During the contest between Trump and Clinton, we wrote 16 fact checks on the email issue, frequently awarding Pinocchios to Clinton for legalistic parsing. But in light of the Trump investigation, Clinton is trying to draw a distinction between Trump’s current travails and the probe that targeted her....
Clinton, in her tweet, suggests none of her emails were marked classified. That’s technically correct. Whether those emails contained classified information was a major focus of the investigation, but a review of the recent investigations, including new information obtained by the Fact Checker, shows Clinton has good reason for making a distinction with Trump.
At a July 5, 2016, news conference, Comey said: “From the group of 30,000 emails returned to the State Department, 110 emails in 52 email chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received.”
He added that out of “thousands of emails we found that were not among those produced to State, agencies have concluded that three of those were classified at the time they were sent or received, one at the Secret level and two at the Confidential level.”
Separately, he said 2,000 additional emails were “up-classified” to make them suitable for public disclosure. This statement has generally been translated in news reports as the FBI determining that 113 emails contained classified information.
Referring to seven email chains that concerned issues classified at the “Top Secret/Special Access Program” level, Comey said: “There is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position, or in the position of those government employees with whom she was corresponding about these matters, should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation.” ...
The State Department has both classified and unclassified systems — known informally as the “high side” and the “low side.” The classified system has tight controls, often housed in what is known as a sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF); it is not possible to “cut and paste” from the classified system into the unclassified system.
Clinton’s private email system was designed to deal with the unclassified communications, similar to the unclassified state.gov email account. But sometimes classified information seeped into email exchanges.... “The senders used unclassified emails because of ‘operational tempo,’ that is, the need to get information quickly to senior State Department officials at times when the recipients lacked access to classified systems,” said a nearly 600-page Justice Department inspector general report released in June 2018....
One prosecutor who worked on the case told the IG: “The problem was the State Department was so screwed up in the way they treated classified information that if you wanted to prosecute Hillary Clinton, you would have had to prosecute 150 State Department people.”
“There was no evidence that the senders or former Secretary Clinton believed or were aware at the time that the emails contained classified information,” the Justice IG report said....
David Kendall, an attorney for Clinton, told the Fact Checker: “The State Department personnel who originated the emails did not think their content merited classification, and not a single one of the over 33,000 emails bore classification markings.”
In his news conference, Comey said “three of those were classified at the time they were sent or received.” At the time, he said one was marked “secret” and two “confidential,” but at a congressional hearing two days later, he said all were marked “confidential,” the lowest form of classification.
Moreover, he acknowledged that markings — a (C) — were contained in the body of the text and, contrary to standard practice, there was no header at the top alerting someone that this was classified material. He told lawmakers that without a header, it was “a reasonable inference” that this material was not classified.
The emails concerned proposed talking points for Clinton when she called a foreign leader. The State Department later said the (C) markings should have been removed as a matter of course once Clinton decided to place the call but through “human error,” they had not been deleted. In her FBI interview, Clinton said she did not know what (C) meant and “speculated it was a reference to paragraphs ranked in alphabetical order.”
The IG report said the FBI missed the (C) markings until late in the investigation. In her Twitter thread, Clinton said, “Comey admitted he was wrong after he claimed I had classified emails” — a reference to his remarks at the congressional hearing.
“When he testified before the House Oversight Committee, he was forced to concede the markings he pointed to were ambiguous, did not comply with federal classification guidelines, and did not contain proper classification markings,” Kendall said....
During the Trump administration, two more investigations were conducted... The unclassified version of the Diplomatic Security investigation that was publicly released notes that “a typical security violation involves premarked classified information discovered contemporaneously with the incident. None of the emails at issue in this review were marked as classified.”...
The report was critical of Clinton’s decision to have a private server — “it added an increased degree of risk of compromise as a private system lacks the network monitoring and intrusion detection capabilities of State Department networks.” But the report concluded: “Instances of classified information being deliberately transmitted via unclassified email were the rare exception and resulted in adjudicated security violations. There was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information.”
That's the distinction between what Clinton did and what Trump is accused of doing. It has to do with whether documents are marked "classified."
Posts
87 comments:
Hillary Clinton took data off of NIPR and SOSA and other classified networks.
It is by definition classified if it is on those networks.
If you plug a thumb drive into a USB slot on one of these networks someone is standing behind you before it opens.
What Hillary did would land any normal person in jail forever.
33000 counts? You might disappear into a cargo container in some random country somewhere.
These people are just dishonest shitheads.
How do we know this when so many emails and the server itself were destroyed?
And the Mar-a-Lago raid was obviously a fishing expedition. How do we know what a similar dive into all of Clinton's emails would yield?
Wasn't the reason those documents weren't marked classified because Hillary created a private e-mail server designed to evade the classification process?
Bleachbit. Hammered phones. Spectacular increase in wealth. If it walks like a duck.
Now that nuclear seems to becoming a viable option we will need to check with Russia to see if we can buy their uranium. But "17 security agencies" cleared that sale! $500K for a speach. At this point what difference does it make.
Hillary Clinton is a stain on America and belongs in jail.
