A veteran confronted Hillary Clinton about her handling of classified information as secretary of state during a presidential forum on Wednesday.
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House Republicans have accused Clinton of lying to Congress when she testified late past year that she never sent or received emails marked classified at the time, and they want federal authorities to open a criminal investigation into the matter.
And what we have here is the use of an unclassified system by hundreds of people in our government to send information that was not marked, there were no headers, there was no statement, top secret, secret, or confidential. And 100 of those emails contained information that was classified when she sent or received the messages.
But fast forward to this week, in the wake of a damning Federal Bureau of Investigation report about her email practices, and Clinton has embraced what is now her fourth different defense regarding the existence of highly sensitive government information in her emails. FBI investigators established that Clinton did send and receive classified information. Yet, he also testified that those documents did not conform to the proper procedure for marking documents classified.
“It says, this material is ‘Top secret, ‘ ‘Secret, ‘ or ‘Confidential.’ There were no headers on the thousands of emails that I sent or received”.
Clearly, the absence of a header does not change the fact that the classified portions of the three documents in question were marked as such.
Speaking today at an intelligence-related summit in Washington, D.C., Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said USA agencies are “guilty” of labeling too much information as classified, and he said agencies could “somewhat simplify our system” if they would “just not bother” restricting information that’s now classified as “confidential”, the lowest level of classification.
Clinton’s handling of classified information has dogged her campaign since it was first revealed that she used a private email server to conduct business as secretary of state.
I thank you very much for coming tonight. It is marked. There is a header so that there is no dispute at all that what is being communicated to or from someone who has that access is marked classified.
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To take another notorious example, General David Petraeus, the former Central Intelligence Agency director, knew that his diaries contained top secret information notwithstanding the absence of markings and headers designating them as such. Such a claim, he had to know, would have been frivolous.
