Report: Hillary’s “unclassified” e-mails? Actually classified.
When will enough be enough?
Since the Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal first broke, supporters of Clinton have clung to a narrative that rejects the possibility that her private systems of record keeping and communication could have caused a national security breach. Spokespeople from the State Department and Clinton’s own team have stood by her testimony promising that her personal server didn’t convey or store any classified material.
This narrative survived the unveiling of several e-mails that State has now marked classified, but that discovery prompted deeper digging by activists and the media. Reuters investigated some of these new “classified” stamps and found that the e-mails marked with those new stamps contain information State’s own regulations deem classified, with our without the official designation.
In the small fraction of emails made public so far, Reuters has found at least 30 email threads from 2009, representing scores of individual emails, that include what the State Department’s own “Classified” stamps now identify as so-called ‘foreign government information.’ The U.S. government defines this as any information, written or spoken, provided in confidence to U.S. officials by their foreign counterparts.
This sort of information, which the department says Clinton both sent and received in her emails, is the only kind that must be “presumed” classified, in part to protect national security and the integrity of diplomatic interactions, according to U.S. regulations examined by Reuters.
“It’s born classified,” said J. William Leonard, a former director of the U.S. government’s Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO). Leonard was director of ISOO, part of the White House’s National Archives and Records Administration, from 2002 until 2008, and worked for both the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.
“If a foreign minister just told the secretary of state something in confidence, by U.S. rules that is classified at the moment it’s in U.S. channels and U.S. possession,” he said in a telephone interview, adding that for the State Department to say otherwise was “blowing smoke.”
Clinton had doubled down on the “no classified material” narrative as early as Tuesday of this week, making this report even more shocking. The FBI is investigating, and according to the Reuters report linked above, the State Department refuses to acknowledge (at least at this point) that even a few classified e-mails were discovered on the server.
They don’t know. Why would they?
Yesterday, I was in the courtroom when a federal judge dragged DoJ attorneys across the coals over their apparent lack of interest in the various investigations into Clinton’s e-mails, server, and “system of records.” The attorney on record for State spent a good ten minutes tripping over his own tongue after the judge demanded to know the physical location of the server and thumb drives in question.
So, here we are: State doesn’t know if there are any classified e-mails stored on the server, much less pages’ worth. They refused to confirm in open court which agency under the DoJ is in possession of the server, either because their attorneys don’t know, or don’t want to confirm a location for fear it could lead to more inconvenient information leaking out. An independent investigation has blown a huge hole in the “no classified material” narrative that Clinton’s campaign is banking on, and we’re still not done looking for material responsive to Judicial Watch’s latest FOIA request.
When will it finally be enough for Democrats? Because from where I’m sitting, the majority of the party is still willing to hedge their bets with a candidate who has more skeletons in her closet than pantsuits.
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
I tend to doubt that any of this caused a real national security breach (not counting what she might have deliberately sent to various no-good parties) because the Clintons needed to maintain very tight security over their possibly criminal activities, and all the evidence is they have maintained that security over the years.
There hasn’t been an internal Clinton leak of secret information ever – that I know of, except maybe for the tape recordings that Gennifer Flowers made, and Bill Clinton never revealed anything important to her – but only to Hillary. (When Gennifer Flowers speculated that Mario Cuomo might be a member of the Mafia he didn’t correct her because he was not in the habit of educating her as to what was going on)
Of course doing something like this was very much against rules and regulations, even if Bill and Hillary Clinton consulted David Kendall before setting up the system – and she probably did.
There is still something fishy here. Hillary could not have been stupid enough to think she could hide emails sent and received in her capacity as SoS, because those emails never belonged to her, they belong to the government with all that implies. She should have known that putting government email and private emails (possibly including incriminating evidence of graft and other crimes) together could result in the compromise of both sets of messages. Why was she not smart enough to put those two categories of messages on separate servers (even if in her control) so that a compromise of one (likely her government messages, because of the potential for demands like JW’s and other FOIA requests) wouldn’t affect the other? This is such a fundamentally stupid mistake that I find it hard to believe that she made this error for reasons that we believe we understand. This makes me think something is going on here that we don’t yet understand.
OTOH, if she is that stupid, the stupidity itself is enough to disqualify her from any office of public trust. We expect much more of our corrupt politicians.