‘There is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position, or in the position of those government employees with whom she was corresponding about these matters, should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation.’
Even this best case assessment doesn’t mitigate her deliberate creation and use of a non-secure server. Clear intent.
Thus why 90% of Americans ignore or hate the “news” media. Compare these acrobatics with the LVRJ article burying the party affiliation of an alleged murderer IF ONE OF THEIR OWN. We all know “Republican” would be in the headline if one killed somebody especially a reporter: it would be “from ‘enemies of the people’ to killing in three short steps” in Trump’s America. Still, democrat politicians have (allegedly) killed more people this year than Republicans killed in the J6 parade.
Hillary and others are going around saying don't compare what she did to what Trump allegedly did. You see the argument that these things were different, but there were similarities and differences. If you want to argue the differences are more important than the similarities, you can, and Kessler shows you how. Good luck arguing that in public though. It will dissolve into chaos very quickly.
What percent of Americans do you think could read that article and understand and remember the distinction and be able to explain it to somebody else?
What percent of Washington Post subscribers — a small subsection of Americans — do you think *are* reading and understanding the article in its entirety? Of the Washington Post subscribers who clicked onto the page, what do you think is the ratio between those who read and understood the article well enough to remember it and be able to explain it to others and those who scrolled to the bottom to see if there were Pinocchios, saw none, and took away the idea that you can't compare Hillary and Trump on this issue?
All (as in all) communication between a SOS and POTUS is classified by statute and needs no markings. Hillary should know that but she skipped all the briefings on it because she doesn’t give a fuck about rules and she gets away with it. She’s laughing all the way to the bank selling her “But Her Emails” hats. And they say (without evidence) that Trump doesn’t take rules seriously. And there was a Navy corpsman who sent a selfie to his fiancé from a deployed ship and he was severely prosecuted under the same rules Hillary shamelessly broke.
Shorter Hillary: All Trump had to do was have someone take scissors and cut the classification marks off the documents.
If Orwell had made Winston Smith a fact checker, it would have been proof he had a time machine.
Audible words came from her piehole.
That's how sane people know she was being deceptive and telling a lawyerly lie.
The FBI has released in court a detailed list of everything they confiscated during their fishing expedition in Melania's panty drawer.
The things they took (stole) included many, many items - most - that are obviously NOT classified in any way, shape or form and the FBI knew these items to be NOT CLASSIFIED. Items such:
* photographs
* Newspaper clippings
* Clothing
* Empty folders
* Other folders not marked classified in any way
* Books
* Gifts
It is clear to any reasonabkle person that the government took, without authorization, many things from the President's home they had no authorization to take. In Texas, we call that: STEALING
Who put a few classified documents among these things? These were boxes of Presidential memorabilia that were packed up. Who packed the boxes? Do you think that the President of the United States packed up his own moving boxes? Or did staff more than likely do it?
What in fact is in these "alleged" classified documents? Where they properly classified in the first place?
Lots and lots of questions our "media" isn't interesting in answering.
God, I hope this guy wins the Presidency again just to watch how many people are going to be shipped off to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, never to be seen or heard from again.
Everyone is choosing to ignore that the president has complete authority and power in determining whether something is classified or not, and at what level. A number of people writing about this surely are aware of this fact; if they aren't, they ought to be. He's advised, but he makes the final call.
A Secretary of State does not have this authority. These comparisons between Clinton and Trump are silly and designed to trick us into comparing an actual elected president who assumed all presidential powers with someone who has lost multiple runs at the presidency, has never had these powers, and what marginal authority she had in the executive branch was abused and corrupted.
If the president takes something that was classified and tells people to declassify it-- what Trump did with a number of the docs the FBI was interested in finding during the raid-- it is then declassified. End of story. If the president takes info that was classified and then decides for some reason to hold a press conference and announce it to the world-- well he's the president and he has this authority whether you think it's right and good or not. Clinton has never had this authority, God willing she never will, and therefore what she did was in every way illegal. What Trump did was not.
In fact, something taken off NIPR is by definition *not* classified (it's the Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network), but the restrictions are still onerous. The Secretary of State does not have full authority to declassify any and every thing (the sitting President pretty much does), but can still do a lot.
On the other hand, classified information on a private server is far more exposed than classified information in someone's house. The house, you have to get a body into it. The server? Someone sitting in Pyongyang, Beijing, Moscow,... can own it pretty much at will.
Ann Althouse said...
What percent of Americans do you think could read that article and understand and remember the distinction and be able to explain it to somebody else?
What percent of Washington Post subscribers — a small subsection of Americans — do you think *are* reading and understanding the article in its entirety?
Normally a good reporter would add the context I have supplied.
But you have just put your finger on the problem with the Washington Post and the people that read that publication.
These people know they are conflating to completely separate sets of actions.
They know that what Hillary did was blatantly illegal and that people are in jail for a fraction of that right now.
They know that what Trump did was perfectly legal and routine and done by every president in modern history.
The Washington Post operates in bad faith.
At some point these bad faith elements must be removed from our society.
"Hillary Clinton took data off of NIPR and SOSA and other classified networks"
Your acronyms are unhelpful for us generalists that are not in the know.
