Hillary Clinton Personally Wrote 104 Classified Emails From Her Private Server

Email Scandal May Enmesh Others

It is very possible that someone will end up going to jail over the imbroglio, because there is clear wrong doing, and the public, the FBI, and many government workers are well aware of the laws that control them and that would demand some kind of penalty. Another excuse being launched is to say that “everyone does it,” so the violations are understandable, though one would expect the Secretary of State to be held to the very highest of standards, not the least.

Hillary Clinton wrote 104 emails that she sent using her private server while secretary of state that the government has since said contain classified information, according to a new Washington Post analysis of Clinton’s publicly released correspondence.

The finding is the first accounting of the Democratic presidential front-runner’s personal role in placing information now 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.

In roughly three-quarters of those cases, officials have determined that material Clinton herself wrote in the body of email messages is classified. Clinton sometimes initiated the conversations but more often replied to aides or other officials with brief reactions to ongoing discussions.

The analysis also showed that the practice of using non-secure email systems to send sensitive information was widespread at the department and elsewhere in government.

The analysis raises difficult questions about how the government treats sensitive information. It suggests that either material is being overclassified, as Clinton and her allies have charged, or that classified material is being handled improperly with regularity by government officials at all levels — or some combination of the two.

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.

The handling of those emails has drawn particular 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.”

Regarding Clinton’s role in writing 104 of the emails, Fallon said the classification determinations “were after-the-fact . . . for the purposes of preparing these emails for release publicly.”

“It does not mean the material was classified when it was sent or received,” he said.

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.

A former official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, expressed disagreement with the State Department’s decision to classify the emails. Still, the official said diplomats at the time believed they were sending the material through a “closed system” in which the emails would be reviewed only by other State Department officials. They are becoming public now, the official noted, only because of Clinton’s email habits and her presidential run.

“I resent the fact that we’re in this situation — and we’re in this situation because of Hillary Clinton’s decision to use a private server,” the official said.

At the end of it all, the decision lies in the hands of the FBI and whether they are willing to indict Clinton and anger the entire Democrat party and thus jeopardize their relationship and funding, and with President Obama’s Justice Department agreeing to try Clinton, which seems very, very unlikely.

What is not being spoken about is why Clinton needed a private server in the first place. It seems that she preferred keeping her correspondence out of official access, which would suggest other motives besides simple convenience. There are those who cite, among other things, the possibility of Clinton Foundation funding from questionable sources, but such emails have not been found at this point.

It is also difficult to know how damaging and sensitive the emails are, since many are heavily redacted. Some are what is known as Special Access Program (SAP) documents, established by Executive Order 13526 — called “Classified National Security Information” and signed Dec. 29, 2009 — which are super secret documents with very limited access. Certainly Clinton would have recognized these documents as super classified, but the obfuscation continues, and the story is becoming less interesting to the public as the weeks role by.

At the end of the day, we know this. Hillary Clinton is lying, and everyone knows she is lying. But because Democrats are determined to pay her back for a whole host of things, from covering for husband Bill, to stonewalling on Benghazi, to quietly rolling over when Obama became president, for all these reasons, Hillary will likely not be charged or convicted, especially with a RINO laden Congress, and could very well end up being president of the United States, a prospect that should trouble the most partisan of Democrats.

But it appears that power and position are the only elements valued in the equation, and so the Clinton machine rolls on, untroubled by the standards and rules that we mere mortals are held to every day.

Source: washingtonpost.com