This may be a relevant point for deciding the question of criminal liability. But it has very little to do with whether the top-secret info could have fallen into the wrong hands. Once secret info is stored in an accessible place, the way its classification is marked ceases to matter much.
As this case clearly shows, in the natural course of daily duties the Secretary of State will be receiving sensitive info, some of which may be - or become - highly classified. If her scheme is to funnel that info to an unsecured private server, it’s pretty much guaranteed that security will be spectacularly compromised.
It’s decidedly lame for her to then say, in effect “The responsibility lies exclusively with those who originated that data - it’s not my job to evaluate the nature of the info I receive. And I shouldn’t be expected to store that info in a secure place [that the US Govt supplies for free] on the expectation that it might prove sensitive. Except when they’re clearly marked as classified, I can do what I like with emails I receive.”
It’s not about markings (though that might be important too) – was the information in question classified? Information can be unclassified one day, and then later determined to be classified, and vice versa.
Absolutely. It was not MARKED classified, but that doesn’t mean as much as Clinton would like us to believe. She didn’t get tons of training just to tell the difference between “marked” and “unmarked”.
Not the way I understand the situation after watching several news reviews. As i understand it they were, are now, will be for some time above top secret.
Of course could be my lying eyes and ears, that might be the next excuse.
They weren’t marked that way, but it doesn’t actually matter. If the info is secret, the info is secret. If she’d used a .gov account, wouldn’t have been an issue.
All correspondence pertaining to foreign leaders is classified automatically, marked or not. So are intelligence assets. No one asked when Plame’s name was leaked if anyone in the BUsh administration had seen a document marked classified with her name on it.
No, it is just the media that does want to have their horse race once the main election comes. You have to remember that already on this issue even the New York times that started the ball rolling was caught with several inaccuracies and exaggerations.
Cite, that any of this is true, including that the info in question pertained to foreign leaders, and that this is automatically classified. I have experience in this, though not with State Dept stuff. I’m not going to accept anything you say without a cite.
“Presumed classified” doesn’t mean classified, and stuff that is “presumed” to be so, looked at, can be determined not to be. “foreign leader’s wife likes puppies” would not be classified.
What is the information? Until we know that, every claim about legality is guesswork.
And that is the speculation that it is coming from the right a lot nowadays. As pointed before that is what it is more likely to be wrong or miss the target.
For example there was an accusation that a name of an intelligence operative was leaked thanks to one of then not marked classified emails.
As it has been a pattern many times the accusation does not really match what Republicans are telling to the ones they are misleading.
After Gaudy and others mentioned the Palme incident to compare to the current issue this was reported:
It is indeed, what one should not guess is the context offered already by the State Department, they have said that Hillary didn’t do anything wrong. She broke no policies of having a private email account.
Virtually all the speculations from the right are coming by using recently changed rules and regulations that they want them to be applied retroactively to Clinton for political reasons. Something that IMHO would be considered unamerican but it is par for the course for many authoritarian republicans.
AFAIK there could be a complaint by the FBI later but the FBI itself cannot present an indictment on its own, a federal grand jury would be needed to bring charges against Clinton and then the item about malicious intent will have to be demonstrated to them. Very unlikely IMHO to indict even then.
We’d like to hear how this causes you to believe that “presumed classified” doesn’t mean “classified”.
It may have happened - but it wouldn’t (and indeed couldn’t) have happened instantly to every piece of info originating from a foreign government. So storing such on a private server was a violation of the law.
Why do you believe that malicious intent must be demonstrated? The relevant law - 18 U.S. Code § 793 (e) and (f) - certainly does not specify that a violation requires any malicious intent.
Thing is, even from the beginning that was not a clear cut case, hence the ongoing point that speculations like this one are bound to be found wrong or insufficient to get an indictment or ultimately a conviction.
You need to read (a), (b), (c) and others, clearly the issue of intent is key.
And that is why IMHO we get what we are seeing, Clinton is not the target of the investigation, of course that does not mean that mistakes were made and what this investigation looks like is what it is: To make better guidelines to identify secret messages properly between intelligence groups. To check where and how anyone could had gotten access to information, so as to prevent issues like this one from happening again.