- Executive Order 13526 and 18 U.S.C Sec. 793(f) of the federal code make it unlawful to send of store classified information on personal email.
- Section 1236.22 of the 2009 National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) requirements states that:
“Agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that Federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency record keeping system.”
- MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell believes that the use of a personal emails server appears to be a preemptive move, specifically designed to circumvent FOIA:
Nothing that links to the daily caller is a serious news source.
Plus the article is a pile of stupid innuendo that conflates what Hillary did with Petraeus providing contemporaneously classified documents to his journalist fuckbuddy.
Further, clearly nobody in government had a contemporaneous problem with it since they saw the email address every time they communicated with Hillary Clinton. Whenever they sent her an email, they saw
Hillary Clinton <hdr22@clintonemail.com>
show up in the email composition window, which certainly cannot be mistaken for a state department email...
In the just released state department report, there are several instances where staff complained about Clinton's use of a private server, and they were told that she had permission to do it and never to mention it again. In fact, no permission was ever sought or given.
IT staff reported issues with clintonemail going to SPAM folders and insisted Clinton use her .gov account, and she refused. IT staff further complained of security issues with her email server and were ignored.
It is simply not the case that no one had a problem with it. Many people did, and they were told to pound sand.
I worked in Federal Government for 7 years. She knew about Records Management, had a records custodian that worked for her, and clearly used clintonemail.com in an official capacity, circumventing State Department and other Federal regulations regarding official records.
Here is the official IG report:
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2842429/ESP-16-03...
Sure, news sources can be biased and we should be discerning when we look at them, but that doesn't automatically mean that the source is automatically wrong 100% of the time.
The LA Times is a news source while the Daily Caller is an avowed conservative publication founded by Tucker Carlson and one of Dick Cheney's advisors.
It's quite possible the law discussed in that article was broken. The author lists the three cases of relevance: (1) whether Clinton knew she was putting classified information into an unclassified system, (2) did she willfully communicate classified information to anyone not authorized to receive it, and (3) did she remove classified information with the intent to retain such documents or materials at an unauthorized location. None of those are settled yet. The headline that "Hillary Clinton didn't break the law" is an opinion, not settled. The author is only citing what Clinton's aides and one government lawyer have said -- those are far from unbiased or conclusive. And after the state department IG's report from yesterday, it is pretty clear the violation was intentional.
The IG's report is basically just ass-covering by the Department of State, iterating her violations of protocol so that it doesn't look like they were completely incapable of recognizing things that the FBI is about to bring to light.
The criminal intent part is the FBI's job, and will likely apply, at the very least, to things like Clinton's attempt to delete thousands of messages before handing over the server (messages the FBI was able to obtain anyway due to offsite backups, going by the extrapolations observed and detailed on http://www.thompsontimeline.com/).
Even if she's not found guilty of violating any major law, this kind of obstruction of justice alone is in a class of behavior we impeached her husband over. I imagine the FBI doesn't take kindly to the people they're investigating putting the bureau through hassles like this.
>And the article lists various reasons why none of those would likely apply to her.
I guess we have different definitions of "likely" since the only reasons given are:
(1) Clinton and her aides have insisted that she didn't. They say none of her emails included material that was marked as classified at the time.
(2) She says she didn't, and there's no known evidence that she did.
(3) "If all she was doing was exchanging emails with her staff, I don't think they can prove that she had the intent to retain anything," a former top government lawyer told me.
Like I said, those are hardly unbiased or definitive assessments. Clinton and her aides have every reason to say that there was no wrongdoing. The government lawyer quoted even says "If" acknowledging that it is an assumption. As for the IG report, if it had said the violation was minor and mostly because of regulations implemented only after she left office, which had been claimed before, then it would be looking really good for her. As it stands, there is still an FBI investigation looming.
Does "not marked as classified at the time" mean what I think it does?
Obviously she did not change her automatic email footer to "Top Secret - Do not distribute - Thanks, H ;-)"
So of course none of her emails were marked - that's like saying "I am commiting a crime right here" since of course the server was insecure.
Is the content classified at the time, or even derived from a classified source? My understanding is there are perhaps thousands of emails to which this might apply, and the law needs only one. So it seems to me hopeless for Hillary to think the FBI would not recommend charges.
The bigger question is will the (current) AG decline to prosecute, and what about the next one?
"marked as classified" isn't what matters. It's misdirection.
The standard is that she had reason to believe that the email contained classified information.
Consider something obvious, like full details of an ICBM including plans for the nuclear warhead and decoys. You get a copy without markings. I hope you wouldn't imagine it to be unclassified just because it isn't "marked as classified at the time".
Some of her email contained information that she got from other government agencies; she knew it was classified and had no authority to declassify it. Some of her email actually was marked classified; we can assume she believed it to be classified. There is even a lovely case where she tells a subordinate to REMOVE THE MARKINGS and then send insecurely.
For issues with classified information, intent doesn't normally matter. This isn't libel. The rules are different. It's more like strict liability.
I don't know why you think proof has not been found. Is it because prosecution hasn't started? You can bet that many FBI and DOJ employees are struggling with the realization that prosecuting her would likely get them fired. The stress must be enormous.