Routine public news can become classified when combined with 2 or 3 other public facts. The insiders seek to protect "methods and sources" from harm or exposure. The trouble is the methods are often widely known and those sources can be deduced with little effort.
Hillary tried to circumvent records-keeping rules from the start. This was the original sin. Trump was hounded from before the election and her colleagues used dirty tricks against him. He has a case for self defense. She has a case for initiating a "vast left-wing conspiracy" that targeted her political opponents.
Lurker21 said...
How do we know this when so many emails and the server itself were destroyed?
It is not the theft that leads to long prison sentences.
It is the destruction during the investigation. If the files are still on your personal they can determine if you sent them out to another computer or not.
If you did not distribute things go much easier.
But Hillary obviously distributed the information.
That is what lands people in jail.
"What percent of Americans do you think could read that article and understand and remember the distinction and be able to explain it to somebody else?"
I think many Americans "could" read and "could" understand the article and the distinction identified. However, I think most people see the headline and skim the article (if at all). Those on the D-side will draw pre-conceived conclusions. Those on the R-side will draw their own pre-conceived conclusions. This all part of regularly scheduled programming.
Tune in. Turn on. Drop out.
Hillary showed "intent" by setting up her own server. Yet we were told she was careless but had no "intent".
Trump didn't set up his own server, had classification privileges as President that Hillary never had, but most likely was somewhat careless in how he managed documents.
Neither one has been indited.
One is not an angel and the other the great Satan.
Charge them or drop it. Who is "worse" is not relevant.
This wasn't written to be read. This was written so that people arguing on social media could drop it into threads as "evidence" that Trump is singularly bad.
More phony-baloney plastic banana goodtime rock 'n roll from the establishment uniparty and its deep-state allies.
Whatever you do, don't disturb this groove. And by "this groove", I mean "the narrative".
Gahrie said...
Wasn't the reason those documents weren't marked classified because Hillary created a private e-mail server designed to evade the classification process?
Exactly.
When you want to take information off of NIPR for example there is a process. I had to identify the information and go down to the lab and have it burned onto a CD. The CD is marked and the files are marked.
Hillary just downloaded in onto local storage and sent it out over private networks.
Like people who are in jail right now.
That's also an awfully long way to say, "She also mishandled classified material, but the material wasn't clearly marked at the top."
The purpose of the article is not to explain the differences but to obscure those differences. The eyeballs glaze and attention wanders as you try to comprehend what it's all about. I'd like to see a further article that details the security differences between a Mar a Lago closet and Anthony Weiner's laptop.
I'm not going to click on the link, but did Kessler deal with:
- Clinton, or people at her discretion, not only did not turn over the servers but destroyed and wiped them after the subpoena was sent.
- At every step of the way, Clinton downplayed and treated her actions as unserious. She DID NOT provide access but instead filtered access through her legal representation.
- By Comparison, there is (as of this time) no evidence Trump worked to destroy or hide information. He provided access to the FBI and he followed their instructions to retain and further protect records in place.
...
I'd like folks to contemplate that Trump, after the FBI review of documents in June 2022, could have easily moved records off site. Hid them. Or Destroyed them.
Instead he followed their explicit written instructions.
That's a bit of a difference compared to Clinton e-mail's scandal.
"What percent of Americans do you think could read . . ." etc.
Althouse asks very fair questions. The answers may be a little too obvious. They also do not matter. The meta answer is that nothing matters but Dem power.
What percent of Americans do you think have seen what Hillary had and what Trump had?
This article purports to be a comparison of the classified materials Hillary had with those Trump had, but it isn't.
It's a comparison of what the FBI said Hillary had with what they implied Trump had.
The classified system has tight controls, often housed in what is known as a sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF); it is not possible to “cut and paste” from the classified system into the unclassified system.
But you can copy to a hard copy and then scan it into the Hillary server. Besides, most of the evidence was destroyed in that cover up party her staff held.
Hilary’s argument seems to be “ I was busy and my underlings may have violated some rules to get me information in a timely manner. But you don’t pay your secretary of state to parse every single message. You pay her to get diplomacy done.”
Oddly, she never used the argument that as the secstate, she had classification authority delegated from the president, so she could declassify any State Dept documents any time she wanted. Maybe because the documents in question were originally classified by other agencies?
Trump on the other hand seems to rely mostly on the “I’m the classifier/declassifier” argument, and not on the “gimme a break, I’m the big picture guy - do you think I read every single word?” argument.
Maybe he’s saving that one for an actual trial.
JSM
Truthfully, I find news of Hillary boring today (I know - I read both posts and therefore am hypocritical.) My mind at the moment is more interested in news of Queen Elizabeth II and her health issues.
What would Hillary have been if she never married Bill? A question for the ages that no one can definitively answer. But, based on her results, I would say her reputation far exceeded her accomplishments.
Queen Elizabeth II got her job because of whose daughter she was and an uncle who chose to "marry for love". She also married someone who had a wandering eye. But with far less formal education, she had survived 7o years as a leader. Now she has a different leadership role than previous reigning Queens but she still is part of the process. What she has seen since 1952 when she followed her father on the throne.
