No matter how Hillary tries to spin it, it’s a criminal investigation.

The FBI probe into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email system while she was in office is not just a fact-finding exercise but a criminal investigation, the New York Post reported Wednesday, citing sources inside the agency.

It’s a report that contradicts the Clinton camp’s claims that the FBI probe involves civil law, according to the Post.

The Post reported:

The feds are investigating to what extent Clinton relied on her home server and other private devices to send and store classified documents, according to a federal source with knowledge of the inquiry.

“It’s definitely a criminal probe. I’m not sure why they’re not calling it a criminal probe,” the source told the newspaper.

“The DOJ [Department of Justice] and FBI can conduct civil investigations in very limited circumstances,” but that’s not what this is, the source stressed. “In this case, a security violation would lead to criminal charges. Maybe DOJ is trying to protect her campaign.”

The Post continued:

Clinton’s camp has downplayed the inquiry as civil and fact-finding in nature. Clinton herself has said she is “confident” that she never knowingly sent or received anything that was classified.

The inspector general for the intelligence community has told Congress that of 40 Clinton e-mails randomly reviewed as a sample of her correspondence as secretary of state, four contained classified information.

If Clinton is proven to have knowingly sent, received or stored classified information in an unauthorized location, she risks prosecution under the same misdemeanor federal security statute used to prosecute former CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus, said former federal prosecutor Bradley Simon.

The statute — which was also used to prosecute Bill Clinton’s national security adviser, Sandy Berger, in 2005, is rarely used and would be subject to the discretion of the attorney general.

According to the Post, Simon likened the potential case against Hillary to the criminal investigation of former Army Gen. and CIA Director David Petraeus, who was sentenced to two years probation and a $100,000 fine for sharing classified information with a woman who was both his biographer and his lover.

“They didn’t hesitate to charge General Petraeus with doing the same thing, downloading documents that are classified,” Simon told the Post. “The threshold under the statute is not high — they only need to prove there was an unauthorized removal and retention” of classified material, he said.

Representing Clinton in the email case is former President Clinton’s long-time lawyer, David Kendall, who also represented Petraeus.

“My guess is they’re looking to see if there’s been either any breach of that data that’s gone into the wrong hands [in Clinton’s case], through their counter-intelligence group, or they are looking to see if a crime has been committed,” Makin Delrahim, former chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee, who served as a deputy assistant secretary in the Bush Justice Department told the Post.

“They’re not in the business of providing advisory security services,” Delrahim said of the FBI. “This is real.”

What little reputation for honesty Clinton may have had before has just hit the sewer.

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Michael Dorstewitz

Mike has been with BizPac Review almost from the beginning. Follow him on Twitter at @MikeBPR.

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