Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager and spokesperson both took to left-wing MSNBC on Monday to reiterate their boss’s prevarications over her email conduct while heading the State Department. Robby Mook and Brian Fallon repeated their shared script that emails Clinton sent and received via her private email account and server while Secretary of State were not “marked classified” at the time of their sending and receipt.
Joining Morning Joe on Monday, Mook claimed that “classified information is sent over a completely separate system,” implying the existence of some sort of technological inability to communicate classified information in an unsecured manner.
Speaking with Tamron Hall on Monday, Fallon denied that Clinton had perjured herself in before Congress when testifying under oath that she had not sent or received classified information via her private email system as secretary of state.
Political observers should note that secretaries of state are privy to some of the most sensitive governmental secrets. The secretary of state is in a position to originally communicate information that cannot be “marked classified” as it is being communicated. There is no special employee hovering over the shoulder over of a secretary of state as he or she composes emails or makes phone calls to advise whether or not the information being communicated is classified while wielding a virtual red stamp.
Secretaries of state are legally required to exercise responsibility in protecting classified information to which they have access. Clinton was in a position to originally communicate such information given her special access to such information as head of the State Department.
Clinton, along with her campaign operatives and surrogates, continually insists that no information she sent or received via her private system was “marked classified” at the time of its transmission. If observers accept this premise as a justification of her conduct, they must strip Clinton of responsibility for being able to think beyond bureaucratic classification protocols.
If, for example, Clinton sent or received information via her private email system related to pending or ongoing military operations, is she to be excused if the email chain was initiated without some special identification in its heading grading its sensitivity? Should she not have known better?
If details, names, locations, dates, and other operational details of the most sensitive nature were inappropriately marked by an email chain’s originator, does Clinton’s excuse of inappropriate markings absolve her of responsibility for compromising their safekeeping? Should she not have known better?
Is Clinton’s conduct excusable because her emails lacked Mission Impossible-style headings with CLASSIFIED/TOP SECRET typed out in all caps with red letters? Should she not have known better?
FBI Director James Comey partly explained Clinton’s negligence.
“Even if information is not marked classified in an email, participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it,” said Comey. “The security culture of the State Department, in general… was generally lacking in the kind of care for classified information that’s found elsewhere in the US government.”
“There is evidence that [Clinton and her colleagues] were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information,” said Comey, adding that Clinton both sent and received information of the most classified (Special Access Programs) variety. “None of these emails should have been on any kind of unclassified system.”
Despite regularly claiming that her decision to set up and use a private email system was a “mistake,” Clinton has yet to explain why. She has never been asked in any television interview why her decision was a mistake.
Was Clinton’s conduct mistake because it led to evasion of FOIA requests for her communications as secretary of state?
Was Clinton’s conduct a mistake because it compromised national security?
Was Clinton’s conduct a mistake because it politically inconvenienced her and her left-wing media allies?
Chuck Todd, Jake Tapper, John Dickerson, George Stephanopoulos and the rest of the usual suspects refuse to ask Clinton why she describes her conduct as having been a “mistake.” Also unasked are any questions pertaining to Clinton’s motivations for setting up such a system.
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