Clinton.com Struggles with Classification Scandal

Not going away anytime soon.

Mystery deepens into how classified emails got onto Clinton's unclassified server

"It is hard to move classified documents into the non-classified system. You couldn't move a document by mistake," said Willes Lee, a former operations officer for the U.S. Army in Europe and former operations officer for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

State Department spokesman Alec Gerlach confirmed the two systems don't connect. "The classified and unclassified system are separate and you cannot email between the two," Gerlach told Fox News.

The Clinton campaign adamantly denies any emails traversing Clinton's homebrew server were marked classified at the time. The intelligence community inspector general says "potentially hundreds" of classified emails may be in the mix, but acknowledges at least some were not properly marked.

So if the Clinton denial is to be believed, individuals in her inner circle would have simply typed or scanned classified information into a non-classified system without regard for its contents. In this case, emails would have started in, and stayed in, the unclassified system -- albeit improperly, based on the findings of the intelligence inspector general.

But if it turns out emails literally jumped from the classified to the non-classified system -- something the State Department claims cannot happen -- it would seem to point to Clinton's staff going to great lengths to create a work-around to do so.

A government employee doing so would commit numerous felonies, according to Bradford Higgins, who served as assistant secretary of state for resource management and chief financial officer from 2006-2009. "A violation, in addition to criminal charges and potential prosecution, would likely mean that person who committed the breach would never again be given a security clearance," Higgins said.
. . .
"Emails don't change from unclassified to classified. The originator of the email decides the classification before it is sent out based on basic protocols, not subsequent readers," Higgins said. "I believe it would be highly unusual for an unclassified email to later become classified."

Regardless of how it happened, Lee faulted Clinton and her staff.

"It is not as if Hillary Clinton and her staff do not know the rules and the law," he said.

Sure they know the rules and laws; just enough to break them with as much plausible deniability as possible.

Petraeus prosecutor: Clinton committed no crime

Both the law and his oath required Petraeus to mark these books as “top secret” and to store them in a Secured Compartmented Information Facility. He did neither.

Rather, Petraeus allowed his biographer to take possession of the journals in order to use them as source material for his biography.

Importantly, Petraeus was well aware of the classified contents in his journals, saying to his biographer, Paula Broadwell on tape, “I mean, they are highly classified, some of them. They don’t have it on it, but I mean there’s code word stuff in there.”
. . .
In sharp contrast, Clinton is not being investigated for knowingly sending or receiving classified materials improperly.

Indeed, the State Department has confirmed that none of the information that has surfaced on Clinton’s server thus far was classified at the time it was sent or received.

Glossed over, of course, is that numerous other agencies, including DOD and the CIA are disagreeing with that assessment, and they should know, since it was their intelligence she was mishandling, and it was their right and duty to classify it before it was sent to the State Dept.

Additionally, the Justice Department indicated that its inquiry is not a criminal one and that Clinton is not the subject of the inquiry.

Anne M. Tompkins is . . . a donor to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

In the eternal words of Gomer Pyle, "Suprise, Suprise."

Hillary Is In the Zone of Maximum Danger

Let's check in with the big 2016 news from last week: Jim Gilmore? He gone. From the CNN debate, that is. I expect he'll be formally gone from the race soon and whoever manages to scoop up his support will be in the driver's seat to Cleveland.

I kid, obviously. I'm dead serious, however, when I say that the next few weeks will likely determine the outcome of the Democratic nomination. Because Hillary Clinton is now in the zone of maximum danger.

It's never good when a candidate is being linked to an ongoing FBI investigation, as Clinton is with her private State Department email system. And you can see this in Clinton's poll numbers with Democratic primary voters: She's gone from 63 percent in late July to 49 percent today. She's not just sub-50 percent right now, but at her lowest ebb since a year ago and with a surging Bernie Sanders, who's at 25 percent and climbing. (Remember Barnes' First Law of Politics: All races tighten.) . . .

Who is scariest, President Biden, Warren or Sanders?

What can Clinton do to regain the trust of voters, generate genuine enthusiasm among grass-roots activists and reassure nervous Democrats that she will be a strong nominee atop the party’s ticket in November next year? - An assassination campaign?