rayiner is a lawyer, I believe with experience in and around DC and government agencies. I always appreciate his takes because they're often counter to call it the HN zeitgeist.
They're asking you to clarify your argument, obviously. You say some federal law has been broken, they're asking you to specify which federal law you claim has been broken. It isn't rocket science.
A lawyer would charge you a lot to explain this to you you know?
What he asked is not currently public. It will be made public during the hearing.
A US federal judge (Not some random guy) is acting in accordance with being aware of a federal crime. (It's actually many more than one judge and one crime but let's keep it simple)
I'm comfortable with trusting a US judges read on the situation a priori. You could argue that it will be overturned and thus nothing illegal happened, which would techbically be correct. All talk about this is hypothetical, especially here in the deep comment section of some website.
As I said, what are you going to do with this information?
So - this is a "gotcha" question, not asking for genuine clarification. As if random citizens should have an encyclopedic recall to all laws.
Security clearances being marked on documents as worthless because the government has told employees to "just pick" a specific cleatance from the dropdown, even for things like "lunch meeting Tomorrow". The clearance people were told to use is "never to be cleared" - meaning it's intractable.
It was abused, so I don't buy the legal argument.
Put another way, if everything is top secret, nothing is.