I am not a follower of royals in general and, in fact, see it as part of my American upbringing to be anti-royal. I just have to give this particular individual, Queen Elizabeth II, credit as a ruler.
Trump is an ex-POTUS. When he was POTUS he regularly took copies of "Classified" documents to margo lago. Just like Bush took them to his ranch. So did Reagan. After he left the Presidency, he declassifed some documents and took them to margo lago. The vast majority were in a locked storage room.
The FBI and the national archives knew he had the documents, and it took 1.5 years to decide they were so "vital" that Trump's residence had to be raided.
Hillary set up a secret private UNSECURED server. She not only conducted State Department business on this unsecured server, these messages contained classified info. How many we don't know, because Hillary wiped the server and destroyed all her emails. Despite being under subpoena. Having the Chicoms/Putin read State Department traffic on a private unsecured server is 100x more damaging then what Trump did.
I know people who have worked at DoD. THey would've been fired and fined/prosecuted for simply downloading data from the classified network to an unsecured floppy disk or their personal computer. All data confidential/classified is supposed to stay on the SECURE network. Any moviing of data to an unsecured computer or network is VERBOTEN.
Comey admitted Hillary broke the law. And that others had been fired and prosecuted for the same crime. But said it was impossible to prove INTENT, so the investigation was stopped.
THe MSM carry water for the Democrat party. WE all know that. They should be called the New York Democrat and the Washington Democrat. Not the Times or the The post.
Kessler and Hillary are just trying to muddy the waters.
IRC, wasn't Peter Stork Snort in charge of the FBI "Investigation" when they found classified data on the Anthony Weiner computer in 2016? If so, we have every reason to believe it was a coverup. Just like the FBI "investigation" of the Hunter Biden computer was also a Coverup.
Hillary sought to evade requirements regarding the preservation and public access of official documents. She didn't want anyone to be able to FOIA her conversations from her time at the State Dept. That alone should have disqualified her in the eyes of any rational voter, let alone the mishandling of classified information.
Althouse is right. Very few will understand what is going on here. And the WaPo readers are looking for propaganda not the truth.
I'm always struck at the dishonesty and Leftwing bias in my "News Feed" that pops up on Google and MSN. Imagine being someone who took that at face value! You'd think Biden was the most popular POTUS of all time, and that Trump was a crazy, criminal, fascist who beloings in jail.
As I've said before, its like living in the USSR. NYT instead of Pravda.
I will bet every penny that I own that multiple intelligence agencies, both friends and foes, hacked Clinton's server and have a copy of everything.
They can use the information in the usual manner, or they could A) blackmail her should she ever become president, or B) release some of her emails before an election should she ever run for president, thus destroying her campaign.
A makes more sense. Who wouldn't want to blackmail a US president?
Either way, everyone has seen everything.
Trump's information (whatever it was) was not online for all the world to hack...
I'll make a simple comparison. Clinton directed that her staff take information found in classified 'high side' systems and rekey it into emails that could easily be sent to her personal email.
Typical Clinton Hubris which put that material into the hans of our enemies. She and her staff, enabled by State and the FBI went to great lngths to excuse and cover up that malfeasance.
Trump took some files that he waved his hands over and declared unclassified, which arguably makes them so. I suspect that the material will turn out to be memoirs material, like stuff related to Russiagate or NORK nuke talks. Sloppy, but when stored in a locked room, under video CCTV in a building guarded by the Secret Service, not exposued greatly to enemies.
In arguing for courts or historians the obstructions of the Deep State and Swamp, Trump must provide evidence and examples. Hypotheticals and fictional instances will not do.
That said, the fictional hypotheticals from the BBC TV's comedy "Yes, Prime Minister"
are instructive.
Bernard Woolley:
What if he demands options?
Sir Humphrey Appleby:
Well, it's obvious, Bernard. The Foreign Office will happily present him with three options, two of which are, on close inspection, exactly the same.
Sir Richard Wharton:
Plus a third which is totally unacceptable.
Sir Humphrey Appleby:
Like bombing Warsaw or invading France.
It has been reported (by anonymous sources) that Trump, when rejecting proposals, would tear up the documents, lengthwise. Archivists would then tape the documents back together. This tale was told to indicate Trump's disregard of history, but it seems to me it shows that he never wanted a mishandled document to allow anyone to "Bomb Warsaw."
But the taped documents were archived and presumably if dealing with highly sensestive matters were classified even if proposals were not implemented. Nobody wants a document leaked that showed the US Military was ready to Bomb Warsaw. On the other hand, Trump might very well want, at some future point, to illustrate that all the options his Defense or State Departments were offering were unacceptable. He would need to preserve a cover letter statement that three and only three options were offered, and he would need to show all three recommendations, and it would be best if all three were ripped lengthwise showing he'd done something else. (Bombed Krakow?)
So does a computer program decide if something is classified or not and then mark the document?
Given how much information the government leaks to the news media, it’s hard to take any of this seriously.
