You’ll never believe this, but according to the State Department, two Republican secretaries of State received “a handful” of classified information on their personal email accounts when they were in office. Just like Hillary!
We know this because the State Department’s inspector general is reviewing the email practices of the last five secretaries of state, and they leaked the results to Rep. Elijah Cummings, who in turn passed it on to the media. The State Department reviewers managed to get the goods on Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, even while failing to meet court-ordered deadlines to produce Hillary’s emails.
In all, 12 emails have been found containing classified information sent to Rice’s aides or Powell, according to Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the House of Representatives’ Oversight Committee. Quite a contrast to the over 1,500 Clinton classified emails that were found on her private server — especially since she deleted 31,000 additional emails in 2014 (so there are probably more classified emails we don’t even know about). Reportedly, the vast majority of Clinton’s 1,500 classified emails were rated merely “confidential,” a lower level of sensitivity. But so far, 29 of her emails have been determined to contain “top secret” and “special access program” (SAP) material — the “crown jewels” of the intelligence community.
In a statement, Powell said the two emails he received were not judged to contain confidential information at the time they were sent to him by American ambassadors.
“I wish they would release them,” Powell told NBC News, “so that a normal, air-breathing mammal would look at them and say, ‘What’s the issue?'”
That, coincidentally, is the same thing Hillary’s been saying about her emails:
“Hillary Clinton agrees with her predecessor that his emails, like hers, are being inappropriately subjected to over-classification,” John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, said in a statement, calling for their unredacted release.
PJ Media’s Andrew McCarthy finds Team Hillary’s call to release her top-secret emails to be nothing less than disqualifying.
That is, while desperately seeking the office most responsible for protecting national security, Clinton is audaciously subordinating national security to her political ambitions.
Let’s be clear about how cynical this is: Clinton’s outrageous demand is theater through and through. Before she was secretary of state for four years, Hillary Clinton sat on the Senate Armed Services Committee for six years while the nation was at war. She knows full well that the intelligence community would never publicize the scads of national defense information she compromised over four years.
Meanwhile, a representative for Rice is disputing State’s findings, saying that “the 10 emails sent to her aides did not contain intelligence information.”
J. William Leonard, who oversaw the government’s classification regime as the Information Security Oversight Office director until 2008, said so-called “spillage” of classified information into unsecured email systems was common.
“That’s why from the get-go it was exceedingly poor judgment to set up a private email account because of this very real fact,” Leonard said in an interview, referring to Clinton’s arrangement.
Ace of Spades sums up what he thinks is going on here, and I agree:
Hillary is claiming that State “disputes” the CIA’s and NSA’s determination that the information she was passing around was top-top-secret. Shockingly secret. State is disputing this on her behalf — but they have no such power to classify or declassify CIA or NSA information.
State does, however, have the power to retroactively classify emails originating from State — such as an Ambassador sending Colin Powell an email — and that, I say, is what they have done. I can’t prove this — but I know this. They are picking out some innocuous emails and saying “Those are now classified” in order to provide cover to this disgusting vulture they’ve already been providing cover to.
Indeed. According to Reuters, “Democratic lawmakers and staff on Clinton’s presidential campaign seized on the report as vindicating some of their defenses of the controversial arrangement.”
What’s that thing Michael Walsh likes to say? “Think of the Democratic Party as what it really is: a criminal organization masquerading as a political party.”
Watching them in action almost takes your breath away sometimes.
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