The scandal swirling around Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail account just keeps getting worse.
Earlier this week, the press savaged the former Secretary of State at a press conference where she attempted to explain the logistics governing her private e-mail server. Then, a report released by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) revealed that one of Clinton’s key claims—that all of her e-mails were somehow captured by the State Department—is completely baseless.
Now, advocacy organization Judicial Watch has laid into the feeble argument that Hillary never used her private e-mail account to deal with classified information. They focus on a previous JW investigation showing that top State Department officials circulated sensitive and classified e-mails amongst themselves during and in the aftermath of the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi.
It’s hard to believe that the Secretary of State was completely out of the loop on this material, which was disseminated among her top aides as Islamic terrorists attacked the U.S. Special Mission in Benghazi, Libya. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, the first diplomat to be killed overseas in decades, and three other Americans were murdered in the violent ambush.…That brings us to the secret email account scandal initially exposed by a mainstream newspaper. “Hillary Clinton’s suggestion that she didn’t send classified information is belied by productions in our Benghazi lawsuits,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “A review of the documents shows material sent to Susan Rice and other top State Department officials was withheld under exemptions for classified material. None of these emails (or any similar emails) were ever received or sent by Hillary Clinton?”The scenario is highly unlikely, despite claims made by Clinton this week during her United Nations news conference. “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email,” the former Secretary of State assured. “I’m certainly well aware of the classification requirements and did not send classified material.” So, we’re supposed to believe that the nation’s top foreign diplomat managed to exclude classified information in more than 30,000 emails?
Just one thing—a statement made by a former State Department official demolished the idea that you could guarantee that the account did not contain classified information:
Mrs. Clinton insisted that she kept classified information out of her email, as the law required. Storing classified information in a personal, nongovernment email account on a private computer server, like the one at Mrs. Clinton’s home, would be a violation of secrecy laws.And relations with other countries are particularly subject to secrecy claims. “Foreign government information” — information received from another government with the expectation that it will be held in confidence — is an official category of classified information in secrecy regulations.A former senior State Department official who served before the Obama administration said that although it was hard to be certain, it seemed unlikely that classified information could be kept out of the more than 30,000 emails that Mrs. Clinton’s staff identified as involving government business.“I would assume that more than 50 percent of what the secretary of state dealt with was classified,” said the former official, who would speak only on the condition of anonymity because he did not want to seem ungracious to Mrs. Clinton. “Was every single email of the secretary of state completely unclassified? Maybe, but it’s hard to imagine.”
Then there’s this careful observation:
On Bloomberg’s “With All Due Respect,” Reince Priebus made a really good point about speculating about the e-mails, the servers, and how Hillary is maneuvering through the media blitz. Watch (at about the 10:00 mark):
He’s right. Normally, I shun speculation and “connecting the dots” when most of those dots are either classified, or simply unavailable—I want the dots, not the outline of a dot that may tend to be; but this is an entirely different level of dot connecting. Who was policing this? What was the standard for making sure classified information stayed secure? What was personal, and what wasn’t? If she fielded 30,000 e-mails, or even half that many, how could she possibly be sure that nothing was compromised? Even if she wasn’t the one sending it out? I field just over 100 e-mails a day and if I was asked to confirm that XYZ wasn’t present in my inbox, I’d have to pause and check.
The circumstantial evidence is overwhelming, mostly because Hillary Clinton is a very deliberate person. Things don’t just happen in the State Department, and they don’t just happen to Hillary Clinton.
This thing is snowballing. Everyone out there donning a tinfoil hat is officially vindicated.
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