One of the ongoing skirmishes over Hillary Clinton’s use of her personal email server to handle official correspondence was the issue of handling classified information. To date, Hillary’s defense has been two-fold a) the information was not classified when I received it and b) the information was not marked as classified. Now we have a literal smoking gun to prove that Hillary told her minions to strip classification markings from classified information so it could be sent via non-secure email and provide her with plausible deniability if it was ever discovered.

If you look at this email exchange it is her National Security aide, Jake Sullivan, tells her that administrative staff are having difficulty sending her talking points by secure fax.

“They say they’ve had issues sending secure fax. They’re working on it.”

To which Hillary says:

“If they can’t, turn into nonpaper w no identifying heading and send nonsecure.”

This isn’t merely improper. This is blatant criminality.

d) Whoever, lawfully having possession of, access to, control over, or being entrusted with any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, or note relating to the national defense, or information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation, willfully communicates, delivers, transmits or causes to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted or attempts to communicate, deliver, transmit or cause to be communicated, delivered or transmitted the same to any person not entitled to receive it, or willfully retains the same and fails to deliver it on demand to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it; or

(e) Whoever having unauthorized possession of, access to, or control over any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, or note relating to the national defense, or information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation, willfully communicates, delivers, transmits or causes to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted, or attempts to communicate, deliver, transmit or cause to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted the same to any person not entitled to receive it, or willfully retains the same and fails to deliver it to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it; or

(f) Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, note, or information, relating to the national defense,
(1) through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, or
(2) having knowledge that the same has been illegally removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of its trust, or lost, or stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, and fails to make prompt report of such loss, theft, abstraction, or destruction to his superior officer—

Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.

This is not even open to interpretation. It also explains rather easily how the count of classified emails held on Hillary’s private server has reached 1,340.

The only question now is whether FBI Director James Comey’s brag that the FBI will follow the case wherever it leads will stick.

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