.
An intelligence source familiar with the investigation said the investigation is focused on sections of the Espionage Act that address security clearance holders who permit national defense information to be separated or abstracted from its secure location, according to Fox News.
The section in question is under 18 U.S. Code & 793 subsection F, which applies to "Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, note, or information, relating to the national defense," which includes Clinton, since classified information was found throughout her emails during the investigation.
Following this guideline, the law is broken if that person "through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed."
Or if he or she has "knowledge that the same has been illegally removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of its trust, or lost, or stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, and fails to make prompt report of such loss, theft, abstraction, or destruction to his superior officer-"
The punishment for failure to report such an incident is a fine, imprisonment up to 10 years, or both.
While Clinton's defense of not sending or receiving classified information from her personal email address has already been debunked, authorities still have other ways the act was possibly violated to investigate, according to The Daily Caller.
Two of the more prominent routes they can focus on are the possibility that her email inbox was potentially accessed by international hackers after receiving a fake speeding ticket in 2011, and the fact that she didn't tell her own department she had a private mail account, meaning that if her email account was indeed hacked, there would be no way for the State Department IT Help Desk to help her.
There's also the possibility that hackers didn't specifically target her email account, but were able to anyway due to all the holes in the email arrangement cybersecurity analysts discovered near the start of the investigation.
Hillary's campaign team maintains that Hillary's email system was not hacked.
"There's no indication that they were [hacked]," Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta said during a brief interview at Tuesday's Democratic debate. "You're speculating."
