One of the mysteries of the Hillary email scandal has been how over 1000 emails containing various levels of classified material were sent to Hillary without being “marked” as classified. It is that lack of emails being “marked” classified “at the time” that is Hillary’s central defense.
On September 25, 2015, Kemberlee wrote that there must have been some signal to State Department employees to send the classified material without markings; there’s just no way it could be coincidence and Hillary must have known. Some dare say conspiracy: Who will be first Hillary aide to flip on her?:
Was there a concerted conspiracy to violate the law, particularly given the fact that Clinton opted for a private email on her person server? Who else knew classified information was being transmitted outside of government purview?If any of these suspicions are confirmed throughout the course of the FBI’s investigation, will aides then be offered legal concessions if they cooperate?What were once Clinton’s closest lackeys may end up being her downfall.
We may not need to wait for an aide to flip on Hillary.
As detailed by Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, a newly released email shows Hillary instructing a State Department employee to remove classification markings before faxing a document since a secure fax device could not be located:
Has the State Department released a smoking gun in the Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal? In a thread from June 2011, Hillary exchanges e-mails with Jake Sullivan, then her deputy chief of staff and now her campaign foreign-policy adviser, in which she impatiently waits for a set of talking points. When Sullivan tells her that the source is having trouble with the secure fax, Hillary then orders Sullivan to have the data stripped of its markings and sent through a non-secure channel.That should be game, set, and match, yes?“If they can’t, turn into nonpaper w no identifying heading and send nonsecure.” That’s an order to violate the laws handling classified material. There is no other way to read that demand. Regardless of whether or not Sullivan complied, this demolishes Hillary’s claim to be ignorant of marking issues, as well as strongly suggests that the other thousand-plus instances where this did occur likely came under her direction.
I’m not surprised that this happened, I am surprised that Hillary was sloppy enough to have herself tied so directly to such an instruction.
I expected it to be more of an unwritten “understanding” among aides and State Department employees. Since Hillary was off the State Department secure grid, they would have known they could not send classified material to her personal email account.
But they had to send her classified material to do their job, because she was Secretary of State. So through a nod or a wink or some hint, they failed to mark and/or removed markings from thousands of emails sent to Hillary.
If it was just a nod and a wink, prosecutors might have had a hard time bringing charges of conspiracy against Hillary. But now, in this email, Hillary took an affirmative step as part of the conspiracy and thus became part of it.
Hillary’s sloppiness in covering her tracks is demonstrated by a 2011 email in which she criticized another employee for using a personal email account. The NY Times reports:
In February 2011, senior aides sent Mrs. Clinton a dispatch from the officer, John Godfrey, analyzing the situation in Libya. She asked whom he worked for. When told he was a State Department employee, she responded, “I was surprised that he used personal email account if he is at State.”
So Hillary received over 1000 classified emails which inexplicably were not marked classified, and she instructed at least one person to remove classified markings from a fax sent to her.
There has long been a belief that classification markings were stripped from communications, as this August 2015 Fox News report indicates:
“Hillary only used her personal account for unclassified email. No information in her emails was marked classified at the time she sent or received them,” campaign Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri said in a statement to supporters Wednesday.But a State Department official told Fox News that the intelligence community inspector general, who raised the most recent concerns about Clinton’s emails, made clear that at least one of those messages contained information that only could have come from the intelligence community.”If so, they would have had to come in with all the appropriate classification markings,” the official said.The official questioned whether someone, then, tampered with that message. “[S]omewhere between the point they came into the building and the time they reached HRC’s server, someone would have had to strip the classification markings from that information before it was transmitted to HRC’s personal email.”The official said doing so would “constitute a felony, in and of itself. I can’t imagine that a rank-and-file career DOS employee would have done this, so it was most likely done by someone in her inner circle.”The messages apparently contained satellite imagery and signals intelligence, information that diplomats cannot unilaterally obtain.Yet, like the Clinton campaign, the State Department public affairs team also maintains that the emails were “not marked classified” when Clinton received them.”None of them were classified at the time,” department spokesman Mark Toner said.
At this point, if Hillary is not indicted for conspiracy it’s because someone at DOJ doesn’t want her indicted. Or maybe they’re still waiting for State Department employees to flip on her.
[Featured Image via Daily Mail]
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