SECRET Coversheet: It’s The Information That Makes Something Classified, Not The Markings.
Criminal risk exposure from Hillary Clinton’s illegal use of a home email server to conduct her Secretary of State duties grows by the day. Recent statements from her campaign, the State Department and the White House show the intrigue surrounding violations of Hillary’s legal responsibilities to protect America’s secrets continues to mount.
On 14 January, Intelligence Community IG Charles McCullough III sent an unclassified memo to senior Congressional lawmakers detailing the intelligence community’s findings of highly classified email/information on Hillary Clinton’s server. Some emails included the highest level of classification (above TOP SECRET) involving Special Access Program (SAP) information. Even the historically damaging espionage by Edward Snowden didn’t compromise that level of classified information.
According to a Fox News Report:
“Highly classified Hillary Clinton emails that the intelligence community and State Department recently deemed too damaging to national security to release contain operational intelligence and their presence on the unsecure, personal email system jeopardized sources, methods and lives, a U.S. government official who has reviewed the documents told Fox News.”
What’s most telling about this revelation is the lack of outrage from the Democrat Party. Remember, it was the Democrat Party that went after President Bush and his Administration over the Valerie Plame “outing”. That was treated by Democrats as treason, but not a word regarding Hillary’s unprotected server, which according to FOX’s source, has done far worse.
The Clinton campaign tried to deflect criticisms regarding emails that the intelligence community marked as too sensitive and damaging to release. The campaign responded with:
We firmly oppose the complete blocking of the release of these emails. This appears to be over-classification run amok. We will pursue all appropriate avenues to see that her emails are released in a manner consistent with her call last year.
Hillary’s campaign seems to be confusing the “complete blocking” of her State Department emails with the protection of National Security. This isn’t surprising since Secretary Clinton herself had the same confusion as the Secretary of State. If she wanted to protect America’s National Secrets and protect OUR records, she never would have set up the illegal server in the first place.
In another, of a series of irrelevant comments regarding classification markings, John Kirby, the State Department’s spokesman, stated on 29 January that the documents referenced in Inspector General Charles McCullough III’s Memo were “not marked classified at the time they were sent”and that the State Department will look at “whether they were classified at the time they were sent”.
As far as whether Federal Laws were broken or not, it doesn’t matter if it was marked, or when the information was classified. The mishandling of it, intentionally or accidentally is all that matters. In the case of Secretary Clinton’s unsecure server, the information was not protected, and puts her in grave legal danger. It’s fair to say that just about anybody else in America would already be under indictment and on their way to prison.
The White House, which refuses in other instances to comment on ongoing investigations, did not hold back regarding Hillary Clinton’s FBI troubles. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest was asked by a reporter on 29 January:
“Can you say with certainty and confidence that Secretary Clinton will not be indicted because of this email scandal?”
He responded:
“That will be a decision made by the Department of Justice and prosecutors over there…What I know that some officials over there have said is that she is not a target of the investigation. So that does not seem to be the direction that it’s trending. But I’m certainly not going to weigh in on a decision or in that process in any way. That is a decision to be made solely by independent prosecutors but again, based on what we know from the Department of Justice, it does not seem to be headed in that direction.”
Ernest also stated:
“I can tell you with full confidence that there is has been no political interference in this process! think the extraordinary request that Secretary Clinton put forward to actually release her emails is something that, Im not sure has a precedent, at least for federal office holders.”
His comment drips with “Clinton Speak”. There shouldn’t be a precedent regarding the requests to release emails, since nobody else in the government was careless enough to use a private server to conduct classified government business. The need to release the emails stems from Hillary’s gross negligence in protecting America’s CLASSIFIED Programs and information.
The State Department also announced that 18 emails between Clinton and President Obama would also be withheld from Friday’s release. It would be fascinating to know what they discussed. Clearly, if the President was emailing Hillary Clinton at her home server, with a home address, he should have known that the address wasn’t a “.gov” address. Obama stated before that he learned of Hillary’s server from the press. The 18 withheld emails suggest otherwise.
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