Reuters:
For months, the US State Department has stood behind its former boss Hillary Clinton as she has repeatedly said she did not send or receive classified information on her unsecured, private email account, a practice the government forbids.
While the department is now stamping a few dozen of the publicly released emails as “Classified,” it stresses this is not evidence of rule-breaking. Those stamps are new, it says, and do not mean the information was classified when Clinton, the Democratic front-runner in the 2016 presidential election, first sent or received it.
But the details included in those “Classified” stamps — which include a string of dates, letters, and numbers describing the nature of the classification — appear to undermine this account, a Reuters examination of the emails and the relevant regulations has found.
The new stamps indicate that some of Clinton’s emails from her time as the nation’s most senior diplomat are filled with a type of information the US government and the department’s own regulations automatically deems classified from the get-go — regardless of whether it is already marked that way or not.
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 US government defines this as any information, written or spoken, provided in confidence to US 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 US regulations examined by Reuters.
Hillary maintained a secret, personal server for one reason and one reason only: to be able to destroy any negative information she deemed necessary. In the process of covering up (or attempting to) her corruption, she laid out not only US classified information but also that of our friends. How long will it be after the destructive one-two punch of Obama and Hillary that foreign governments can again trust and rely on the United States of America?
The federal government spends not thousands of dollars per year, but tens of millions of dollars a year to protect the government servers, yet both the IRS and the Pentagon were hacked into.
What are the chances that Hillary’s server was hacked? 110% sound reasonable?
Hillary claimed the servers had Secret Service protection? How does that work? Hacking is electronic, not physical. Once the firewall of her server was breached, the hackers had access to any number of other government sites.
@retire05:
That’s just a bone thrown to her stupid (and willfully ignorant) supporters to chew on so there’s some (im)plausible deniability that she knowingly used an unsecured server with which to traffic the nation’s vital information. Nothing more.
Only the dimmest of bulbs will accept that as validation. But, accept it they will.
See Greg. Those of us not defending a criminal with silly arguments have been describing these volitions of the law.
It’s “born classified” no matter what the words are, simply because the words come from the mouth of a foreign official? You’re going to swallow that premise hook, line and sinker?
You’ve got to be kidding.
There are two types of servers used for unclassified and classified. They are called NIPR (Nonsecure Internet Protocol (IP) Router Network) and SIPR. NO classified information whatsoever from confidential and above is allowed to be transmitted over a NIPR net. ALL classified must go through the SIPR although you can also transmit unclass this way. Transmitting classified information through an unsecure method is ‘forbidden’ and is punishable if you are caught (which is usually happens, and fast).
The idea that this information was marked classified after being found on her server is pure bunk.
Will hillary serve time? probably not because bill and obama are already putting together an agreement. A possible scenario is that hillary bows out the race for the man who appears to be more of a pedophile than presidential (his creepy actions about touching young girls and women) and obama pardons her.
@Enchanted, #6:
No, it IS NOT pure bunk. Documents that had not previously been intended for public viewing are now being reviewed and sometimes classified before being released under a Freedom of Information Act suit.
Information can be sensitive without having originally required a formal classified status. You don’t necessarily want the entire world reading all of a former Secretary of State’s emails, even if they didn’t have Top Secret document attachments.
Surely you can understand this.
@Enchanted: I don’t know what it’s like now, but when I was in everyone who handled classified material knew that classified material was sent on SIPR (RedNet). The penalties for sending out classified material on NIPR (GreenNet) were made quite clear as were the guidelines for what would constitute classified material versus unclassified material. But then again, prior to 2009 we were still a nation where rule of law mattered.
@Greg:
what is your experience with classified material? Unless you have worked in the government you don’t have a clue how it works. I do.
I’m not going to get into another pissing match involving past experiences handling classified documents, or presume to make authoritative pronouncements on the basis thereof. I don’t know your background and you don’t know mine.
Nor do you, myself, or anyone else expounding on the topic ad nauseam actually know any of the specific details concerning Hillary Clinton’s private server, the security protocols it operated under, the methodology used to assure confidentiality and to wipe her hard drive, what was on it to begin with, what might be on it now, or how information that actually was properly classified was routinely handled.
That, of course, doesn’t prevent people from pretending to know something. The media is filled to capacity with seemingly erudite articles by those who know virtually nothing. The motivation is either political attack, political counter-attack, or simply cranking out speculative material for people to read because it’s a hot topic that boosts audience ratings and earns somebody attention or a paycheck.
Someone should make a list of relevant facts that are known with certainty. I’m not sure they could make it up to a #6.