Hillary Clinton: Busted

Boom:

The latest batch of emails released from Hillary Clinton’s personal account from her tenure as secretary of state includes 66 messages deemed classified at some level, the State Department said early Friday. In one email, Clinton even seemed to coach a top adviser on how to send secure information outside secure channels. Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, has repeatedly maintained that she did not send or receive classified material on her personal account. The State Department claims none of the emails now marked classified were labled as such at the time they were sent. However, one email thread from June 2011 appears to include Clinton telling her top adviser Jake Sullivan to send secure information through insecure means. In response to Clinton’s request for a set of since-redacted talking points, Sullivan writes, “They say they’ve had issues sending secure fax. They’re working on it.” Clinton responds “If they can’t, turn into nonpaper [with] no identifying heading and send nonsecure.” Ironically, an email thread from four months earlier shows Clinton saying she was “surprised” that a diplomatic oficer named John Godfrey used a personal email account to send a memo on Libya policy after the fall of Muammar Qaddafi.

Guy Benson adds at Town Hall:

As Hillary herself has personally attested — is that none of the sensitive material that she wrongfully transmitted through her unsecure server was “marked classified” at the time. Again, this is meaningless, especially when it comes to highly secret material that she was obligated to recognize and protect as soon as it was produced. But the email chain referenced above includes an instruction from Hillary Clinton to a State Department aide (who now works on her campaign) to strip classified information — it remains redacted to this day — of its classified markings [“identifying heading”] and “send nonsecure.”

Which leads us to Ed Morrissey at Hot Air:

Has the State Department released a smoking gun in the Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal? In a thread from June 2011, Hillary exchanges e-mails with Jake Sullivan, then her deputy chief of staff and now her campaign foreign-policy adviser, in which she impatiently waits for a set of talking points. When Sullivan tells her that the source is having trouble with the secure fax, Hillary then orders Sullivan to have the data stripped of its markings and sent through a non-secure channel.

That should be game, set, and match, yes?

“If they can’t, turn into nonpaper w no identifying heading and send nonsecure.” That’s an order to violate the laws handling classified material. There is no other way to read that demand.

Game, set, match, indeed. Every single one of Hillary’s excuses has now evaporated, and this email is a clear instance of giving an order in violation of national security clearance rules.

Hillary Clinton, I don’t need to hasten to add, belongs in jail.

Also courtesy of Ed, the actual email below.