I'm sure you all saw the story that State won't be releasing some of Clinton's emails, even redacted, because no amount of redaction would make it safe to release the information. That's a big, bad-sounding story, but it's not the worst story for her today.
The worst story for her today is that the State Department itself declared 22 of her email threads to be Top Secret.
The reason it's much worse is that the determination that her emails couldn't be released redacted came from the intelligence community, and the IC has already given a sworn statement to its Inspector General that her emails contained Top Secret and Special Access Program information. Until today, though, State has held that there was no genuinely Top Secret information included. State's position has been that the IC was overclassifying the information it found in her emails, and that the worst she was guilty of exposing was Secret information.
The Clinton camp could thus claim that this was all a bureaucratic, interagency dispute. One determination is just as valid as another! The IC must be pursuing a vendetta against her, some vast-right-wing-conspiracy type of thing.
John Kerry is Secretary of State. There is no right wing conspiracy vast enough to include him. If his office is saying she passed Top Secret information in the clear, then she can't attribute the charge to partisanship.
Furthermore, this eliminates the dispute between the IC and State on whether or not she insisted on a system in which Top Secret information was passed on an unsecure server. The Federal government now has a unified position: she did.
Now the only question that matters is what they are going to do about it.
Obama has already announced, through his Press Secretary Josh Earnest, that there won't be any indictment. 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.
ReplyDeleteEric Hines
He's wrong: what they said was that she wasn't a subject.
ReplyDeleteMeh. What does he know about the law?
ReplyDeleteHe doesn't have to know anything about law. He does know he owns DoJ. And, Obama's statement today postdates McCarthy's source by several days.
ReplyDeleteRepublicans will just have to win the White House. The statute of limitations won't have expired.
Eric Hines
WRT Kerry, there is plenty of partisanship that has nothing to do with the two branches of the political party.
ReplyDeleteSo Iran's Huma gets to read the intel, but citizens and semi patriots aren't disallowed... that's a nice way to setup the system.
ReplyDeleteALmost worry of John Fing Kerry and Jane Fonda.
I seriously doubt anything will come of it, and normally I'd say scarcely any voters will ever hear of it--and yet her plunging poll numbers are interesting.
ReplyDeleteUntil today, though, State has held that there was no genuinely Top Secret information included. State's position has been that the IC was overclassifying the information it found in her emails, and that the worst she was guilty of exposing was Secret information.
ReplyDelete/epic eyeroll
Yes, because releasing information that has the potential to "greatly harm national security" (the definition of "Secret") isn't a crime. Somehow. Actually, the real claim is that there was nothing sent or received "with classified markings", and every time one of her spokesjackals said that over the weekend, I had to refrain from yelling "that's just admission of an additional crime, you moron!" at the TV. No data, email, or document is classified because of the words at the top and bottom of the page. The only people who could ever believe that a document lacking those markings is unclassified are people who have never worked with classified materials and who never stopped for a moment to rub two brain cells together to figure that out. Because it is the information that makes something classified, not a stamp.