This is why America is going to hell in a handbasket. Hillary had a PRIVATE SERVER. IN HER BATHROOM. Her girlfriend Huma had classified information in e-mails found on her pervert husbands laptop. How did HUMA get that classified information, and why isn't SHE in prison for passing it through to the perverts perverted computer?? The whole thing stinks and it is the Clinton Turd stuck in the toilet. The Washington Post fake checkers have been known to lie before. Why would you start trusting their lies now?? https://nypost.com/2017/12/29/classified-documents-among-newly-released-huma-abedin-emails-found-on-weiners-laptop
"What would Hillary have been if she never married Bill? A question for the ages that no one can definitively answer."
Backwoods Ozark hillbilly (this is one step below trailer-park trash).
Which is what she continues to be today.
(i)Tim said...
The Secretary of State does not have full authority to declassify any and every thing (the sitting President pretty much does), but can still do a lot.
Actually, there are 3 levels at which generally have declassification authority and Clinton only controlled a tiny fraction of classified material.
- Orginator
- agency head of orginator
- POTUS
Clinto could declassify the State memo that said, our Ambassador learned that Sir Andrew is boffing the 2nd Secretary of the Russian Federation. She could not declassify that same info if sourced from the CIA, DIA, or NSA. Even if passed to her in a State memo, it carries the orginators markings.
Material in Clinton emails about Talent Keyhole photos (spy satellites) or NSA intercepts are seriously secret, or more precisely TS/TK or TS/SI
Jonathan Turley
@JonathanTurley
...Hillary’s denial that there was any classified information on her server exposes something far more serious than a false claim. It reflects the sense of license for many in the establishment that they can literally rewrite history with little fear of contradiction by the media
7:10 AM · Sep 8, 2022
Backwoods Ozark hillbilly (this is one step below trailer-park trash).
Which is what she continues to be today.
She'd have ended up in some mid-level Chicago law-firm, mostly because she married someone connected and the firm needed the business contacts. She would live in a nice neighborhood outside the city, get elected to local government, but fail miserably in her attempts at higher office.
Glenn Kessler is to "fact checking" what Rob Zombie is to children's television.
Clinton, or people at her discretion, not only did not turn over the servers but destroyed and wiped them after the subpoena
Let me add MORE context for this act: Comey had already extended immunity to Huma and Cheryl when they took hammers to the Blackberries and server. Usually there is an exchange, immunity for TESTIMONY for example, but Comey just did it as a courtesy and still let them destroy evidence under subpoena without a thought of punishment.
How many Trump associates have destroyed evidence under subpoena and then sold hats bragging about it? How many have been offered immunity for no good reason -- or for any reason at all?
This article raises more questions than it answers. Literally.
Buckwheathikes said...
"What would Hillary have been if she never married Bill? A question for the ages that no one can definitively answer."
Backwoods Ozark hillbilly (this is one step below trailer-park trash).
Nah, Hillary's from Park Ridge. Bill is from the Ozarks. She woulda wound up as a Gruppenfuhrer in the Karenwaffee (suburban PTA/HOA President).
"The problem was the State Department was so screwed up in the way they treated classified information that if you wanted to prosecute Hillary Clinton, you would have had to prosecute 150 State Department people.”
To paraphrase an old joke, I see that as a good starting point.
"The problem was the State Department was so screwed up in the way they treated classified information that if you wanted to prosecute Hillary Clinton, you would have had to prosecute 150 State Department people.”
To paraphrase an old joke, I see that as a good starting point.
Joe says Hillary is a lying dog faced pony soldier. Statement is 66% correct
Just skimming headlines over the years one can feel the difference in treatment. Trump has already been impeached twice and has an open grand-inquisitor-jury eager to indict him; his staff and advisors have been subject to unfair prosecution; his lawyers offices have been raided and no evidence has ever been put forth to show cause for any of these incursions into Trump's civil rights.
Not above the law? Only Anthony Weiner spent time in jail and it wasn't even for the classified documents he stole from his wife. Hillary and her staff got immunity, the very definition of being above the law. We don't need in-depth "reporting" by the Washingthem Post.
The only time I see Kessler's name on something honest is when it's a whiskey bottle: Smooth as silk!
Hillary’s foundation took hundreds of millions of dollars from foreign nationals with business with the state department, records of meetings with whom she destroyed *after* Congress announced that they were going to be examining her records.
It’s been recognized since the early days of the republic that Congress has the constitutional right and responsibility of oversight. Basically our republic has been seized by a cabal of crooked politicians, organized crime, greedy and amoral arms manufacturers, and billionaire rent seekers. Trillions of dollars are at stake in our national elections and doing them on the “honor system” has guaranteed that they would be corrupted.
I’d say the distinction is whether they tried to follow the policy on handling classified information versus didn’t care at all that there is a policy for handling classified information.
I disagree with the notion that if you prosecute Hillary, you had to prosecute others. This happens fairly often in prosecuting large scale criminal organizations. You prosecute the leaders and give plea deals to minor participants in exchange for testimony. In Hillary’s case, they just gave immunity without requiring testimony.
The fact remains is Trump was President. He could declassify anything he wanted. Hillary did not have that ability. Also papers in boxes in a locked room are way more secure than files on a non-secure (by government standards) computer server.
