After all the denials and evasive lies about Hillary Clinton's private server that she received and sent over 52,000 emails, including a significant number the intelligence agencies are claiming had secret information, the War Witch and her team now are using the defense that everybody did it.
The Washington Post now has evidence that Hillarious herself wrote 104 emails that she sent using her private server while secretary of state that the government has since said contain classified information. Placing information considered sensitive into insecure email during her State Department tenure. Clinton’s authorship of dozens of emails now considered classified could complicate her efforts to argue that she never put government secrets at risk. No longer the poor suffering spouse, she got her hands dirty too. Sometimes Hillarious initiated the conversations.
The initial recipients of the classified emails, which were included in back-and-forth exchanges between lower-level diplomats and other officials and arrived in her inbox only after they were forwarded to her by a close aide. For federal employees other than Clinton, nearly all of the sensitive email was sent using their less secure, day-to-day government accounts. Classified information is supposed to be exchanged only over a separate, more secure network.
The Post analysis is based on an examination of the 2,093 chains of Clinton’s email correspondence that the State Department decided contained classified information.
The analysis did not account for 22 emails that the State Department has withheld entirely from public release because they are “top secret,” the highest level of classification.
EVERYBODY DOES IT...commits Crimes?
Hillarious has received criticism from Republican lawmakers and officials in the intelligence community, who have argued that Clinton’s use of a private server exposed some of the government’s most closely guarded secrets to hacking or other potential breaches. Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon said the large number of people who sent and received emails that were declared classified was a sign of “overclassification run amok, and indicates that our system for determining what ought to be classified is broken.”
Clinton has struggled to fend off the email controversy since it was revealed last year that she used the private server. Republican presidential candidates have vowed to make an issue out of her handling of classified information, with front-runner Donald Trump saying last week: “What she did is a criminal act. If she’s allowed to run, I would be very, very surprised.”
A key question facing Clinton is whether any of the emails she authored – or any of the correspondence stored on her private server – contained information that was classified at the time it was sent.
When her use of a private system was first revealed, she told reporters, “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email.” At other points, she has said that none of the emails was “marked classified” at the time she sent or received them – a point she reiterated Friday in a CNBC interview.
But government rules require senders of classified information to properly mark it. And the inspector general for the intelligence community has said that some of Clinton’s correspondence contained classified material when it was sent – even if it was not labeled.
Where are the Diplomatic Security Flying Monkeys when you need them? This is a job for Homer Simpson special agent Bauer.
The State Department has side-stepped the question, which sets a bad precedent for the DS Flying Monkeys who have to investigate these cases in the future. And how about all those cases in the past? It only matters when lower-level employees do it?
Spokesman John Kirby said only that the department’s reviewers “focused on whether information needs to be classified today – prior to documents being publicly released.” State officials have not offered an assessment of whether the information was classified when it was sent.
DS will likely go after someone lower like Sullivan, who now advises Clinton’s presidential campaign. and was the most frequent author of classified emails. He wrote 215, the Post analysis found. Other close aides to Clinton, including Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills and Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin, also authored dozens of such notes. Top officials outside of State wrote some, too, including Clinton’s eventual successor at State, John F. Kerry, who was then a senator. Ooops.
DS has its work cut out for it: the bulk of the emails that State Department reviewers deemed classified were sent by career officials engaged in the day-to-day business of diplomacy.
“If experienced diplomats and foreign service officers are doing it, the issue is more how the State Department deals with information in the modern world more than something specific about what Hillary Clinton did,” said Philip H. Gordon, who was assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs and was the author of 45 of the sensitive emails from his non-classified government account.
Seriously, just kidding
Kirby said the State Department “takes the protection of sensitive information seriously and our staff are aware of the appropriate channels for transmitting classified information.”
Just imagine if the Donald becomes presidense, how this will play out in the State Department. The Donald knows where he speaks: everybody does it .. like cheating on their spouse. Enough is enough presidence: one presidence kept his lip-server in the Oval Office. But to keep a private "server" in their basement and then wipe it clean?
Not everybody does it, just entitled creeps who thought they were above the rules.