RUTHFULLY YOURS

When Team Clinton warns of a vast right-wing conspiracy, it’s a sure sign of political distress. Hillary Clinton’s accusation that even an independent federal watchdog is conspiring against her is another sign that her email problems are escalating.

The Clinton attack is a response to a Jan. 14 letter from the intelligence community’s inspector general, Charles McCullough, to Congress’s intelligence committees. Mr. McCullough said he has received sworn declarations from the intelligence community that former Secretary of State Clinton’s private email server contained intelligence about the government’s most important secrets. Reviewers have found “several dozen emails” containing information deemed to be at “confidential, secret, and top secret/sap” levels.

The SAP—special access program—reference in particular is ringing Washington alarms. A SAP usually refers to a highly covert technology program, often weaponry. Knowledge of these programs is usually restricted to small groups of people on a need-to-know basis.

NBC News first reported that the SAP reference on Mrs. Clinton’s server is so sensitive that Mr. McCullough had to get special clearance before he could even view the intelligence-community declarations. Later on Wednesday NBC quoted “senior U.S. officials” as saying that the information was “innocuous” chatter about U.S. military drone strikes.

This quote looks like an attempt at political damage control because the SAP news undermines Mrs. Clinton’s previous claim that the emails on her server weren’t classified “at the time.” The fact of drone strikes may have generally been known to the public, but classification levels often involve specific details—such as targets and timing. Mrs. Clinton would surely have recognized the sensitive nature of such a program—the details of which were sitting on her unsecured email server, affording “special access” to any quality Chinese hacker.

This isn’t the cakewalk she expected. While not mentioning his name often, Hillary Clinton has tried marginalizing Bernie Sanders by moving left, narrowing the distance between them on income inequality and Wall Street regulation, then whacking him occasionally for opposing increased gun control. It hasn’t worked.

Last month Mrs. Clinton won all eight of the polls taken in Iowa, beating Bernie by an average of 16 points. But now her edge has fallen to only four points in the Real Clear Politics average for the state. Even that number is bolstered by an outlier, a poll that put her ahead by 21 points; remove it and Mrs. Clinton’s advantage all but disappears. In New Hampshire three polls were taken in December, two of which Mr. Sanders won, putting him ahead by 5.8 points in the Real Clear Politics average. With five fresh polls in January, his average lead has doubled to 11.4 points.

That’s why in Sunday’s Democratic debate, Mrs. Clinton deployed a new strategy with four components:

• Attack Mr. Sanders as a socialist. Mrs. Clinton now argues that her opponent would raise taxes on the middle class to pay for his socialist schemes. An unlikely attack dog, daughter Chelsea Clinton, even went so far as to assail Mr. Sanders for supporting single-payer health care—“Medicare for all,” as he described it in the debate. It is strange to see the Democratic front-runner trash another Democratic hopeful for backing the expansion of a health-care entitlement.

• Hug President Obama as tightly as possible . During the debate, Mrs. Clinton frequently invoked Mr. Obama’s name and legacy. She depicted Mr. Sanders’s single-payer plan as an attack on ObamaCare, flipped a question on Wall Street regulation to hit Mr. Sanders for criticizing the president, and even defended Mr. Obama’s widely criticized failure to order military action after Syrian President Bashar Assad crossed the “red line” by using chemical weapons.

• Lock up the nomination by locking in African-American and Hispanic support. Sunday’s debate was held in South Carolina, where more than half of Democratic primary voters in 2008 were black. “There needs to be a concerted effort to address the systemic racism in our criminal justice system,” Mrs. Clinton said. “One out of three African-American men may well end up going to prison.”

It is possible to identify how far down the mountain American politics has fallen in one word—Benghazi.

Benghazi is no longer the place in Libya where U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens was killed by Islamist militias. “Benghazi” is now just another neutralized buzzword in the bad-mouthing wars of American politics. As a professional cynic aptly noted to Congress, “What difference, at this point, does it make?”

Forget Benghazi. It’s time to move on to more important matters.

Such as what?

The movie “13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi” opened last week, and the cold-water machines have been hosing it. No one cares about Benghazi anymore, the conventional sniffing goes, because the box-office is tepid. At 144 minutes, “13 Hours” is too long and, really, it’s just too political.

I sat through it, and these political faces and names appear nowhere in the movie: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice. But for the last 75 minutes, I could think of only one thing: the Obama administration’s YouTube coverup, the story—or “talking points”—about how an obscure anti-Islamic video made in California caused Benghazi to happen.

“13 Hours” is a graphic, reasonably accurate depiction of the events on Sept. 11, 2012: the consular assault, Chris Stevens’s death, an escape under heavy fire to the CIA annex a mile away, and the successful, nightlong defense of the annex. With apologies to the politically delicate, “13 Hours” makes the memory of the government’s tall tale, which it insisted on repeating for more than a week, hard to stomach.

Emails from Hillary Clinton’s home server contained information classified at levels higher than previously known, including a level meant to protect some of the most sensitive U.S. intelligence, according to a document obtained by NBC News.
In a letter to lawmakers, the intelligence community’s internal watchdog says some of Clinton’s emails contained information classified Top Secret/Special Access Program, a secrecy designation that includes some of the most closely held U.S. intelligence matters.Two American intelligence officials tell NBC News these are not the same two emails from Clinton’s server that have long been reported as containing information deemed Top Secret.
The letter doesn’t make clear whether Clinton sent or received the emails in question, but in the past, emails containing classified information have tended to have been sent to Clinton, not written by her.
The new revelation underscores the extent to which the email classification issue could continue to dog Clinton, as State Department and intelligence officials review sensitive information within messages that were blacked out before being released to the public.
Clinton, who tops national primary polling as a Democratic presidential candidate, has repeatedly said that none of the information she sent or received while secretary of state was marked classified, and nothing has emerged to contradict that. But it’s become clear that classified information bled into the emails, which were sent over unencrypted channels open to interception by foreign intelligence agencies.