"One prosecutor who worked on the case told the IG: “The problem was the State Department was so screwed up in the way they treated classified information that if you wanted to prosecute Hillary Clinton, you would have had to prosecute 150 State Department people.”
“There was no evidence that the senders or former Secretary Clinton believed or were aware at the time that the emails contained classified information,” the Justice IG report said....
David Kendall, an attorney for Clinton, told the Fact Checker: “The State Department personnel who originated the emails did not think their content merited classification, and not a single one of the over 33,000 emails bore classification markings."
This is such obvious bullshit.
Everyone knew exactly what they were doing. No service member would be let off by saying something so stupid.
This is just showing how corrupt our bureaucracy is.
“All (as in all) communication between a SOS and POTUS is classified by statute and needs no markings. Hillary should know that but she skipped all the briefings on it because she doesn’t give a fuck about rules and she gets away with it. She’s laughing all the way to the bank selling her “But Her Emails” hats. And they say (without evidence) that Trump doesn’t take rules seriously. And there was a Navy corpsman who sent a selfie to his fiancé from a deployed ship and he was severely prosecuted under the same rules Hillary shamelessly broke.”
No. She didn’t skip all of the briefings, just the required yearly ones. Know a guy who briefed her quarterly on terrorism matters, and he couldn’t continue his briefings until she acknowledged the security protocols. Expect, for her, there was a lot of that.
The first problem was that she didn’t have a high side and low side. She just had her illegal personal server. And key aides, like Huma had accounts there too. That was the only way to communicate with her via email. Classified or not - it didn’t matter. Making things worse, her email server had apparently been penetrated - probably at least by the Russians, likely by the Chinese and the Israelis too. Some of them were apparently getting copies of her emails in real time - sometimes, like when she was flying, before she did.
Remember Trump jokingly asking the Russians for her missing 30k emails? That was because they likely had them, and the FBI didn’t. She didn’t have just 30k emails on her server, but 60k. Her attorneys selected 30k of the 60k, printed them out (eliminating the metadata, that would have shown how she got classified data on her email server), gave those to the FBI, and destroyed the rest, despite them being under Congressional subpoena at the time (which the Obama/Lynch DOJ was not about to enforce, in sharp contrast to the FJB/Garland DOJ being so aggressive enforcing the J6 subpoenas). The amazing thing was that there were as many classified emails in the carefully cherry picked 30k emails they gave the DOJ. I expect that there were far more classified emails in the 30k that weren’t turned over (and Trump was asking the Russians for), simply because each classified email indicated a felony committed on her part. So, don’t fall for the BS that she didn’t have very many classified emails on her email server - those were just the ones that slipped through the screening process by her attorneys.
"a typical security violation involves premarked classified information discovered contemporaneously with the incident."
That's a dishonest, self-serving assertion. Kristian Saucier was successfully prosecuted for a case that didn't have that, even though he attempted to invoke the Hillary defense.
Nitpicking aside, Hillary was not the POTUS or former POTUS. Hillary deleted 30+ thousand emails and destroyed hard drives. The FBI determined that there was classified information on her servers despite her subterfuge and their failure to search.
The leftmediaswine will cover her a$$ on this whenever possible by lying if necessary.
"a typical security violation involves premarked classified information discovered contemporaneously with the incident."
That's a rather misleading assertion. Kristian Saucier was successfully prosecuted for a case that didn't have that, even though he attempted to invoke the Hillary defense.
The first problem with finding the Humu/Carlos Danger laptop was that it contained classified emails, and the perv didn’t have a security clearance to see them. But more importantly, they duplicated many of Crooked Hillary’s emails, including many that weren’t turned over to the FBI. Some containing classified information. Moreover, they were in electronic form, so the metadata was intact, and it could have easily been determined exactly how Clinton had been getting any classified documents on her illegal (and thus, by necessity, unclassified) email server. It’s not supposed to be possible. The metadata for email very typically contains all of the routing information, from source to destination. So, of course, their laptop, containing all of this incriminating information on Clinton, was lost by the FBI.
Isn't the POINT of requiring SecState emails to be sent on a secure network, and kept on secure servers, that the sender cannot classify each one, or wait for someone with classification authority to do so?
So isn't it obvious BULLSHIT to let Hillary off the hook by claiming her *emails* were not marked classified, when many of the *attachments* to those emails were in fact classified?
Sheer sophistry at work here.
Ann, the claim he was fact checking was this:
“The fact is that I had zero emails that were classified.”
But then he went and checked a different claim -the distinction of being marked classified
Fact Cheka.
https://twitchy.com/dougp-3137/2022/09/08/classic-clinton-jonathan-turley-calls-bs-on-hillary-and-the-media-for-rewriting-history-about-her-emails/?bcid=d04ce49ce91a8dc439411adb32dd66bd04ecce88556e205ad9c26dab9c03aa60&utm_campaign=nl&utm_medium=email&utm_source=twtydaily
The whole thing is worth reading, but considering Ann's post, I thought this of interest:
'From Turley’s article at the New York Post:
"A 2018 Department of Justice inspector general report revealed “81 email chains containing approximately 193 individual emails” were “classified from the CONFIDENTIAL to TOP SECRET levels at the time.” Clinton is echoing her allies’ recent spin that there were only three documents with classification markings among 33,000 emails. It is utter nonsense." '
y'all forgetting : Hillary was SOS and refused to sign up for Intelligence orientation training
almost = she was not given Miranda
Joe Smith said...
