How The Newest Classified Emails Show State Is Defending Hillary Clinton

Hillary Clinton's Underground Communications Center by DonkeyHotey, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0/Original

DonkeyHotey via Flickr Creative Commons image 16690863566_a1dae87e2f_o
Caricature by DonkeyHotey flic.kr/p/Ct4G4K

More emails from Hillary Clinton’s private email server have been released.

The State Department released 551 more emails from the personal server of Hillary Clinton on Saturday, including 84 with some or all of the messages blocked out because they contained information that has now been deemed classified. Three of those are classified “secret.”

The State Department has now classified as secret 21 emails from among 33,000 that were sent through the private server Mrs. Clinton used while she was secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.

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If you think this actually helps the case against Hillary Clinton, you are mistaken. Let’s read on:

Mrs. Clinton and her aides have said the State Department and the intelligence agencies are overzealously classifying information that was not marked classified at the time. The author of one of the emails marked as “secret” and released on Saturday, Dennis B. Ross, agreed.

Mr. Ross, a former official at the State Department and National Security Council, drafted a two-page email to Mrs. Clinton on Sept. 22, 2012, offering “a few thoughts for your upcoming meetings.” Mr. Ross had left the government, but continued to act as an intermediary in back-channel talks between the Israelis and Palestinians, a role he discussed in a new book, “Doomed to Succeed.”

Virtually all that followed in the message has been redacted, or blocked out, with the contents classified on national security grounds until Sept. 21, 2037. Mrs. Clinton replied to the email with a short note: “Thanks, Dennis. Can you talk this morning?”

Although those talks were diplomatically sensitive and were not disclosed, Mr. Ross said in an interview that nothing about the discussion should be classified. He added that he had submitted the chapter of his book dealing with the talks for a security review and that it was cleared for publication.

“It shows the arbitrariness of what is now being classified,” Mr. Ross said.

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From the beginning the Clinton camp has had two key defenses. First, there was nothing sent or received by Hillary that was marked classified when it was sent or received. We know that is true because we know that Clinton ordered staff to remove classification markings from classified material before sending it. And a State Department official has boasted that sending classified over an unsecure system was SOP for Hillary.

The second line of defense is that the Intelligence Community has been over zealous in classifying information. POLITICO’s Josh Gertein, at what seems like the behest of Hillary’s fixer in the State Department, Undersecretary for Management Patrick Kennedy, has been lying about and belittling the efforts of the Intelligence Community to protect the information Hillary Clinton exposed to any foreign intelligence service with enough ambition to hack her server.

Note that is was State that classified the chapter from Dennis Ross’s book. That would be Patrick Kennedy. What he is doing is classifying bull****, essentially creating evidence to prove State’s point. Now you will see Hillary’s defenders start conflating the satellite imagery and the information exposing human sources, items that the Intelligence Community has classified at the TOP SECRET/Code Word or TOP SECRET/Special Access Program level with the stuff State has classified.

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This is not the State Department suddenly seeing the light. To the contrary, this is the State Department waging guerrilla war on behalf of Hillary Clinton.

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