My point is, ICBM hyperbole aside, it's going to be very easy for Clinton to claim that she did not know something was classified if indeed it was not officially classified at the time, and only reclassified later. A suspicion that she might be guilty is not going to cut in the courts.
> Some of her email contained information that she got from other government agencies; she knew it was classified and had no authority to declassify it. Some of her email actually was marked classified; we can assume she believed it to be classified. There is even a lovely case where she tells a subordinate to REMOVE THE MARKINGS and then send insecurely.
You'll need citations for these claims. Nothing I've read indicates any of that is true. The last example proves nothing because 1) the subordinate sent the material by secure fax in the end after all, and 2) there is no indication it was classified (http://www.cbsnews.com/news/state-department-releases-more-c...).
You'll need a citation for that. If you're talking about this exchange: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/state-department-releases-more-c..., it was sent securely in the end, not over email. Also no part of that exchange indicates the material was classified.
It depends your perspective and who you ask. The State Department was directed to draft regulations, as is common, as the result of law. The State Department says that Clinton broke those regulations. By extension, it could be argued that she broke the law.
Department of State employees are supposed to treat any material that even could be classified as extremely sensitive, and not to leave the building. On top of the flagrant disregard for security procedure detailed in this commentary, Clinton routinely shared material with private citizens like Sid Blumenthal, who had no security clearance whatsoever.
For answers to most of your questions about the Clinton email scandal, http://www.thompsontimeline.com/ breaks all the factors in play here down in excruciating detail.
Part of the whole security clearance process is instruction on detecting misclassification, so the :%s/SECRET/SUCRETS/g defense doesn't work. At least 22 emails where later classified as top secret, there is no way to mistake top secret material for uncontrolled information. There were at least 22 chances to take a step back and wonder about the wisdom of the thing.
Lets not forget the handful (I don't recall the exact number) of emails that Colin Powell sent from his personal account and had clearance adjustments later on. Or the number of Rice's staff who received emails to their personal accounts that were deemed classified after the fact.
Lots of chances for many individuals in the IC to step back and develop better procedures. Lets not put ALL the blame on Hillary.
Do we need to preface every discussion with a list of others' bad behavior? I imagine that would distract for the topic under discussion... and you wouldn't want to do that would you?
Well, we could be superficial and only talk about Hillary. OR, and this is crazy but stay with me, we could talk about how this issue happened way back in the early 2000's and no one at the NSA/House addressed the issue then.
A lot of people failed on this issue long before Hillary.
Congress addressed the issue of security of government servers more generally by passing the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) in 2002. Her use of a rouge external server violates this law on every level. Clinton's predecessors have the defense that their terms preceded this law.
Why stop in the early 2000's? Surely this is all superficial if we avoid the real issue - the control of privileged information! It should be obvious how unproductive this line of thinking is, eventually we'd find ourselves debating the original sin of man.
What do you mean "that server was for only unclassified data"? There was no other server. Clinton had a .gov account but entirely refused to use it. Meaning 100% of the email Clinton sent was sent through her insecure personal server.
Do you believe 100% of her email was entirely unclassified at the time it was sent?
As for innocuous, it's reported that her emails (unsurprisingly) included intelligence from "special access programs" which are actually classified beyond top secret.
There was another server for truly classified info + hard copies were used for sensitive stuff. Also, the official non-classified state department server was confirmed hacked during her tenure.
Excerpt:
How did Clinton receive and consume classified information?
The Secretary's office was located in a secure area. Classified information was viewed in hard copy by Clinton while in the office. While on travel, the State Department had rigorous protocols for her and traveling staff to receive and transmit information of all types.
A separate, closed email system was used by the State Department for the purpose of handling classified communications, which was designed to prevent such information from being transmitted anywhere other than within that system.
That is false. Sidney Blumenthal emailed her signals intelligence (which is top-secret at a minimum) on her unsecure server, after stripping classification markings. This has been covered pretty well, and if you want to see for yourself then you can grab a copy of the Guccifer data dump.
I love her values - personal convenience vs national security. This is just the sort of person we need in the White House. It reminds me of a president (I forget which one) who tied up Air Force One on a runway at who knows what cost to the taxpayer just so he could get a haircut.
I have more of a problem with idling the engines while your hair is cut than of the closed runways. Today the complaint would be ecological not economical.
However if idling of the engines is required by security protocols then you can't complain nearly as much.
I do expect to put a ridiculous time value of money on the Presidents time and even higher on security. But it should be done to minimize inconvenience to others.
I am constantly surprised at both the vehemence and the triviality of the ire that people direct at the Clintons. There is literally nothing that people will not attack them with.
I would say that the "3 Felonies a Day" theory applies equally if not even more-so to someone like the Secretary of State. It's probably very hard if not impossible to actually do your job as a high ranking government official and not end up breaking a few laws.
The problem is once said law-breaking becomes widely reported and results in State Department and FBI inquiries, where do you go from there? How can they come back with a recommendation not to prosecute Clinton, but yet they vigorously prosecute people like Aaron Swartz?
However, I do disagree strongly with you that if charges are pressed it has anything to do with her gender. If it were John Kerry who had been SoS when Clinton was, operating kerryemail.com, and he was now running for President, I think we would be in exactly the same position.
There's no reasonable question anymore that laws on handling classified data were broken, the only question is will charges actually be brought?