I will bet every penny that I own that multiple intelligence agencies, both friends and foes, hacked Clinton's server and have a copy of everything.
===========
why not concede intentional - we are all one team boys etc.
The thing to keep in mind about marked classified documents is that it takes time to properly classify and mark them. The Secretary of State was often operating (or should have been - e.g. Benghazi) in real time. Certain types of information she was dealing with is presumptively classified, often at a high level. For example, the State Department had to sign off on drone strikes in countries (like Pakistan) that are putative allies. These weren’t situations that could be planned out long in advance, but rather “we just saw OBL (etc) here in Pakistan, can we take the shot?” The request, the coordinates, the target, etc, are all highly classified, but probably couldn't be marked so when seen by the State Department official giving their OK.
'The first problem with finding the Humu/Carlos Danger laptop was that it contained classified emails, and the perv didn’t have a security clearance to see them.'
A bigger problem was the FBI stating that they had gone through them and that, in essence, there was nothing to see.
However:
Comey later told Congress that “thanks to the wizardry of our technology,” the FBI was able to eliminate the vast majority of messages as “duplicates” of emails they’d previously seen. Tireless agents, he claimed, then worked “night after night after night” to scrutinize the remaining material.
But virtually none of his account was true, a growing body of evidence reveals.
In fact, a technical glitch prevented FBI technicians from accurately comparing the new emails with the old emails. Only 3,077 of the 694,000 emails were directly reviewed for classified or incriminating information. Three FBI officials completed that work in a single 12-hour spurt the day before Comey again cleared Clinton of criminal charges.
“Most of the emails were never examined, even though they made up potentially 10 times the evidence” of what was reviewed in the original year-long case that Comey closed in July 2016, said a law enforcement official with direct knowledge of the investigation.
From WP no less.
What percent of Americans do you think could read that article and understand and remember the distinction and be able to explain it to somebody else?
It's not a distinction, it's a distraction. It's the information that's classified, not the document per se, which is also why you get the carefully lawyered 'documents marked classified' locution because without some digging there's no way to know at a glance if the information in the document was unclassified at some point but the document hasn't been updated. IIRC from the Hillary bruhaha there are some instances where documents may carry classification markings for individual paragraphs and sections depending on the specific information contained in each.
As a number of people have pointed out, Hillary's home-brew email server likely removed the classification information from the emails that were being shared but that is neither here nor there if the *information* contained in them was classified.
"Clinton’s private email system was designed to deal with the unclassified communications, similar to the unclassified state.gov email account."
Balderdash. It was designed to hide negotiations between Clinton and the multitude of corporations and foreign governments who were funneling bribes to her through the Clinton Foundation in the assumption that she'd win the 2016 election. Think Joe + Hunter times a thousand and you'll probably be in the ballpark.
Freeman Hunt said...
This wasn't written to be read. This was written so that people arguing on social media could drop it into threads as "evidence" that Trump is singularly bad.
Yah. They're shaping public opinion here. Propagandists gotta propagandize. Frankly I could not care less whatever justifications they're setting up for Hillary is good and Trump must never ever ever hold office again...but the question I have is- if Hillary never committed a crime why was the No Reasonable Prosecutor excuse invented?
The secretary of state peddled e-mails with classified information, with dreams of redistributive change, and hopes and dreams of leverage from Water Closet, without inviting discretionary prosecution by the bureaucratic state.
It was designed to hide negotiations between Clinton and the multitude of corporations and foreign governments who were funneling bribes to her through the Clinton Foundation in the assumption that she'd win the 2016 election.
Exactly ! When Hillary was caught firing the nonpartisan White House travel office staff to insert her Arkansas cronies there, she accused them of a crime. The jury acquitted them after a couple of years of nightmare.
She is a sociopath. Not rare among politicians, as we see.
At one point in 2016 the FBI was questioning Hillary. Why did you act as though security classifications on documents were meaningless? Why in some cases did you ask that any such classification be removed? Were you not aware of these classifications and what they meant? (I think it might have been in a different context that someone said: did you not realize the "C" meant "Classified"?) Were you not briefed on such matters?
To the amazement of many, Hillary said she had been briefed on security classifications of documents, but this briefing was one of the things she completely forgot when she had a bump on the head. See here.
This referred to events back in 2013. See here.
Hillary is required to KNOW what is classified and what is not. That requirement is spelled out in the training which she probably ducked. There are classified guidelines for every project. It's her responsibility to evaluate the material and give it the protection that it requires. She, being an evil woman, couldn't have cared less about protecting our nation's secrets.
“Comey later told Congress that “thanks to the wizardry of our technology,” the FBI was able to eliminate the vast majority of messages as “duplicates” of emails they’d previously seen. Tireless agents, he claimed, then worked “night after night after night” to scrutinize the remaining material.
