Not long after the news broke that Hillary Clinton was using a private email server during her time as the Secretary of State and not a government email address, she held a press conference to assure people that nothing had been sent with classified information.
According to the Inspector General, Clinton’s claims are not to have been true:
The inspector general for the intelligence community has informed members of Congress that some material Hillary Clinton emailed from her private server contained classified information, but it was not identified that way.Because it was not identified, it is unclear whether Clinton realized she was potentially compromising classified information.The IG reviewed a “limited sampling” of her emails and among those 40 reviewed found that “four contained classified [intelligence community] information,” wrote the IG Charles McCullough in a letter to Congress.McCullough noted that “none of the emails we reviewed had classification or dissemination markings” but that some “should have been handled as classified, appropriately marked, and transmitted via a secure network.”The four emails in question “were classified when they were sent and are classified now,” spokeswoman Andrea Williams told CNN.
4 out of 40 is 10%. Which means of the 30,000 emails Hillary sent, there is a chance at last 3,000 of them contained classified information.
Hillary is relying on the defense that what she sent at the time was not classified and that it was not classified until later:
“I am confident that I never sent or received any information that was classified at the time it was sent and received,” Clinton said. “What I think you’re seeing here is a very typical kind of discussion, to some extent disagreement among various parts of the government, over what should or should not be publicly released.”
That sounds good, but the fact of the matter is, even if the material in the emails were not marked as classified at the time, she still had a responsibility to treat them as if they were:
Not all closely held information created or distributed by federal officials is necessarily “classified.” The unauthorized disclosure of this information, often referred to as “sensitive” information, could harm U.S. national security even if the information isn’t technically classified. “For Official Use Only,” or FOUO, is a common type of sensitive but unclassified information. “Sensitive but Unclassified,” or SBU, is another. The government has straightforward principles outlining proper ways to handle information that may be sensitive but not classified:For any document/product correctly bearing the U//FOUO handling instruction, certain safeguards must be taken. Generally speaking, the material should be treated as if it were classified CONFIDENTIAL.
Joe Scarborough talked about it on Morning Joe today:
With some in the media never missing a chance to take up for Hillary, John Harwood of CNBC tweeted the following:
His question is irrelevant as government officials have an obligation to self report when they release classified information.
Gabriel Malor, a DC based attorney in a series of tweets spoke of “spillage” and the responsibility of the person responsible:
It will be interesting to see where this goes. Like Malor said, 10% is an insanely high rate.
Meanwhile a sailor is facing 30 years in prison because he took photos of classified systems on a submarine and then tried to destroy them. Almost like it was somebody wiping out an email server.
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