As I’ve mentioned before, the wiping of her server(s) may also have ruined their forensic value. Unless the drives of any of her servers were mirrored, it’s unlikely that there still exists recoverable data that can show if they servers were hacked, when they were hacked, what data may have been compromised, and who may have done the hacking. This is extremely serious because when there is a data breach, these are the things you would want to know because the knowledge is necessary for damage-mitigation efforts.
BTW, I saw this story elsewhere early this morning, sent a link out to my friends, and attached a sound file to the email – Dragnet’s “dum-da-dum-dum”!
She hid them for one and half years after she was no longer Secretary of State.
If there hadn’t been a Benghazi investigation, and subpoenas of the State Department that turned up some e-mails FROM her, and a persistent, albeit slow, Gowdy committee, they would still be hidden and unknown.
Still, I am not sure if she and Bill really had the end game figured out.
Maybe it was that she’d become president and then change some rules or regulations. And she’d pretend either that she never e-mailed or it was too late to retrieve them.
Let’s not say that she didn’t, at least for the worst ones. Or at least used a separate e-mail address for that.
As for why she didn’t use government e-mail at all, that could be because she and Bill reasoned that if anything she e-mailed was a government record, she might slip up and leave behind some incriminating evidence. She might by mistake be logged in to the wrong e-mail. Or somebody who e-mailed to her might slip up.
Another reason could be not to cover up crimes, but to escape political responsibility for decisions.
This is such a fundamentally stupid mistake that I find it hard to believe that she made this error for reasons that we believe we understand. This makes me think something is going on here that we don’t yet understand.
It’s much simpler.
Hillary has more to lose from President Obama having her emails than President Putin.
“I tend to doubt that any of this caused a real national security breach….”
Huh?
The business of the Secretary of State is national security, and Hillary Clinton would be a target of every serious intelligence gatherer and a very large number of casual ones.
Unless, that is, Hillary did not use her email account for doing her job, or she was completely out of the loop on all confidential discussions.
“Classified from birth”, according to national security pros.
And STILL classified.
Puhleeeeeeze…!!!
NOBODY is stupid enough to buy what Ol’ Walleyes is selling here.
If they SAY they’re buying it, it’s because they’ve made themselves STOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooOOOOOOOPID by their own election.
And that cannot be fixed.
Longtime Clinton toady law prof Jeffrey Tobin is claiming there is no criminality without intent, even though many have gone to prison without any intent, which is not an element for good reasons.
A man willing to risk his rep as a legal expert to cover for her. Sick.
In light of the attorney for the State Dept. to be unable to answer specific questions, I am surprised at the 31 days the judge permitted before the next status report filing. It seems that the judge could have ordered specific questions to be answered by an earlier date, such as: Which agency has the server, and when did that agency get that server, and from whom, and what has that agency done with the server since the day it received it?
How many think Hillary Clinton was/is the only one in the Obama Administration doing crap like this? I’d say she’s just the only one stupid enough to get caught.
So far.
White House: ‘We screwed up’
Perino’s disclosure about the White House e-mail comes a day after she admitted that the White House “screwed up” by not requiring e-mails from Republican Party and campaign accounts to be saved and was also trying to recover those e-mails.
Perino said 22 aides in the political arm of the president’s office use party or campaign e-mail accounts, which were issued to separate official business from political work. Some of those accounts were used to discuss the December firings of eight federal prosecutors, a shake-up that has triggered a spreading controversy on Capitol Hill.
Congressional investigators have questioned whether White House aides used e-mail accounts from the Republican Party and President Bush’s re-election campaign for official government business to avoid scrutiny of those dealings.
Sen. Patrick Leahy, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, accused the White House of trying to hide messages on the Republican Party system related to the firing of the U.S. attorneys, which has stirred up a hornet’s nest on Capitol Hill.
“You can’t erase e-mails, not today,” said Leahy, D-Vermont. “They’ve gone through too many servers. They can’t say they’ve been lost. That’s like saying, ‘The dog ate my homework.’ ” (Watch Leahy compare e-mails to Nixon tapes Video)
http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/04/13/white.house.email/index.html
I guess Hillary was busy with
Clinton FoundationSenate work while this was going on.It isn’t actually relevant, except for Hillary’s PR (it gives her diehard defenders a straw to grasp). Intent isn’t a factor in mishandling classified materials, and those with high clearances are expected and required to know classified info when they see it.