“But virtually none of his account was true, a growing body of evidence reveals.
“In fact, a technical glitch prevented FBI technicians from accurately comparing the new emails with the old emails. Only 3,077 of the 694,000 emails were directly reviewed for classified or incriminating information. Three FBI officials completed that work in a single 12-hour spurt the day before Comey again cleared Clinton of criminal charges. “
“Most of the emails were never examined, even though they made up potentially 10 times the evidence” of what was reviewed in the original year-long case that Comey closed in July 2016, said a law enforcement official with direct knowledge of the investigation.”
The “technical glitch” was that Clinton’s lawyers, after having sanitized her emails for classified ones that they had selected for the FBI, they printed the emails out, instead of delivering them electronically, thereby removing all of the metadata. I mentioned above that the email header (much of the email metadata) includes each hop the email went through to get there, and eliminating that may have been their goal in delivering printed copies instead of electronic. But something else every normal email header contains is a unique Message ID, consisting of the domain name from which it was sent, along with a unique serial number within that server. Using those, deduplication is trivial. You just match unique message IDs. At the time this came out, it took me under 10 minutes to code it.
The three FBI stalwarts (led by the ubiquitous Peter Strzok) tasked with this originally thought the job much too big to get done over the weekend. But Comey reported back a couple days later that they had accomplished the job, fueled by a lot of pizza and beer. Not quite accurate. Turns out that they had sampled the two email collections, actually looking at approximately 1% of the emails.
It has to do with whether documents are marked "classified."
In other words, it depends on what the meaning of the word "is" is.
Give Hillary props - she learned how to lie from a master of the craft.
You can compare Reality Winner, who did not, with Hillary Clinton, who certainly has.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Winner
Except that we have an email from Hillary Clinton to her staff (Jake Sullivan? or Huma Abadan?), being questioned about how to get her a classified document, telling her staff explicitly to REMOVE the classified headers and then send her the email.
So, she's full of it.
Ann Althouse said...
"What percent of Americans do you think could read that article and understand and remember the distinction and be able to explain it to somebody else?"
Would Comey have us believe that neither his staff nor Ms. Clinton had no capacity to understand the meaning of (C)? Even if the average reader of news might not grasp the import, I find it hard to believe that people who deal in State secrets would not recognize it.
What about the tens of thousands of emails she had wiped...
This wasn't written to be read. This was written so that people arguing on social media could drop it into threads as "evidence" that Trump is singularly bad.
So sooner or later we can expect to see Kessler's "fact check" dropped in a thread here as evidence that Clinton didn't do anything wrong ...
Bruce Hayden said...
The thing to keep in mind about marked classified documents is that it takes time to properly classify and mark them. The Secretary of State was often operating (or should have been - e.g. Benghazi) in real time. Certain types of information she was dealing with is presumptively classified, often at a high level. For example, the State Department had to sign off on drone strikes in countries (like Pakistan) that are putative allies. These weren’t situations that could be planned out long in advance, but rather “we just saw OBL (etc) here in Pakistan, can we take the shot?” The request, the coordinates, the target, etc, are all highly classified, but probably couldn't be marked so when seen by the State Department official giving their OK.
*************************
Exactly. That's why all SecState email messages are required to be sent over a secure network and kept on secure servers.
NO SecSTATE emails are presumptively non-classified at sending. Hillary doesn't have the authority to de-classify ANYTHING.
To anyone who has handled classified or crypto, (I held TS/SCI accesses with poly for 20+ years) Hillary Clinton's obfuscations are enraging. Had I stripped portion markings off of a classified document and then transmitted it on a system outside the SCIF, I would still be in jail. If I generated classified working papers, I was required to take them to security and get them a control number and tracking.
Occam's razor when applied to this case is pretty obvious. She created a parallel mail system to avoid legal reporting requirements for Federal employees and contractors. In doing so she exposed classified documents and the inner workings of an agency to potential espionage activity. Even non-classified documents, when added up can allow spies to deduce things. We also don't know what DIDN'T get seen as she scrubbed the server (like with a towel)
What Hillary did was orders of magnitude larger than anything Trump did, and that's before you get to the fact that Trump has the statutory authority to de-classify anything, even without the consent of the originating agency. Hillary did not.
To anyone who has handled classified or crypto, (I held TS/SCI accesses with poly for 20+ years) Hillary Clinton's obfuscations are enraging. Had I stripped portion markings off of a classified document and then transmitted it on a system outside the SCIF, I would still be in jail. If I generated classified working papers, I was required to take them to security and get them a control number and tracking.
Occam's razor when applied to this case is pretty obvious. She created a parallel mail system to avoid legal reporting requirements for Federal employees and contractors. In doing so she exposed classified documents and the inner workings of an agency to potential espionage activity. Even non-classified documents, when added up can allow spies to deduce things. We also don't know what DIDN'T get seen as she scrubbed the server (like with a towel)
What Hillary did was orders of magnitude larger than anything Trump did, and that's before you get to the fact that Trump has the statutory authority to de-classify anything, even without the consent of the originating agency. Hillary did not.
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