Recently disclosed emails from Hillary Clinton's private server reveal that the 2012 incident, in which high-ranking Chinese official Wang Lijun sought political asylum in a U.S. consulate but was rejected, was discussed at the time in communications with aides, raising the possibility that the Chinese could have obtained access to the server and helped them thwart the defection, The Washington Free Beacon reports.
"The FBI did find that hostile foreign actors successfully gained access to the personal email accounts of individuals with whom Clinton was in regular contact and, in doing so, obtained emails sent to or received by Clinton on her personal account," an FBI report states.
Had the incident been kept secret, current and former intelligence officials said that U.S. officials could have managed to get him out of China.
Critics say Clinton's handling of the incident involving Wang, a close aide to a regional Communist Party leader, was a botched opportunity for U.S. intelligence to gain secrets about Chinese leaders.
Instead of sheltering Wang and granting him asylum, Clinton turned him over to Chinese authorities, saying he was not qualified for sanctuary because of his past role as a police chief accused of corruption.
China gave him a relatively lenient 15-year jail sentence, The Guardian reported, after he was convicted of defection, accepting, abuse of power and bending the law to selfish ends.
Critics say the case demonstrates Clinton's desire to preserve U.S. ties with China's communist leadership instead of possibly obtaining crucial intelligence on a potentially growing threat to the U.S., according to the Free Beacon.
Clinton herself said the U.S. agreed to keep secret all details of Wang's defection attempt in order to help Beijing's Communist rulers avoid public embarrassment in an apparent belief that the leaders were on a path to political reform that the West desired.
Clinton's detractors say the mishandling of the case raises concerns about her ability to handle national security affairs in general.
"Clinton and [President Barack] Obama do not see the world in geostrategic terms," said Kenneth deGraffenreid, a former White House intelligence director told the Free Beacon.
"Clinton had no sense of the reality of the Communist regime they were dealing with… Wang would have been pure gold from an intelligence standpoint, given the paucity of sources inside the Chinese government."
DeGraffenreid also dismissed Clinton's assertion that Wang's alleged corruption would disqualify him for sanctuary, saying, "The point is we're not putting these people in for the Nobel Peace Prize.
"We're trying to find people with insider knowledge. My category for defectors is can we get good intelligence. If that standard is not in [the Obama administration's] manual, they ought to put it in."
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