– –
While this is a criminal violation, in addition to the civil violations of the Records Act and Obama policy, it’s far from the last.
So far we have only heard publicity of one company, the Swiss bank UBS, which had their languishing application at State suddenly approved after a generous donation to the Clinton Foundation and/or hiring Bill for a high-$$ speech, or both. But there are dozens of foreign companies, and at least two countries, with the same experience.
And NO ONE who donated had their application/plea/etc. before State turned down.
USB faced a demand from the Departmemt of Justice to reveal all its U.S. custimers (not just those who had been specially recruited with a promotion that said they could evade taxes – or something like that)
USB contended that violated Swiss law. USB got the swiss government involved, and the State Department was involved in negotiating this too.
I actually agree with that.
But I can see reasons, maybe important reasons, for Hillary to avoiding government e-mail altogether. I don’t fully understand what their game plan was, and what theur end game plan was, but what they did wasn’t incredibly bad, because this did not become an issue until one and half years after she left office.
Before, FOIA requests for anything e-mailed by Hillary were just turning up with nothing (they are always searches of a much larger quantity of data) with no further explanation. Nobody guessed.
The only reason I can think of is that the private company is more secure than the national IT crowd.
Fat Friggen Chance.
(Please regard my accidental up-thumb as an Eastern European gesture. Hand tremble make me click on that instead of “reply”.)
Questions to ask:
1) What happenned with the old server in 2013?
2) Were any copies of her e-mails, sent or received, made while her attorneys were searching through them in the fall of 2014? From what accounts were they taken, and what accounts or times, if any, were excluded? Were any of these copies later destroyed?
3) When was the server moved from Chappaqua to New Jersey, and why? Give both the phony excuse and the real reason.
I think there is enough to indict her, but will they? If they do indict, look for Warren to step in. Warren would be a significant move leftward, almost like Sanders, but with woman parts. I don’t think America is there, yet. I don’t think a Warren could win this time around.
W.J. Clinton: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinski…”
H. R. Clinton: “I did not send classified information…”
Both categorical lies.
Billy was impeached, but not convicted.
I doubt that Hillary! will enjoy the same fate.
Her shocked/frightened countenance while draped in orange is the greatest political photograph since Dukakis drove a tank.
I think it’s BJ Clinton not WJ Clinton.
Did Hillary’s email tell the terrorists that our Ambassador would be in Benghazi on 9/11? Congress should investigate this issue to see if she helped Al Qaeda murder our Ambassador.
The terrorists (or their supporters in some Gulf Arab intelligence agency) probably arranged for him to be there.
There must have been some extended discussion of the idea of him going there on September 11th, of all days, when the idea was to exercise precaution.
Hillary has to know something about all that – what led to the decision to be there that day.
Now, you see, this is where the idea of a “spontaneous” attack serves t purpose of the terrorist. If it was spontaneous, if it was caused by a video or a protest in Cairo that just happened that day – well it couldn’t have been planned. By somebody outside benghazi. theer’s nothing to see here. There’s nothing to look for.
Now the CIA was responsible for that – but the State Department didn’t argue even about the claim there had been a demonstration prior to teh attack. (in fact it came out of the blue, except for some checkpoints that had bene set up on the streets. They also maybe knew about the firetrap safe room, the Ambassador went to.
The terrorists themselves said it was because of the video.
They circulated false rumors in benghazi that americans or their guards hgad fired at non-violent demonstrators, attracted a crowd to the misison, posted guards outside and harrangued peoiple who came including a reporter for the New York Times about the video. That was sthe first that reporter hasd heard about the video. In fact, almost nobody in Benghazi, except the attackers who killed Ambassador Stevens, had heard about the video.
Of course only one conclusion is possible:
The terrorist themselves put the video on the Internet.
Probably paid for the video, too. Just cehck it out.
I find it fascinating that no one seems to be focused on the fact that whoever has hacked into her server (the chances that no one did are less than my chances of winning the Power Ball and not buying a ticket) has tremendous BLACKMAIL power over her…and she hasn’t the slightest idea how much information they have that can be revealed. It makes this entire fiasco a question of judgement…her’s and anyone who’d vote for her.
I read something that gave me an idea that the new server (since 2013 – probable location in the fall of 2014, Chapawau, probably moved to New Jersey in March 2015) may actually be a solid state drive = a flash drive = a USB thumb drive, and not a hard disk.