It's not quite up there with "if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor, period", but Hillary Clinton's claim that she neither sent nor received information that was classified at the time is joining the list of famous political lies. Last March, Hillary's claim was that she neither sent nor received classified information on her private unsecured email system. That claim went out the window when the non-partisan Inspector General found first 4, then 60 and currently 305 emails from that system which contained classified information including some with Top Secret designations. As a result, Hillary retreated and changed her story a bit. As late as two days ago, she told the media that she never sent or received information that was classified at the time. The whole dispute, according to Hillary, pertained to later decisions to classify certain information.
Reuters, today, blew that story out of the water. Here is the essence of the Reuters story:
In the small fraction of emails made public so far, Reuters has found at least 30 email threads from 2009, representing scores of individual emails, that include what the State Department's own "Classified" stamps now identify as so-called 'foreign government information.' The U.S. government defines this as any information, written or spoken, provided in confidence to U.S. officials by their foreign counterparts.
This sort of information, which the department says Clinton both sent and received in her emails, is the only kind that must be "presumed" classified, in part to protect national security and the integrity of diplomatic interactions, according to U.S. regulations examined by Reuters.
"It's born classified," said J. William Leonard, a former director of the U.S. government's Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO). Leonard was director of ISOO, part of the White House's National Archives and Records Administration, from 2002 until 2008, and worked for both the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.
That means that in at least 30 emails out of the few that have been made public so far, Hillary sent or received information that was classified at the time. It also means that Hillary, once again, has been exposed as a liar. Without a doubt, the Secretary of State knows that private conversations with foreign officials are classified from the start. After all, if she did not know this, then who would have known. And it certainly makes sense. If a US representative talks in private to a foreign official, any publication of that conversation could embarrass the foreign official and destroy any ability for America to come to any agreement with that person.
Hillary Clinton needs to admit what she did.
Reuters, today, blew that story out of the water. Here is the essence of the Reuters story:
In the small fraction of emails made public so far, Reuters has found at least 30 email threads from 2009, representing scores of individual emails, that include what the State Department's own "Classified" stamps now identify as so-called 'foreign government information.' The U.S. government defines this as any information, written or spoken, provided in confidence to U.S. officials by their foreign counterparts.
This sort of information, which the department says Clinton both sent and received in her emails, is the only kind that must be "presumed" classified, in part to protect national security and the integrity of diplomatic interactions, according to U.S. regulations examined by Reuters.
"It's born classified," said J. William Leonard, a former director of the U.S. government's Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO). Leonard was director of ISOO, part of the White House's National Archives and Records Administration, from 2002 until 2008, and worked for both the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.
That means that in at least 30 emails out of the few that have been made public so far, Hillary sent or received information that was classified at the time. It also means that Hillary, once again, has been exposed as a liar. Without a doubt, the Secretary of State knows that private conversations with foreign officials are classified from the start. After all, if she did not know this, then who would have known. And it certainly makes sense. If a US representative talks in private to a foreign official, any publication of that conversation could embarrass the foreign official and destroy any ability for America to come to any agreement with that person.
Hillary Clinton needs to admit what she did.
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