And now for something you probably won't hear about much
in the MSM.
"There is no question that Secretary Clinton had authority to delete personal emails without agency supervision - she appropriately could have done so even if she were working on a government server," Department of Justice lawyers told a judge.
U.S. Justice Department lawyers told a federal court Wednesday that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's use of a private email account was not against the law, nor was it illegal for her to unilaterally determine which messages were considered work-related and necessary to return to the State Department for record keeping.
Of course that's not the narrative we've been fed for months, one that the
GOP has been gloating over...
Former Vice President Dick Cheney described former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s handling of her private email through a private server as “sloppy and unprofessional.”
“Maybe she was ignorant, but I find that hard to believe. She’s an intelligent woman. She spent a lot of time in the White House,” Mr. Cheneytold CNN. “I think she should have known better.”
Y'know what I find interesting about Cheney statements? The fact that apparently Colin Powell was just "sloppy and unprofessional"
as Hillary Clinton.
Like Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State Colin Powell also used a personal email account during his tenure at the State Department, an aide confirmed in a statement.
“He was not aware of any restrictions nor does he recall being made aware of any over the four years he served at State,” the statement says. “He sent emails to his staff generally via their State Department email addresses. These emails should be on the State Department computers. He might have occasionally used personal email addresses, as he did when emailing to family and friends.”
The statement continues: “He did not take any hard copies of emails with him when he left office and has no record of the emails. They were all unclassified and mostly of a housekeeping nature. He came into office encouraging the use of emails as a way of getting the staff to embrace the new 21st information world.”
So both Hillary Clinton and Colin Powell used personal email accounts, deleted those emails without it violating any laws and neither received or sent anything that was
marked classified at the time. (corrected link)
Emails released Friday by the State Department appear to confirm Hillary Clinton's assertion that she received no classified information on her personal email account while she served as secretary of state. Still, some of the emails were classified at the FBI's request after the fact — something the White House says is not uncommon.
Sorry GOP but the FBI deciding years later that in their opinion some information should have been classified that the State Department didn't agree with at the time does not lead to some massive wrong-doing on the part of Secretary Clinton.
This story is a great big nothing. Zero. Zip. Zilch.
So I expect we'll be hearing about it for several more months. Far longer than the media droned on about members of the Bush Administration using RNC servers for their email and then "losing" millions of them.
Even for a Republican White House that was badly stumbling through George W. Bush's sixth year in office, the revelation on April 12, 2007 was shocking. Responding to congressional demands for emails in connection with its investigation into the partisan firing of eight U.S. attorneys, the White House announced that as many as five million emails, covering a two-year span, had been lost.
The emails had been run through private accounts controlled by the Republican National Committee and were only supposed to be used for dealing with non-administration political campaign work to avoid violating ethics laws. Yet congressional investigators already had evidence private emails had been used for government business, including to discuss the firing of one of the U.S. attorneys. The RNC accounts were used by 22 White House staffers, including then-Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, who reportedly used his RNC email for 95 percent of his communications.
Yeah, "Sloppy and Unprofessional".
3:26 PM PT: Adding this to address a bad link I had on the NPR article from May which documented that (some) of Clinton's emails during the period around Benghazi didn't have anything classified in them.
There are of course more emails than just those and Secretary Clinton gave both a printed copy and thumb drive PDF of 55,000 of her work related emails to the State Department last December.
What I have to say about FBI & CIA comments is this:
The secondary classification issue is really a security turf fight between State and the other agencies IMO, and I'm very familiar with classification procedures as I've noted elsewhere in the thread. [I held a Top Secret/SAR Clearance for 13 years, and worked with classified materials daily] The one NPR article backs up Clinton based on a sampling of her emails which were around the time of Benghazi. There was nothing classified in them, and there's nothing to contradict that.
CIA and FBI have identified two(?), four(?) emails that had some information they think should have been classified - but the important thing is what did the State Department think about it at the time? Things don't become "classified" until someone gives it that designation, before that it's just information. If the State Department sent Secretary Clinton some information that was not at that time designated by State [or at the time anyone else] as classified, there's no violation there.
If something is specifically
designated as classified and then someone shares that info with someone who
doesn't have proper clearance - then you have a clear violation of law, not the other way around where the "classification" happens later.
This isn't Dr. Who... CIA saying this or that should have been classified now doesn't mean they get to jump in a TARDIS and change Clinton's emails before they were sent or received. It doesn't work like that.
6:37 PM PT: Ok, I have to address something else about classified data protocols.
People are claiming that someone, or Hillary Clinton herself, took a classified document and copy and pasted some of it into an email.
That's Re-Dick-U-Louise!
The reason why is because truly classified documents can not be placed on an unclassified "White World" system that has direct access to yahoo.com and gmail. Those documents are kept in the Black World, on completely isolated private encrypted intranet systems running across their own separate T1/T3 (or 3G/5G if they've been upgraded) backbone. I used to set up servers on one of these backbones and it's not conceivable that you could establish one of these systems on that network and then fire up ESPN.com to watch a game.
That ain't possible.
A truly secure system would have to conform to C2 Security guidelines from the DOD.
It must be possible to control access to a resource by granting or denying access to individual users or named groups of users.
Memory must be protected so that its contents cannot be read after a process frees it. Similarly, a secure file system, such as NTFS, must protect deleted files from being read.
Users must identify themselves in a unique manner, such as by password, when they log on. All auditable actions must identify the user performing the action.
System administrators must be able to audit security-related events. However, access to the security-related events audit data must be limited to authorized administrators.
The system must be protected from external interference or tampering, such as modification of the running system or of system files stored on disk.
In my day, C2 systems had to have their floppy & disk drives removed. The only way to get data off such a system would be to use a thumb drive which is apparently
what Chelsey Manning did when she choose to share classified data with Wikileaks.
An innocuous-looking memory stick, no longer than a couple of fingernails, came into the hands of a Guardian reporter earlier this year. The device is so small it will hang easily on a keyring. But its contents will send shockwaves through the world's chancelleries and deliver what one official described as "an epic blow" to US diplomacy.
The 1.6 gigabytes of text files on the memory stick ran to millions of words: the contents of more than 250,000 leaked state department cables, sent from, or to, US embassies around the world.
As we know from the Manning story the State Dept. has a secure cable system for classified communications - they've had that system since long before the internet and their still using it because - shocker of shockers - the
internet is not secure.
So if people are really thinking someone at State sent classified data to Secretary Clinton, or the reverse, with a simple "copy/paste" they would have had to already illegally copy that file from the secure system to their White World internet accessible machine, which is already a crime long before anyone hit "Send".
Having said that there are times when there are things going on in the public that mirror information the government would prefer to keep private. For example one of the projects I worked on when I had a clearance was the B2 Bomber. That project was still Classified long after it was public knowledge that such a plane existed, in fact, it's budget issues and funding were being debated in congress - but the Air Force hadn't official admitted it existed yet, or what's it's full capabilities were.
So Officials talking about the B2, even in their own personal emails, or on the phone, would have been talking about something technically "classified" even though it was largely common knowledge and Aviation Week (which we used to call "Aviation Leak") was running reports and artist concept drawings of it - most of which were wrong to our amusement - for years.
I haven't yet seen exactly what this retroactively classified information is in specific [there has been some reports that it regarded details of Ambassador Stevens death in Benghazi] and we probably won't know exactly because if we did it wouldn't be classified, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was something along these lines.