It all points to a Clinton data disaster
S O IT turns out that Hillary Clinton continued recklessly mishandling classified information even after stepping down as secretary of state. The revelation is bracing — but hardly surprising.
We already knew Clinton’s e-mail practices remained a national-security vulnerability after she left the State Department at the end of President Obama’s first term.
For nearly two years, she maintained the servers through which her unauthorized, non-secure homebrew communication system had operated. As we now know, about 62,000 e-mails were stored on those servers, over 2,000 of which contained classified information, including some of the most sensitive national-defense secrets — and the highly classified sources and methods for acquiring those secrets — maintained by our government.
The latest classified-e-mail disclosure is a joke. The document is so chockablock with classified information — meaning, it is so thoroughly redacted — that the State Department might just as well have issued a blank page. This reminds us of how cynically the Democrats’ presidential nominee looked the American people in the eye and assured us, for over a year, that she never sent or received classified information.
When this preposterous claim was exploded, she tried Clintonian parsing: none of the e-mails, we were told, was “marked classified.” But the latest e-mail discovery illustrates how farcical this talking point has always been.
Officials with security clearances know the categories of information that are classified pursuant to an executive order — whether they’re “marked” as such or not. Clinton not only knew the rules; she was in charge of enforcing them throughout her department.
And in any event, as FBI Director James Comey conceded, Clinton did send and receive some e-mails with classified markings.
We are also reminded that Clinton repeatedly vowed she had surrendered every single governmentbusiness-related e-mail upon the State Department’s request.
This was an extraordinary lie: She hoarded and attempted to destroy thousands of e-mails that, like the one The Post describes, involved government business — some of it highly sensitive and significant (such as the 30 e-mails related to the Benghazi massacre that the FBI recovered but the State Department has yet to disclose). Converting government records to one’s own use and destroying them are serious crimes, even if no classified information is involved.
Of course, the Obama Justice Department was never going to indict the Democrats’ nominee (who, if she wins, would be positioned to reappoint Loretta Lynch as attorney general). But, in recommending against the filing of criminal charges (which he could do only by contorting statutes under which Clinton was clearly culpable), Comey noted that officials in Clinton’s shoes normally face “security and administrative sanctions.”
Translation: they have their security clearances revoked and are fired.
How could someone who should not be allowed to work for the government, much less have access to classified information, be permitted to stand for the presidency? It’s a question Congress should very publicly be exploring, even if the Obama administration and the Clinton campaign seek to sweep it under the rug.